Jordan Peterson on Constructing Your Identity, Chaos and Order, and the Escalating Culture Wars

this episode is sponsored by skillshare and the first 1 000 people to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare's premium membership enjoy the episode [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with somebody that i have been so desperate to get on the show for a long time i cannot tell you just how much the one and only jordan peterson jordan welcome to the show thank you very much it's a pleasure to be here appreciate the invitation man i am beside myself with excitement to have you on and for a few reasons one you've had massive influence over the way that i think and um you have been a guiding li i never intended to get involved in the culture wars that's not where i thought um my voice was going to be but your idea of having to face things courageously and not basically just try to hide in the basement and i realized that i was doing that i was trying to avoid those topics because i was afraid of them and that didn't make me feel good about myself and so i think a lot about identity and one of the things that i'm always telling people is money success fame all that stuff is irrelevant what matters is how you think about yourself when you're by yourself and i want to know what you think about in terms of self-identity how we construct our sense of self and then how we leverage that to move through the world in a way that makes sense so identity to me is something that's practical it's it's your identity is a it's like a dramatic role that you play out in the world and while playing that out it has to furnish you with a life and what that means is that it has to be it means that it has to be negotiated with other people when you're a very young child and you first start to play with who you are you live in a fantasy world and according to some developmental psychologists at least particularly this is grounded in the theories of piaget that very young children two or three are quite egocentric in their play they play according to their own rules and so they're not social yet until they're three or four which means that they have their own goals in mind and then they erect a little fictional world around those goals and then they play out the role within that fictional world and that's pretend play and when they get to be about three or four and they start playing with other kids they have to bring their worlds together and negotiate because both children have to want to play and so that means identity has to expand beyond its egocentric focus and increasingly be negotiated in the social world i studied developmental psychology for a long time especially in relate in relationship to the regulation of aggression and most children learn to regulate the regression between the ages of two and four now for example for for instance there's a subset of children mostly male who are very aggressive at the age of two comparatively speaking they bite kick fight hit and steal that's the definition of aggressive and almost all those children are socialized out of that by the time they're four although a small proportion aren't and they tend to be long-term anti-social children and then criminal adults it's very very difficult for that to be rectified if it isn't rectified by four what happens with most children is they learn to move beyond their ego-centric presuppositions and include other children in the play and so they start to negotiate their roles and identity is a sophisticated identity is a negotiated role and so it's not appropriate for associated with who with everyone with everyone and of course you know this is the case because if you if you well first of all if you're a child and you want friends then you can't insist that only your game be played so i'll give you an example there's been observational studies of children in playgrounds so imagine there's a group of children together let's say they're six or seven years old and they're playing helicopter so they've got their erasers out and they're buzzing around in the helicopters okay so they've already established the ground rules they've got together and they laid out the drama they say well let's play helicopter and maybe there's four or five suggestions but the group the group uh um develops a consensus that helicopters the fun game and let's make our erasers into helicopters i don't have an eraser well you can use your pencil and it can be a long helicopter so everybody gets a role and everybody's happy about it otherwise play won't continue right everybody has to be happy or play won't continue and so then the the little drama organizes itself and the kids play helicopter and there's consequences of that that play out like a story and then maybe another kid comes along and he's got an eraser and a pencil in his bag and he wants to play helicopter too and if he's a socially sophisticated kid he'll hang around the outside of the little game and watch and then he'll take out his eraser and maybe start making buzzing noises with it and when when he can see that there's an opening in the play situation he'll swoop in and maybe he'll get integrated it's like when you're at a cocktail party and you hear a conversation and you're hovering around the edge you wait for an opening and then you say something that's germane to the topic and if you're sophisticated enough and the people are friendly enough then it'll open and you'll be allowed in now even popular kids often get rebuffed when they try to enter an already structured game unpopular kids don't watch what's going on and then they come along and try to impose their game on the entire group and then they have a tantrum if they don't get let in and so that's a good example of how identity is negotiated at the earliest stages that feels to me um something it feels very different than what i would think of as identity so i'm going to try to put this in context of what i see as the major movements of your work and what makes you so powerful tell me where i go astray so i look at your two books and and i'm literally just paraphrasing from what you said that they're basically the yin and yang so you have chaos on one hand and you have order on the other both will tend towards tyranny and as far as i can tell this is why i do not understand why people are pushing back on you why there's so much bizarre backlash is the moral of your story is hey everybody guess what you need to find this balance between the two if you only exist in the creative potential it ends up being all chaos all the time if you only exist in the conservatism the things that are already there and working they will tend towards tyranny solidify and cease to be useful and die and so now it's this game and you do this brilliant explanation of what happens in a city that shows exactly this with artists and if you can walk us through that and tell me if if the identity of the artist if that's what you're trying to get at with identity because i i'm understanding what you're saying in terms of okay in that moment we're negotiating but there's a grander sense of who we become that is seems to me to be a negotiation with the world so collectively everybody else but also a negotiation with how i want to feel about myself when i'm alone and the things that i think are right the things that i think are wrong okay well okay well that's very complicated so i'll walk it through so as you pointed out i'm gonna hold up these books so this is the new book beyond order and it does concentrate on pathologies of structure and the previous book which is 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos and the the underlying presupposition there is that in our phenomenological landscape so that's the world as we experience it complete with emotions and motivations and dreams and so the full range of human experience including the subjective and the objective let's say can broadly be broken into two domains and one is the domain of things that are beyond our grasp and reach and that's the unknown the unknown emerges when the unknown emerges you tend to experience anxiety and then there's the the known and i defined the known very specifically and very carefully the known is the place you are when what you're doing presult produces the results you want and i say want because that brings motivation and emotion into the game so you're motivated to pursue something you pursue it and what you want happens not only do you get what you want but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions now if you you know imagine that you're um you know you're lonely and you approach a young woman in a in a social situation um attempting to make some contact with her you you want to alleviate your loneliness and so you hope you make a good impression and you tell a joke let's say in a relatively awkward manner and you get rebuffed then you feel you you you're no longer where you control you're no longer where you exercise control and that brings up all sorts of specters and immediately it's like well why were you rebuffed well maybe all women are uh to be despised that's one theory maybe there's something deeply wrong with you maybe you're having an off day maybe it wasn't a very good joke and so when you don't get what you want then a landscape of question emerge questions emerge and those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity from the trivial oh i told the joke wrong to the profound there's nothing desirable about me and i'll be alone for the rest of my life now you asked about identity and i used the example of a child's game but i could go through an identity and so i do this particularly in maps of meaning and so for example let's say i'm sitting typing okay we could decompose my identity so at the highest level of resolution i'm moving my fingers and so that could be my identity i'm the thing that moves its fingers and then slightly at a slightly broader level than that i'm typing words and at a broader level i'm typing phrases and thinking them up and then sentences and then paragraphs and then chapters and then let's say full papers or books that that's that's a productive unit so i'm the author of a book or the author of a paper that's an identity but then that's nested inside for me it would be nested inside being a clinical psychologist being a professor being a good citizen and then that's nested in some inside something that's even broader than that and i would say that that's nested inside a cultural heroism and i don't mean that specific to me i mean that for everyone that's the outermost level whether you're playing out the role of hero or adversary say that's that's the highest possible level of identity that's the level at which fundamental morality is adjudicated and there isn't really anything beyond outside that is it's beyond us it's the transcendent itself and you're all of those at any one time you're all of those levels of identity but those are all practical right so those are the roles that you're playing in the world all of those are a consequence of who you are but in interplay like in this situation with the child all of that's negotiated with other people and so if you have a functional identity you see if you have a functional identity when you act it out in the world then you get what you want and need and if an identity doesn't do that well then you should you either retool or your identity or you retool the world conception of the world well if you're retooling your conception of the world then you're retooling yourself no you can actually i mean what a revolutionary does is try to bring the world into alignment yes literally well and we all do that to some degree because we are practical engineers you know i mean not only do we perceive the world but we also interact with it so that it does manifest itself in accordance with our desires there's limits obviously to how far you can go or how far you should go with that you know and um what are the limits well there's practical limits nature won't do what you want it to unless you're very sophisticated in your in your application of your knowledge and other people will object so now you might say well you should forge forward regardless of their objection and you know there are circumstances under which that's true but generally speaking that's not a very good idea it certainly doesn't make you popular as a child and so that brings up one other issue i would also say and this i developed this idea quite a bit in the new book you go from egocentrism as a child you have to go through this period where you're socialized as a child and adolescent and that really means that you allow your identity to be molded and shaped by the group and you know you think about how important peers friends and peers are to children and adolescents you know your mother will say when you're a teenager well if johnny jumped off the bridge would you too and you say well no but the real answer is well probably if all your friends are there taunting you you would in fact jump off the bridge and not only that generally speaking you should because it's your duty it's your developmental duty as a child and a teenager to take your your isolated self and turn it into us a functioning social unit now you could say well do you peterson wants everybody to be a functional social unit a robot you know a cog in the wheel and i would say well that that isn't where development stops it has to go through that period before you can emerge as a as a genuine individual which means you have to know the rules of the game before you can break them but not being able to abide by the rules is not anything like being a genuine creative individual those are not the same thing and there's plenty of attempt to confuse the two things because it's much better if you can't follow the rules to view yourself as a avant-garde revolutionary than as a failure and it's not like i don't know that that social molding crushes obviously it crushes and everyone feels that these are existential problems everyone deals with the tyranny of culture and the fact that it does want you to be a certain way and not other ways and those ways might not be in keeping with your with your the deepest elements of your nature well tough luck for you you have because you're also the beneficiary of culture and so you have to offer it your pound of flesh now you shouldn't do that at the expense of your soul but you shouldn't stay an immature child other either and so this notion of identity that we're being fed is very very it's very thin what are we being fed be very specific well there is the idea for example that your identity is whatever you say it is and that everyone else has to go along with that no that isn't how it works partly because no one even knows how to go along with it like let's say just for example that you're a gender non-binary okay what am i supposed to do about that man i don't know i hardly know what to do if the rules are already there so let's say i grow up i want to being a heterosexual male i want to find a woman fall in love with her raise a family have children have grandchildren that's a game i know the rules to it not well because everyone's a failure at that you know it's very difficult but at least you kind of know what the the goal is and so does the person you're with well you leap out of that which is already terribly difficult you leap out of that into completely unknown territory saying um uh that i'm presenting yourself as something other than those categories leaves everyone around you and you completely bereft of direction let me put it in the words that i get from um your material so what i heard you just say tell me if i'm wrong is part of the negotiation that we do from the time we are little kids and figuring out that play we're up on the bridge we jump maybe because we want to you know fit in with our peer group um it there is a sense of order to that now you've been very careful and it would drive me crazy if people respond to this interview as if you have not already illustrated that it is the balance between two opposing forces but so we need enough order so that somebody can find their way through the world and that many i think a big part of the reason that your work has resonated so profoundly with people is there excuse me they are left in a world where they don't know how to move forward in a way that serves them spiritually practically as well for sure and so hey everybody both of those both of those practically shades into spiritually as you move up into the broader reaches of identity you know and look this this see one of the things i really laid this out in maps of meaning it took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion so what happens is that if you act out your identity if you act out your beliefs in the world and what you want doesn't happen what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action and the reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire and now you're in the forest and maybe you're naked and so what do you do then and the answer is well you don't know what to do so what do you do when you don't want know what to do and the answer is you prepare to do everything and the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically like it hurts you and there's there's an immense physiological literature detailing the the cost of of of exactly that kind of response and so people need people and animals they people stay where what they do has the results they want that's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions is because you know that for example even in small ways let's say you're a country music aficionado and you're hanging around with your cowboy hatted buddies and you throw on a tape and everyone says great tunes man and you you know you're happy about that but you know you throw on a piece by tchaikowski and you're you're in a different subculture and who the hell are you and people who the people in your group will say man who listens to music like that and like that's a trivial example in some sense but i believe it's one that everyone can resonate to we like we it's very hard on us not to be where we know what we know that what we want is going to happen we hate that we hate that and no wonder so and then you know there are there are varying degrees of that obviously you can really be where you don't know what's going to happen or you can only be there to some degree but by and large by and large we're conservative creatures even if we're liberal and temperament there's not we can't tolerate that much uncertainty and you might ask well why and the answer is well because you can be hurt pain you can be damaged you can become intolerably anxious and you can die so it's no wonder you're sensitive or very sensitive to negative emotion and so our identities rate functional identity regulates your emotion but you do that in concert with other people in the first chapter of the new book beyond order the rule is uh don't casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement that's that balance again i make the case that most of your sanity is socially distributed and what i mean by that is well let's say that you know how to behave you're well socialized you can play with others now i said already in this conversation if you didn't learn to play with others between the time you were two and four you will never learn and psychologists have beat their heads against the wall trying to rehabilitate anti-social children they can't do it after the age of four is that because areas of the brain just don't develop well it seems to be partly because the kids fall farther and farther behind so let's say you make the leap from egocentric dependence on your mother at two and three to immersion in a peer group well then then you you pick peers that are at your same development level and you chase each other up the developmental ladder and the longer you're out of that the farther you fall behind and so you know kids five-year-old kids might come across another five-year-old kid who tends to cry too much if they don't get their way and they'll say we don't want to play with the baby and what they're saying is we have to find someone who's at our developmental level shares our developmental horizons so that we can mutually scaffold our further development now they're not going to say that obviously but that's the situation and kids test each other out when they first meet so do adults game game game game can you play are you playing at the same level as me i'm playing my game at the level that will further my development can you play along with me if not well maybe you're lower in status and i can pull you up as a mentor maybe you're higher in status and i can learn from you but if you're a peer we can play together anyways if you're acceptable to your peers and you behave well they'll accept you and then they tell you all the time if you're acting appropriately you know if your jokes are funny if you're dominating the conversation if you're bringing something of value to the table and all you have to do is pay attention to the social cues and you'll keep yourself regulated okay i want to dive in here and i'm going to see if i'm tracking all of this because i'm i'm putting this in a larger context of this really matters and it applies directly to something that's happening in the world it seems to me that you don't dive into things unless they have real relevance so is it fair to define identity as the self-narrative that emerges from a nearly infinite number of interactions with other people and nature itself well i i i would say yes but that gets to the point it's so broad it's almost it it starts to lack definition so i can take it finer than that i i'm trying to sort of find the borders and then then then i will work in okay so if we're if we still remain true at that point um then having in the book you walk through a lot of some of the people that you've done psychoanalysis with and so we get a lot of insights into the actual people that you're dealing with and how people can begin to tell themselves a narrative that is very dysfunctional and you help them out i don't want to say easily because that that sounds like it cheapens it but pretty straightforward in helping them reframe and framing is something i'm obsessed with and so our identity is based on this it's a self-narrative that we tell ourselves based on the interactions we have with other people and nature such that we begin to solidify a set of behaviors that make sense for us based on the goals that we want to achieve and where we're trying to go am i still good yes well you improved your definition by adding the behavior element because i would say the fundamental element of identity is what you act out on top of that there's the story that you tell do i have to be consciously aware of it well you're consciously aware of some of it not of other elements of it you can't be consciously aware of everything you do and does the conscious unconscious alike make up my identity as you define it your identity is the story you tell about your actions in the world but it's also your actions in the world okay now why why does my identity and i assume as i understand it why does my identity as i understand it matter to the course of my life because it's the it's the structure of the it's it's the structure from which the plans that you implement in the world originates and you're always acting in the world you have problems to solve all the time and you have to solve you have you have to solve all sorts of problems you have to solve to stay alive and you have to solve them for today but you have to solve them in a way that works for today that doesn't screw up tomorrow too bad and leaves next week intact and next month the next year and so there's a continuum of you so that's another see that's the other reason why your identity can't just be you because or how you feel right now because you're not only who you are right now and how you feel right now you're this strange entity that exists right now but that already existed in the past and that is going to repeat itself into the future and so you're actually a community of individuals stretched out across time and the plans that you implement have to be beneficial for that entire community of individuals and it's going to be the case that there isn't much difference between you acting properly with regards to your extended temporal self and you acting properly in relationship to other people that's interesting so you're stuck with society just because you know that there's a future you're stuck with society even if you're solipsistic right if you think you're the only conscious consciousness that there is there's still the fact that you have duration across time and that you know you have to take into account what the consequence for your actions is going to be on the 50 year old tom and the 80 year old tom and so now here's a question do you think that there's something that has pathologized the creation of useful identities in today's culture well i think each person can judge that for themselves to some degree i mean the more functional your identity the better regulated your emotion the more positive emotion the less negative emotion certainly negative emotion doesn't rise to an intolerable level if you're fortunate your identity is well constructed i think that any insistence that identity is something other than a pragmatic set of actions let's say that orient you properly in the world is sufficiently sparse so that it isn't going to solve the problem that has the problems that have to be solved so i might insist i'm whoever i think i am at the moment and if you were polite you would go along with that and to some degree i would be right we do that when we allow people to save face but if i'm right we go along with their presuppositions presumptions we don't call them on their mischief and a certain amount of that's polite but that doesn't alleviate the necessity for me of adopting a role that other people find valuable otherwise what the hell do i have to trade and you might say well why should i have to trade well if you can live all by yourself then you don't have to trade but if you can't you have to bring something of value to the table and you can't insist on its value other people have to agree to that and so i can't say well i'm my sexual identity it's like yeah that's a part of your identity so this is where i wanted to go so you brought up um the idea or the example of somebody giving a sexual identity of some kind and that was what prompted me to say do you think there are things that are pathologizing is it just that people are trying to define themselves in isolation like adopting their identity adopting their identity around um a non-negotiated with the external people and world and non-negotiated identity and therefore when they try to use that as the lever by which they add value in this exchange that is life that they're left going what the [ __ ] like people aren't respecting it they're not giving me what i think is my due is that where this begins to be a problem well i think that's certainly part of it because it's a it's a sparse theory of identity it's not it's not going to suffice because other people have to go along with it and they have to be able to go along with it you merely insisting that you're a certain way doesn't give anyone else any guidelines to go along with except for your whim and that's going to change and people aren't going to be able to predict it anyways and so the thing is is that in the identity politics world there's an implicit theory of identity otherwise we wouldn't have an identity politics and obviously the identity it appears to be the case that the identity that characterizes identity politics is something like unalterable characteristics they seem somewhat arbitrarily chosen to me which is also a huge catastrophe because it isn't obvious why those elements of identity should be paramount sex gender race ethnicity there's endless numbers of other possibilities and i i can't for the life of me see why they aren't equally um what valued let's say but even even if we accepted the validity of those as identity categories the theory under that is that that constitutes a sufficient um what would you describe it that constitutes a sufficient identity because you see we're not having a discussion publicly about what identity is that's assumed a priori it's race it's ethnicity it's sex it's gender well no it's not and that's actually a big problem especially not because those things are not universal not all um transsexual people think the same act the same so it's it's unnegotiated and ultimately misleading is that the the weakness of something like that that's that's some of the weaknesses it's also it it doesn't provide a useful a very useful guide to action across time because no one knows it's a game no one knows the rules to okay so i think i'm starting to get a sense of helpful you know so and then but wait there's one more thing too because there's also this analysis of culture that goes along with this that's part of let's say critical race theory you take these categories identity categories and you accept the implicit theory of identity upon which they're based and then you note that the world doesn't divide up its resources equally among all those categories and then you make the assumption that the social world is prejudiced and corrupt because of that well that doesn't follow partly because the association between those identities and reward isn't obvious like you can't make a living being black you can't make a living being white so now give us an example of what can you make a living like are there four or five like i was gonna say um is this trying to push people to you should have the identity of the hero or something along those lines it gives them something to strive towards a a historically charged um cadre of things that they know okay well if i'm the hero i'm gonna need to be brave i'm gonna have to face down the dragon of chaos you know there's now there is order and structure to the way in which i need to move through the world well remember at the beginning of the conversation i sort of provided a nested theory of identity so for example let's say you're a filmmaker and i'm a professor okay we could so we differ there right we're playing a different game so you might say and and as you go down into the particulars of what we do it might even become more different so if you look at what a plumber does and a lawyer does as as you get more and more fine-grained they get more diverse but you might say well the lawyer and the plumber are both honest they're both good citizens and then you might nest that inside well they're both acting out the archetype of the hero and and like i said after that you're out of the things get too abstract for us to we can't go farther than that i think that you know i think the world is order versus chaos let's say the balance of order and chaos on a it's good and evil on a background of order versus chaos and so you're either the hero or the adversary or actually most of the time you're a mixture of both and it's best for you that's what our culture has decided it's best for you to take on the role of the hero to the degree that that's possible and that would be associated with love and that's that the love and i define that in the second book particularly what's the third book i wrote but in in beyond order are you working for the betterment of being or are you working for harm and everyone has a sense of this and they know when they're working for harm in self-authoring do you walk people through uh like a handful of identity statements to help people craft a useful identity because i'm trying to so if i were to say to myself oh i'm a filmmaker nested in a ceo nested in or whatever none of those immediately tell me what they are what they do so when i'm working with up-and-coming entrepreneurs and i'm trying to help them because i come at it from an identity standpoint as well but i come at it from a really basic place and this is what i tell people so your identity is going to drive your behaviors ultimately your behaviors are the only thing that matters so you're going to begin by telling yourself identity statements you're going to say i'm the type of person that so for instance i'm the type of person that gets out of bed in 10 minutes or less now i started telling myself that even when it wasn't true because i needed to start getting out of bed in 10 minutes or less then that's an aspiration and then i put more i'm the type of person monday through friday if i'm awake i'm either working or working out right these become my identity um i am a husband first right so even before being an entrepreneur i'm a husband like and i repeat these things over and over and over some are aspirational and become true over time and some are a recognition of something that i'm already doing that i want to reinforce so all i'm trying to do is use basically cognitive dissonance against people so that they're not saying something to themselves and other people because i always encourage them to say it to other people as well so they're not saying something that they're not actually doing so now you're trapping yourself into getting out of bed in 10 minutes or less working your ass off monday through friday prioritizing in my case my wife things like that but it's all like this really rudimentary thing about behaviors just say statements that you're going to adhere to that make you act in the way that you should be acting that's what a behaviorist does in as a therapist is that is to break things down to the level of implementable behavior and yeah you you group behaviors like an ethical statement is actually a grouping of behaviors right an ethical statement is a statement about a group of behaviors or it's empty so i want to be a conscientious person okay we have to decompose that into implementable actions well you did there to some degree i need to get out of bed at eight o'clock i need to get out of bed at in ten minutes or less i need to have breakfast within the first half and a half hour that i've woken up i need to be able to cook my breakfast i need to be able to go get groceries because otherwise i won't have any breakfast to cook and so you decompose it you it is decomposed to the level of implemental behavior and that means bodily that's the point where the abstraction meets the world right through the actions of the body and behaviors concentrate on exactly that level rather than you know the psychoanalytic types might be more inclined to alter global statements that would be to say part of the self-narrative those are abstractions because they're collections of behaviors they're that that have an abstract description associated with them and yes part one of the things that you do do in therapy is you notice where there's disjunctions between the way people describe themselves and the way they act of course you do that in relationships all the time as well you say to people well you said this is especially true in intimate familiar relationships you said x but you do why it's like there's a there's a discordance there and that makes you unpredictable to me i don't like that it's probably not that good for you either many many arguments are like that so getting back to now how people can leverage this information in a usable way in their life and i'll put it in the context of what i see going on in the culture war the thing that drew me in is i'm not worried about myself i'm worried about other people and my big thing is so i've worked in the inner cities a lot and so i've seen people that have a an identity what i often refer to as a frame of reference that leads them so far astray because their parents will tell them things like people don't want somebody who looks like you to be successful and so they don't even try to be successful and so that belief about who they are and how the world conceives of them stops them from doing the behaviors that would lead them to be successful and so when i look at your core concept which i love i think is so brilliant that we've been talking to kids about rights and we really should be talking to them about responsibility and what you owe the world instead of what the world owes you now i'll frame it a little we have to balance those right because i mean even technically speaking your rights are my responsibilities and vice versa and so we can't only have half the dialogue because the responsibility makes enables the rights so you know it could easily be that we could be in a situation where we should be talking more about rights but i don't believe that we are in that situation at the moment and i i mean i think for me that's been borne out by the fact that people have been interested in what i've been saying because one of the things i've noticed time and time again is that whenever i talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning the crowds that i'm talking to go silent say look you need a meaning to sustain you through the vicissitudes of life okay well try to debate that it's like is life painful yes is it anxiety provoking yes is it uncertain yes is it painful beyond bearing sometimes yes it's difficult everyone agrees about that now they might disagree about how difficult but that doesn't matter that the central point holds okay what if you think that's all pointless well that doesn't seem very helpful okay so you need a sustaining meaning well where do you find that well you generally find it in responsibility to yourself and other people and people ask themselves those questions when when i'm talking because i ask them to ask themselves those questions and that's the answer well what's meaningful well i have a meaningful relationship with my father i have a meaningful relationship with my wife i have a meaningful relationship with my pet you know because i take care of that pet um when i commit to something and make sacrifices that sacrifice is something i also talk about a lot in both of the last two books you know if something's valuable you'll make sacrifices to attain it and that that discovery of sacrifice i think that's what separates human it's one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future we acted that out dramatically in all sorts of strange ways over thousands and thousands of years before it was formalizable psychologically but it's a massive discovery i can forego gratification in a particular way and benefit in the future so i can share the proceeds of my hunt and i store up future food in the form of reputation and the favors i've owed i'm owed now by other people it's a massive discovery so no question on that so when i start to put this back in the context of you know what's going on today so i i see you in a certain way i see you as somebody who um has had a long-standing desire to help people make sense of the world and how to move through it both as a public intellectual and as obviously a psychologist who's working with people and so when i hear you talking about um whether it's identity whether it's the culture war whether it's you know the balance the needed balance between chaos and order um it's in trying to get people to understand something so they can use it in their life and and move forward so taking that the the reason that i think identity becomes so important for people now is they the generations coming up seem to be using as a part of their identity a desire for their rights to focus on that what i'm owed um and if they were to flip it over to the responsibilities that they have now they're getting into an identity statement that changes their behavior set so profoundly that it gives them the meaning and purpose that you were talking about earlier it might be also an experiment you can run yourself or one of the tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy is collaborative empiricism so okay so so when you have a client and and you say well you know maybe your mood would be better if you got up at eight o'clock in the morning regularly instead of two or four in the afternoon irregularly and then you say well we don't really know if that's true let's try doing it getting up at 2 regularly for a week and see what happens and then maybe we'll try moving it back an hour week by week but you can see how it goes well so this is so i would say run the experiment it's like is your life better and you can even look at the way that you evaluate your past when you upheld your responsibilities did that improve your quality of life even though it might have been difficult and you know generally people say yes to that we derive a certain amount of satisfaction from past accomplishments and generally in proportion to their difficulty and so if that's not true fair enough and i mean there's variation highly open people tend to take more delight in extraordinarily creative ventures and extroverted people in being with other people conscientious people are more duty focused but doesn't really matter it's still it's still responsibility so it's just i i see the the the so there's this this presupposition let's say with this this set of identities that we've been taught to regard as categorical that good should be distributed equally according to those categories and that to me because those categories aren't functional you can't trade on them they don't bear any relationship to outcomes now you say well no that's just evidence of prejudice it's like well no doubt there's some prejudice i mean no one in the right mind would would deny that but but that's there's that doesn't mean there's no competence the fact that there is some prejudice doesn't mean there is no competence in the hierarchy itself so i once got asked um speaking at google and an african-american gentleman asked hey tom do you think that it's harder for me to be successful because i'm black and i said almost certainly true like even just from the perspective of a school of fish right you from an evolutionary standpoint we group up with people that look like we look so if you're a minority in any country then it seems self-evident to me that it's going to be more difficult but my question is and now what so you've got options you can sit in the unfairness of that and i don't even think people would argue it it is unfair or it's even counterproductive right because hypothetically we want to exploit all people equally for our own benefit you know to speak very coldly about it obviously there's more to it than that so my thing is you talk very profoundly about resentment in beyond order and that resonated with me really well it's like look you're going to have every reason to be resentful in your life there are going to be a million things that come at you but it doesn't serve you doesn't serve you it doesn't serve the community like that is the fastest way for your i wish i had better words for this i'm sure you do but for your sort of energy to go dark for you to step into the role of the adversary which you define very clearly is essentially the devil uh you liken adversaries to mistoffelees to the columbine shooters and that is seeing those as archetypal roles you can play the hero you can play the adversary if you're going down the path of bitterness even if you have every reason in the world to be bitter the thought of where that path leads you should be so terrifying that you should you turn and say even though i have the right even though everybody is going to tell me it makes all the sense in the world for you to be angry bitter resentful it's going to take you somewhere that will be so self-punishing that there's just no point in heading in that direction yeah unless you want unless you want the desolation and waste that comes with it yeah i mean in that chapter that's do not allow yourself to become arrogant deceitful or resentful i might have the order wrong there but that's the chapter yeah it opens with a discussion of why you would get resentful it's like well cultures are raid against you so you're the target of tyrannical forces that are beyond your control they're arbitrary they don't work in your interest at least not entirely and the more eccentric you are let's say the more tyrannical culture will be to you and so you're stuck with that and then nature conspires to destroy you constantly and is going to do that with pain and anxiety and aging and then there's the uncontrollability and darkness of your own psyche and everyone faces those now we face the positive elements of those two the beneficence of culture the beauty of nature the glory of the human spirit that's there as well you have reasons to be deceitful resentful and arrogant but it's not a good game unless you want to produce hell i want to talk about that so you were the one that got me to read the gulag archipelago you're the one that got me to and and this has profoundly changed my life for the better you got me to distrust myself which was such a brilliant move so you said hey when you think of nazi germany don't think of yourself as the one hiding anne frank in the addict think of yourself as a nazi guard because odds are that as much as you want to think of yourself as the one hiding and frank the numbers just don't bear it out and i thought whoa like even if it is just a thought exercise to recognize my potential for bringing hell on earth through silence through cowardice like not necessarily that i'm rushing out to do it but that i am capable of weakness i am capable of silence at a critical juncture i'm capable of resentment bitterness um well silence at a critical juncture i mean for sure that i mean you you told the story at the beginning of our talk i believe about oh no you didn't you told me this story though about um or maybe you did mention it about not having me on your show because someone called me a misogynist well that's a good example it was like and it was just kind of a throwaway in some sense i mean it's not like i hold it against you it's all it's obvious why that would happen but that's actually what's terrifying about it these things are easy you know when i worked very briefly visited very briefly a number of times a maximum security prison in edmonton alberta with a very eccentric psychologist and i met a man there who had shot two policemen in cold blood and um who seemed by all appearances when i met him to be of an ordinary harmless guy you know certainly wasn't very physically pre-possessing and another one of the criminals that i met had held down a third a couple of weeks later and beat his leg to a pulp with a lead pipe because he was a snitch and i imagined doing that it was very shocking i laid that out in the beginning of maps of meaning because i was having aggressive impulses at that time too and so i was curious about these aggressive impulses and i imagined doing it and i i mean i actually imagined doing it and then i thought i could do that and then i thought it's even possible under some conditions that i might be able to enjoy that and that was a terrible still a terrible shock was a terrible shock then it's no wonder people don't do this sort of thing i mean this sort of imagination but you know i took the idea that we were supposed to learn something from the horrors of the second world war seriously never forget okay you can't remember what you don't understand so what are we supposed to remember what are we remembering the fact that all these people were murdered no we're supposed to remember that that was a revelation of the genocidal nature of the human psyche that's partly why i'm so impressed let's say with the story of cain and abel i dealt with that in my biblical lecture series and in my writings you know the first two human beings according to the book upon which our culture is predicated for better or worse the first two human beings brothers the adversary and the hero the the archetypal adversary in the hero put right at the beginning of that amazing book it's the beginning of history cain's sacrifices are rejected by god okay well how do we understand that that's easy once you know the key you make sacrifices to make the future better well what if that doesn't pay off well you know think about that you know what that's like you endeavor to do something and it doesn't work you're not appreciated for who you are you fail maybe you failed despite your best efforts well are you rejected by god well it's as if you're rejected by god does it make you resentful does it make you bitter does it make you want to pull down the successful does it want it does it make you want to pull down the successful out of spite does it make you want to pull down the successful out of cosmic spite the answer to that happens to be yes you shake your fist at god you say i'm gonna harm those whom you blessed and no wonder it's no wonder you know it's a it's harsh that the rewards of life are indiscriminately distributed it's hard on everyone but it doesn't help it doesn't help to become bitter and it's not like i don't understand the temptation i mean i think part of the reason i get away with being so bloody preachy is because i'm talking to myself you know it's not like i don't put myself in the boat of the damned and lost very well dangerous now i listen to the whole times and i see this in this culture war i see this resentment it colors the definition of identity this attack on meritocracy it's an attack on merit itself you know that says nothing about whether or not culture is tyrannical yes but it's not only tyrannical and it's important to get those distinctions correct so i want to then put a coda on that because i think you cover it so well in your book and in the in rule number one don't denigrate social institutions or creative accomplishment uh reading that title i didn't realize what you meant until i read the chapter and what that is ultimately and correct me if i misstate anything but cultural institutions are the order they're the stability and they're granted there are these these these identities that are handed to you ready made and thank god for that marriage is one it's like well you can critique marriage fine but what game are you going to play try coming up with some try coming up with one on your own maybe you can maybe you're like avant-garde picasso maybe you are and maybe you have a right to to make your own arrangement maybe you have the psychological fortitude to craft your own social institution but i bloody well wouldn't count on it you're lucky that there's such a thing as a job or better yet a career you're lucky that there's such a thing as friendship as marriage all of these social institutions you know and and you and when you criticize them nietzsche put as one question of conscience and i think it's in twilight of the idols whether you're a leader or whether you're running away you're outside the pack and moving in a different direction in either case you know are you a rebel rebel because you can't fit in or are you a rebel because you could fit in but you see a better way it's like people in that category are not that common and the first question of conscience should be well which of those two are you it's highly probable that you're the first one and not the second because that would mean you'd be intensely disciplined plus creative on that dimension maybe that is you and god then we need you you know like you're the an avatar of the savior under those circumstances and maybe everyone has some of that in them as many of you know i'm all about constant self-improvement growth mindset and a relentless focus on progress and skill acquisition that's why i'm super excited to tell you guys about skillshare skillshare offers classes designed for real life and all the circumstances that come with it these lessons can help you stay inspired express yourself and introduce you to a community of millions creative self-discovery and expression can settle your mind and spontaneous acts of creativity can help break up the routine of a day indoors skillshare is an online learning community that offers membership with meaning so much to explore real projects to create and the support of fellow creatives skillshare empowers you to accomplish real growth with thousands of classes covering dozens of creative and entrepreneurial skills for instance they have an amazing class by simon sinek called presentation essentials how to share ideas that inspire action if there's anyone that should be teaching that class it is simon cynic this is a perfect example of the unique classes you can find on skillshare you can also find classes on illustration design photography video freelancing entrepreneurship and so much more and skillshare is also incredibly affordable an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month and right now the first 1000 viewers to click the link in the description we'll get a free trial of premium membership so you can explore your creativity don't miss this one guys sign up right now i mean that that's a a big question and i think is one of the fundamental questions that you address which is the almost the need to have them both and so you give an example in the book in beyond order where you said let's take a city and imagine a really run-down dangerous crime-ridden area the people that find themselves attracted to that inevitably become the artists and they move in and they think hey with a little bit of effort this could be kind of cool and then they move in they start to make it cool then the first coffee shop pops up and then the gentrifiers start moving in and then the chain stores start moving in and then that place is no longer suited to the artist and the artist must move and i thought oh my god like in in one description of a city and this like when when people listen to you this is the very thing i want them to understand which is there is a nature to things and instead of you know shaking your fist at god you know why why is this like this is to recognize how predictable this [ __ ] is and to find a meaningful way right to find your meaning to shoulder your burden put your shoulders back like you know climb your way up the the competence hierarchy by getting so good that you can't be ignored but recognizing hey dear artist what a beautiful contribution you make it is necessary in a certain place at a certain time but that will evolve and so instead of being angry that the natural course of things is that you've made something beautiful which attracts people such as the nature of beauty recognize that you know there's like a johnny appleseed quality to that and to relish in that identity of i am the artist i make things beautiful i attract people to my beauty you know hopefully in some transcendent way i mean you talking beyond order about the need for beauty in your life and how chapter seven yeah the very things that we consider um impossible to put a price tag on is always art and so there is that thing but like tying it all together from identity to meaning and purpose to the the almost cruel nature of things that description arrested me in the book because i could both feel the joy of the artist when they discover something and create something and also feel their heartbreak as the place changed so much you even say in the book where they can no longer afford the rent and so there there is a cruelty to you are the one that gave birth to this thing and made it what it is and then it gets to the point where you can't afford it and you have to move on and now to really tie [ __ ] together and bring it back around to you getting me to read the gulag archipelago you realize even i have the impulse to be like oh that's not fair like how do we make sure that the artist can stay there and you know they've done so much to contribute and then you realize the hammer is essentially the only way and that's where it all starts to get scary for me and where i don't feel like people are extrapolating and looking into the future of uh i don't know if you know thomas soul but he has a great quote which is the last 30 years have been marked by take replacing what works with what sounds good and to me that feels like the fundamental flaw of today which ties into your notion of rights versus uh responsibility well the chapter on artists so artists are high in trade openness and open people live in they live farther in chaos they're good at pattern recognition they tend to have high verbal iqs the pattern recognitions manifest itself to some degree in their artistic proclivity because like visual art is a patterning of the world an investigative patterning of the world and so they're the intuitives they see they see what's coming they live on the edge they live on the frontier well there are frontiers everywhere there's frontiers in every discipline there's frontiers in cities and you talked about that it's like this the artist is someone who can see possibility and so they'll take a rundown place and beautify it that's that's their niche and it's it's an evolutionary niche technically speaking we have five dimensions of personality there's variation in each of those dimensions because there's a niche for every every what would you call every place on the distribution and you have to find your place in the world according to your temperament i mean you can change your temperament to some degree although it's not it's no it's no simple matter it's pretty stable it's better to find the place that you belong you know an open people might be very annoyed that they're not appreciated by more conservative types but the conservative types fill a different niche they're conscientious and dutiful and so if something's working you want conservatives to run it because they're dutiful and efficient and orderly by the book patriotic this works let's uphold it let's make it work efficiently let's not change it because we might break it but it needs breaking well that's the debate that's the purpose of free speech that's that that's my sense of it you know there's this balance that has to be obtained between tradition and transformation we have to have respect for both of them and how do we know when something needs to be changed we don't know so we have to argue about it and in order to argue about it effectively we have to be able to talk to each other across our identity boundaries and then we can decide well should this be maintained or should this be transformed why because we're trying to talk to each other today well i think we do a lot of i'm not so sure that we can't i mean part of it might be that we're talking to each other way more than we ever did and we and it's too much like i don't know these things are all beyond my capacity to understand i'm still wrestling with what's at the core of the culture wars let's say although i do think that the pathological element of it is a war on competence um restrictions by resentment yeah that's what it looks like to me you know when i like i said i can understand the resentment you know it's it's it's it's we have to strive not to be wretched there's something that doesn't seem fair about that why couldn't we just be happy being who and what we are why is it that we're punished if we don't strive well i don't know we're negan tropic organisms right i mean we have to maintain this incredible complexity in the face of a dissipating universe it requires effort it's the it's this it's the second law of thermodynamics i believe that's why we have to strive well why is the world constituted that way couldn't i guess it's an infantile paradise wish in some regard couldn't we just be rewarded for who we are i can understand that but i don't think that it works i don't think that's how things i don't think things function like that and i don't think probably in the final analysis we really want them to i don't know if anyone enjoys undeserved reward you know it feels kind of creepy doesn't it to be rewarded for something you didn't do it does i'm obsessed with this idea of the physics of being human that there are just certain things that are true that our brain has algorithms running in them that are going to push us to be striving to you know push against entropy you know partly just to you have to risk danger to go out and get food and provide for your family and keep them safe so it makes sense that you have that pushing at your back um also seems to me that you have an innate drive for progress and that you'll never be happy if you're not advancing in some way getting better well i think that's technically true you know and in maps of meaning in particular i make a neuropsychological argument for that based on mostly based on the work of jeffrey gray who i think was the greatest neuropsychologist of the last half of the 20th century and he drew a lot of his ideas from norbert weiner who was a a cyber cybernetic theorist who was instrumental in the development of artificial intelligence these ideas have a uh what would you call it a stellar academic origin and positive emotion grade laid this out better than anyone else the positive emotion that we find sustaining is experienced in relationship to an unachieved goal it's hope that drives us forward we want something and if we see ourself moving towards that then we're we're in the grip of the positive emotion that we find sustaining it isn't the attainment attainment is satiating attainment shuts down the system that has been striving for that particular object of attainment if you're hungry and you eat you stop being hungry now that's good because the hunger is gone but that whole frame disappears you can no longer strive within that frame and you need a new frame to strive towards and so technically and this is well established as far as i'm concerned we even know the drugs that people abuse cocaine let's say amphetamines the ones that are potent sources of positive emotion activate the system that regulates our emotional response to evidence that we're moving towards a desired goal so cocaine for example is an exhilarating drug it makes you feel that things are worthwhile because it hijacks the system that does make indicate that things are worthwhile so this is deeply this this striving aspect is deeply rooted in in our in our biology for obvious reasons you you cover that very well in beyond order and this is one of the things that and it this particular thing finds itself sort of in in many different um of the rules but this idea that there is an evolutionary wind at your back there are reasons that stories contain certain elements over and over and over and i want to wrap this together in the following question i think i can give you an example of that so there's a part of the brain called the hypothalamus and it's very very very old we share it with virtually every animal that has a nervous system it's it's sits above the spinal cord it's extremely old evolutionarily speaking and half of it governs fundamental motivations so governs hunger for example so if you're hungry you posit the existence of something that will satiate your appetite a peanut butter sandwich and then you're happy when you're moving towards the kitchen and then maybe you get thirsty and the hypothalamus does that and then maybe you need to use the washroom and maybe you're too hot and that the hypothalamus pops up these little motivational frames and then emotions modulate your movement towards the goal that's established by these fundamental motivations but that's only half the hypothalamus the other half is the origin of the dopaminergic system that mediates exploratory striving and positive emotion and so the way our brains are set up way below what way below the neocortex way way older than that the default position is if you're satiated in all the important dimensions then you're curious and explore well why well because you might find new resources that could be used to to to uh satiate those fundamental motivations in the future so that heroic drive into the unknown is unbelievably archaic and then it's regulated by fear and pain you know so you go into the unknown well you don't want to die so if you get damaged you experience pain and you want to avoid pain so you experience anxiety these are very fundamental systems and they are reflected in our narratives that's essentially as far as i can tell why the dragon hoards treasure everywhere the dragon is an amalgam of predatory stimuli and fire which is a destructive force but also very useful so dragon is something like predatory destructive entity you might say well is that real it's like well yeah but it's a meta category it's like there are lions and raptors and um lizards let's say uh 60 million years ago when we were still in trees the idea that there's a meta predator is a great idea a meta predator is what all predators share in common that's a dragon well what should you do with a dragon well avoid it that's one answer another answer is burn it out of its lair so that it doesn't have baby dragons the and the an even more sophisticated answer is well confront it you can feed your family with the body of a dragon it's treasure and then that's become abstracted up into the unknown as such you do a great job of uh telling the story of tiamat martic all of that in a way where you re-grounded it in the actual historical context cause they talk about when you slay the dragon you can actually build things from it they talk about pieces right having an earthquake amazing i thought wow that's kind of interesting and then you said no no they actually used to build the you know the doorways to their cave or whatever from the bones of the animals that they slayed and i thought oh my god when you put the story in that context of you're telling the tribe something that they're actually doing but you're elevating it and so you're saying look the great hero goes and slays the most dangerous of the most dangerous predatory thing and from that we're not just creating our house we're creating the heaven and the earth and i thought whoa like you really do so i mean that's why in christianity which is has taken the hero myth in a tremendously sophisticated direction christ tackles the worst of all potential dragons and that's the adversary that's the evil in the human heart it's become completely psychologized by that point or spiritualized instead of an external monster that's the threat and let's make no mistake external monsters are are threatening but then there's direct external monsters that are other tribes well those are genuinely threatening too and we can demonize a member of another tribe at the drop of a hat but then you take one level above that even you think well the most dangerous thing of all is the evil that lurks in the human heart in the individual and that's why you have the battle let's say between christ and satan that's what that means it's not all it means but that's what it means and and so what you and then you ask yourself like you can ask yourself this question very seriously if you were thinking about the most moral possible action wouldn't that be the voluntary constraint of the evil that you yourself are likely to do and wouldn't that mean facing human evil in its reality as it manifests itself inside you and wouldn't that mean then obtaining victory over that and you might say well is that a divine story well it's the it i can't say what the relationship is between the human psyche and and the world as such but we don't have a deeper story than that and i can't see how it's not true and you might say well it's not true for me it's like well don't you have a conscience doesn't it bother you and then can you control it and answer that is almost inevitably no it calls you to account and why well because you've deviated from the ideal who's ideal an ideal that's making itself known within you at least in so far as the objection arises you wake up at three in the morning and torture yourself for your inequities and you would think well i could just shut that off it's me after all but you can't shut it off you're nothing compared to your conscience now it's strange because you can ignore it you cannot live according to its dictates but it's not going to leave you alone jordan you asked the times person uh in the full-length article or a full-length recording which i listened to you said hey don't focus on my illness in this focus on why people resonate with my message which she of course did not uh but that leads no one does oh it leaves me an opening i'm gonna take it right now it's so interesting to see that is that it's so interesting because you know the only time that ever gets addressed is by the mainstream media jesus you know horrible cliche but it's usually sort of brushed off and it's usually well he seems to be attractive towards young men who are troubled well first of all that's not so bad is it i mean hypothetically the most ardent feminist is primarily concerned with helping the troubled young man not be so troubled but it's brushed off in a cynical sort of way and it the cynicism is also disbelief that that could possibly be serious a serious enterprise well i think it's a serious enterprise why do you think they resonate with you i think it's because who knows the final answer to anything you know but i took what i learned about what happened in the second world war seriously it's like wow we can be really bad we should do something about that like that was unacceptable well was it or not well how unacceptable was it change your life unacceptable better be if you want it not to happen again and it's not like it the next time it happens will make the previous time look like a picnic we're way more powerful than we were you know when we're getting to the point is something jung talked about especially near the end of his life we're getting so powerful that each individual is now a force of almost unimaginable destructive power if they so choose to be and that's just going to that power is going to continue to increase and what that means is that the degree to which each of us has our act together is going to be something upon which the world increasingly depends for its maintenance i'm going to add something to why i think people resonate with you so much in the book you encourage people to think from an evolutionary perspective which i think is incredibly important and i think what you offer people is one you make we all struggle with our own internal demons and you allow people to see how that's a heroic endeavor maybe the ultimate heroic endeavor to conquer that inside of yourself and then going back to the beginning of identity being a function of behavior by helping people begin to identify as the hero engaging in relatively straightforward behaviors like cleaning your room or liking the new book making an area beautiful refusing to give into resentment aim at one thing which [ __ ] was one of my favorite parts of the book and see how extraordinarily good you can get at that like when i think that's a good thing is you got to aim at something it's like otherwise your life is meaningless well what should you aim at well i don't know well pick something pick something aim at it as you move toward it you'll get wiser then maybe your aim will change that's okay but at least it'll change in an informed way it's like discipline yourself in one dimension see what happens well that's exciting and i think that's something that's open for everyone you can do that i shouldn't say that because i don't believe that i think you can find yourself in a situation that's so dire that you don't there's no escape from it but that doesn't matter because this still this is the hero myth might not be the best we have might not always work but it's still the best we have and the fact that it might not work doesn't mean we should throw it away it's still the best we have i mean everyone dies and so we fail in some sense the fact that a symphony ends doesn't mean that it wasn't worth listening to yeah when you put that in an evolutionary context and you acknowledge that people are compelled by biology to strive they're compelled by biology to progress they're compelled by biology to um be courageous that they will be rewarded for being courageous neurochemically they will be punished for being a coward neurochemically and yeah well think about you know the thing about that biological explanation too is that we've been social for a very long time we've been social for so long that our social nature is programmed into our biology and so you'll be punished if you're not useful to other people yes by your conscience because you're a social creature and the question is well how could you be most here's another question that starts to what verge on the religious what does the most useful person look like well who is everyone hoping they'll meet and that's a genuine question i'm like and that's the ideal the ideal is the person everyone's hoping they'll meet that's christ in in the christian culture psychologically speaking independent of any religious claims so that's these these this is this is i suppose the essential idea of the archetype from the union perspective we have the we have the image of an ideal and because it is the ultimate ideal it has a religious element it's compelling it's a judge why is it a judge well if you fall short of the ideal your conscience punishes you so it's a judge and it's merciful well why because if you act out the ideal then your life improves you know what i said well the question what is the relationship between these images of the psyche and reality i i don't know the answer to that i don't know where the archetype shades into reality it depends to some degree on how you define reality and you know this is i've been people don't like that statement but when you're asking questions that are deep enough you start to have to ask what do you mean by true for example what do you mean by real because the questions you ask get so deep that they're of the same kind as the question what is real or what is true you know if think of it this way reality is what we adapt to by definition that's reasonable if you're a darwinian you have to say that's actually as far as you can go reality is that which shapes us you can't get a better handle on reality than that well when you make a picture of objective reality it's not the same as that it's a different picture and it's not obvious which one should play trump now the hero myth as far as i can tell is an evolutionary artifact and that means that for human beings that the hero image is the path of of optimal adaptation does that reflect reality well it does insofar as reality has selected that well does that mean that reality is a story because the hero myth is a story or at least that's one of the things it is does it mean that reality has a narrative aspect well it does insofar as we act things out does that mean that reality is ultimately a story well i don't know but the answer isn't obviously no yeah reading the book beyond order there was a part in there that struck me as this is gonna be the new battleground that jordan is going to be fighting on do you have do you have a sense of um what in the book is going to trigger people no i mean i didn't think that the lobster in the last book was going to be so hillaried i mean i thought it was i thought it was really cool it's like oh my god serotonin mediates dominance in lobsters and people how ancient how remarkable but well that took off in all sorts of directions you know people made fun of it it's like well you can make fun of 350 million years of evolutionary history if you want you can put your social constructionism up against 350 million years of evolutionary history good luck to you i didn't think it was like and you know the idea that i was trying to insist that because lobsters live in hierarchies that hierarchies are the source of all moral value you know that's i was trying to insist that hierarchies are are so inevitable that you see nervous systems adapting to them across virtually every level of animal and why well because some things are valuable and since and within any given domain of value some valuable things are more valuable than other things and so you have a hierarchy there's no avoiding it as long as you need something as long as there's scarcity a hierarchy is inevitable yeah nobody cares how many big pens you have it's because they're not scarce so you can't have status because you have 200 of them but as soon as there's scarcity there's a hierarchy and there's always scarcity of one form or another no matter how rich you get you know if you're if you have 100 million dollars picasso paintings are still scarce yeah the the pushback on the the lobster thing it falls into two things for me one i don't understand why people look for a reason not to listen to somebody which to me most people coming after you for that one just they didn't want you to be right or to be heard and so they went after something that they thought they could mummify and and shut down on and then i understand that like i understand that i it's obvious why people are looking for a reason not to listen to someone it's like how god damn many people can you listen to there's nine billion of them you know so you have to not listen to almost everyone and so you'll fall for any excuse and sometimes that's not so good you know because you have a bias that prejudices you against a viewpoint that you actually need that's that's a problem but the phenomenon itself like you know you you mentioned sorry to bring this up again but because it's germaine and relevant someone said something disparaging about me and they were on your staff it's like well you have lots of options for guests you're looking for no you're always looking for no because you can only say yes to a very limited number of things so that's another reason we have to be very careful about our prejudices because we need them you know to i don't mean prejudice in that obviously in this inappropriate social sense but jesus we have to shield ourselves from an excess of information we're very limited capacity processors no question i i don't understand though i don't understand really and it's really killing me i think i might might mean that literally i don't understand why i'm so controversial i can't figure that out it's very distressing to me you want me to take a stab at it sure good metaphor all right so my gut instinct in terms of why a certain type of person uh responds negatively to you is when you think of a person as a blank slate and that we all have this collective responsibility to make sure that everybody ends up the same then you saying some people are better at something than others already is feels judgmental and so it is oh yes and but when you have a collectivist view and you believe that everyone should have equal outcome which by the way i think everybody yourself included like if only right like that would be amazing like if everybody could live truly in harmony and that didn't violate principles of just the human animal which is why i always remind people to remember you're having a biological experience but you say things that are they violate a deeply compassionate person's desire to take care of everybody the sort of no child left behind type thing and when you insist on in your own life like i'm only going to say that which is true and i'm certainly not going to let somebody force me to say something i don't believe is true so now with that and by the way all of that and this is a key thing i think you have to understand you're fighting with a level of intensity that makes sense when you realize your obsession with what happened in the 20th century the gulag archipelago what happened there uh obviously nazi germany mouse china like the number of people that have been killed in these essentially social experiments so you have this deep intense thing trying to get people to understand like hierarchies are real there's no escaping them not everybody is as good as everybody else at everything and by the way you have to shoulder responsibility and that's where people are like you just to them i cannot and before i say what they think i will reiterate you have changed my life forever and for the better i will forever be grateful to the things that you continue to put out into the world and i missed you horribly as a thought leader during 2020 of all years to be on a jordan peterson diet i was not happy about that but what they think of is that you're being mean for the sake of being mean that you're not trying to help them see you cannot pretend reality isn't reality in pretending that the dragon is not there the dragon does not go away the dragon grows more powerful more likely to devour you and your family and so yeah i'm still smaller but they don't see that and so that's why i'm like when i see people attack you i'm like jesus christ how many times does he have to say this is about a balance between order and chaos that you need both of these things that you have to show the responsibility because that is what reality demands that you're in you're nested in an evolutionary context there are things like hierarchies that will play out in uh in the the body inception exactly and so you may not want to feel bad when you walk in the room and are worse at something than everybody else but you're going to you may not want to feel bad when you're rejected but you're going to you may not want to feel bad because you're just lazing around your house and not doing anything but you're going to and you have peered into enough of human nature to recognize hey there are just certain truisms you've now given us 24 of the i forget how many were originally in the core article 49 or whatever so 42 42 okay we've got 24 answer to the life of the universe and everything right is that all status number so oh my god that's perfect actually uh it it is this incredible thing once you break free from ideology and that's where again this is one of the rules in beyond order not to fall prey to ideology this is where i thought you were going in the beginning with identity i thought you were going to say identity has become pathological because it has become it's been simplified you talk about this and beyond order once you simplify something and this is how an ideologue gets you they simplify it they make it very understandable becomes very clear who's in and who's out you can reward and punish based on that people are grabbing these unnegotiated self-determined pieces of identity that don't necessarily bring value to the larger world which will create dissonance in their own life because they've got all this substructure running you know what i mean it's like i'm not saying they're like your race i suppose is a value but it's not a tradable value and your gender and your sex the same thing it's like i guess it's partly because there's no scarcity you know it's like we've got enough white people being white doesn't buy you anything so and i i'm not saying that with any pleasure that's what i think people miss this is why i think people come after you they don't recognize that you're not saying it you're not relishing in this you want people to be happy and i'm always so confused jordan i don't know why you remain as vulnerable and open as you are after the time saying i was like what the [ __ ] you sounded so kind open compassionate after what four years of you know some percentage of the world relentlessly slandering you and obviously you get people that cheer you on probably way more people that cheer you on them don't but you still remain vulnerable which is [ __ ] incredible but the fact that they don't recognize that you're trying to help like i could get it if they said hey look i disagree with you or the other but maybe they do recognize that you know there's a lot of cynicism about the help and i i can't understand why you'd be cynical about help unless you weren't that help weren't that pleased about the idea of help you know like all these deplorables that i'm helping these angry young men you know they don't deserve help well i don't think that i don't know anyone that doesn't deserve help you know there's this idea in the new testament that you should love your enemies it's like why would you do that well it'd be better if they weren't your enemies and their unnecessary suffering doesn't help it's not helpful it's not like you don't you know anyone with any sense anyone who's human is liable to take pleasure in vengeance or even in but you know when people go after the journalists that have gone after me i don't take any pleasure in that i don't sit back at my home and rub my hands and think you know you got what was coming to you i do think sometimes you've got what was coming to you but i think of that more like watching someone in the road you know they're in the road and they have their back turned and the truck runs over them it's like well you were in the road and there was a truck and so you got what was coming to you because you were on the road and there was a truck but i don't take any pleasure in it i don't see that it's helpful what do you want people to get out of beyond order it it is extraordinarily well thought through it is very well laid out each sentence stacks like a brick upon the next i wouldn't advise i don't know if you feel differently but i wouldn't advise people to read them out of order it's literally this very careful case being made that taken in totality is breathtaking i think you can read them in either order i think you can read them in either order i tried maybe maybe they're better read in order but but um i think that if you read the second one first then it would color your vision of the first one i mean i mean the rules the i think you're right 12 rules for life and beyond order it doesn't matter they're yin and ya you mean the rules themselves the rules themselves just it stacks so well so otherwise it wouldn't be a book okay i mean each the thing about writing a book is that you're outside of time and space in relationship with the book because chapter one comes before chapter 12 but not when you're writing it you can go back and modify chapter one because of chapter 12. i did try to tie them together so that they make a book you know and they won builds upon another that's like that's the musical element of it as well the recurrent themes i'm glad you liked it see i can't tell i can't evaluate it um i'm hoping that it it's of the same level of quality that the first book was and i'm not making any claims saying that about the level of quality of the first book i'm just that was as good as i could do and i wrote the second one under unbelievable duress yeah and so i can't tell if it's you know whether that was a curse or well certainly a curse and no doubt about that i don't know how it impacted the book though it's hard to say what do i want people to get out of it well i'm hoping that they find it useful the same way they seem to have found the first one i'm embarrassed actually hurts me actually both of them hurt me i would say because i'm ashamed you know of what's happened to me what do you mean and they're books about life and my life is i'm very hurt i'm a very destroyed person in many ways and so i feel unworthy unworthy of what you name it i hope people find it useful you know i hope it alleviates some unnecessary suffering that's the goal here's how i read your books and everything that you've put out into the world the people that should write the instruction manual are the people that have struggled and in your suffering you have been able to piece together useful information which is the barometer by which i judge a book's value for sure the reason people flock to your lectures they buy your book is you have made in modern times the single most coherent and useful instruction manual for life period so the i fear that the brokenness that you feel the heartache that you feel translates into something usable that couldn't be written by somebody that hadn't gone through what you've gone through well i would like to believe that was true you know there's a bit too much self-justification in it for my taste but i thought the other day i'd probably do this too and no i would i have to record an announcement for this book because it's coming out on tuesday i thought the best announcement would be just to thank people for all of their kind attention i'm very fortunate in that regard i get letters from people all the time that they open up their hearts you know it's really something but i am somewhat non-plus let's say for all this work i'm pretty broken in general or just in this moment don't know i think in general man well i will say this as somebody whose life you have touched and the thing i want you to recognize and me as i imagine countless other people want you to recognize in them more than warm wishes is i have put to use the things that you're teaching and they have made my life better and they have made the lives of those around me better and man it is really heartbreaking to see you go through what you're going through now and i i certainly get it um you know and i don't know you well enough to offer you any sort of um familial consolation so i will just say that what you do matters probably more than you think it does certainly as much as you think it does and i i had never met you through 2020 and i started reaching out to people that we both know asking about you because i i believe that the world needs the insights that you uniquely have coming from your background of mythology and understanding what is deeply ingrained in the human psyche from an evolutionarily shaped perspective and that nobody is putting it together the way that you're putting it together and the fact that you've been you know i mean hopefully it's it's small in comparison to the people that are supporting you but jesus like i don't i know i would not put up with the amount of [ __ ] that you've put up with and the fact that i think the individual is the only way to approach any systemic problem like you just have to deal with the individuals and then from there it will echo out into society and so the fact that that's your approach um i kept telling people we need jordan peterson right now and i'm so grateful you're back and i know this book will be very successful because i'm glad you liked it i'm glad you liked it because like i said i it's really hard for me to evaluate it you know sometimes i well i have every possible thought that you could have about it you know sometimes i read it and i think oh that seemed to have turned out pretty good and other times i think jesus i've said this 50 times already and yeah i'm all over the place i can't i think that happens it happens when you write a book you get so because you know if when you read someone else's book you can kind of tell if the ideas are original at least insofar as you're concerned well i can't tell because i these are my ideas well not all of them obviously but their ideas i'm at least deeply familiar with so i can't tell to what degree it's original none of it and so i and it's it's also i suppose i'm quite apprehensive about its release in some sense because i've set myself up an impossible second act you know because the first book was so insanely popular i think it's six million copies now in in all the languages it's been published in so um that's impossible that never happens right it's it's certainly it's like winning the lottery it's probably less probable than winning the lottery in fact i'm virtually certain that it's less probable than winning the lottery and to to imagine doing that twice is well that's just it happens but it's highly improbable anyways it's going to all come and then you know i'm in a different space than i was when i released this first book so this is compared to all this is going to be compared to all my electronic avatars which are busily working out there in the world i think there's more of me outside of me now than there is inside of me weirdly enough that's another phenomenon i can't really get my hand my my my uh mind around you know the power of youtube jesus that's quite the technology when i put those first videos up you know i was this was bothering me this piece of legislation and for a variety of reasons some of which we've discussed i talked to my wife and my son sort of casually i said well i'm going to make these videos see what happens and just like famous last words yes yeah man look it's resonated it will continue to resonate you are you have an extraordinary ability to translate what people are feeling into the actions they need to take to get out of it it is not a mistake that you are a very practiced clinical psychologist that is able to scale what you were doing one-on-one now to the many it's extraordinary and i think it's really had an impact on society my fantasies i love being a clinician it was a great job you know i really loved it there was nothing better than intense conversations about how to make things better when both partners in the conversation are fully committed to that it's such fun to produce incremental improvement sometimes more than incremental you know collaboratively there's nothing better than that i love doing my lecture tour because it was that on a large scale it was i talked to dave rubin about that this week because of course he was long on the tour and it was such it was so perfect to be talking to people about making things better and to have everyone at least in that moment fully on board with the idea you couldn't you couldn't ask for anything better than that was great and to have the support i've had from people it just stuns me you know i think it's actually traumatic to have that much support that's interesting why traumatic it's not easy to know what to do with you know the cheers of a million people it's overwhelming it's dangerous dangerous because it can seep into your identity or this is probably not directly relevant but i don't know you know i've thought a lot about hitler you know it was it his arrogance or his humility that led him to be the savior so-called of germany he had millions of people cheering for him how could you not think you were right how could you possibly think you weren't right and so there's danger in that you know i don't think i've i don't think i've unfairly benefited from it i'm not a hedonistic person my life style hasn't changed um but still it's it's just difficult to see i also think these are things i don't know what to think about you know that i'm talking about if you're a movie star people are your fans you know for your roles but i'm not playing a role or if i am it's me i'm no different on in this conversation than i am whenever i'm doing anything you know i think well what is it well i'm talking about all these great clinical ideas it's the power of the ideas it's the power of the communications technology brought together and that's probably sufficient explanation but it's still strange and maybe i was pretty old when this happened to me and maybe that makes it more difficult to adapt to but you know my videos have been viewed something like if you count them all up approximately with the ones that people have cut it's like 600 million times it's some insane number it's incredible it's incredible man it speaks to the impact so not that anybody would have a hard time finding you but if people want to track you in the book and the progress and you getting more involved now again where should they do it well you can go to jordanbpeterson.com and everything's laid out there i have a list of recommended books that's quite fun there's about 100 books there if you read all those books well you'd be educated not in everything but you know you'd have an education so there you go there's an education for anyone who wants it they're 100 great books that doesn't mean you know everything about everything or even something about everything but what you do know would be useful and you would know it and lots of people are reading those books i can tell because i run it through amazon as a third-party vendor so i get some sense of how many book affiliate yeah uh gets a sense of how many books are being published a month and it are bought a month it's a lot so that's fun um the exercises that my partners and i have developed self-authoring and the personality test understand myself are are you can find them there and self-authoring helps people write out an identity past present and future and that seems to be really useful for people because it's better to have a plan you know what's the idea if you don't have your own plan then you're the tool of someone else's plan so that's probably not good especially if you don't know what their plan is so so that's useful you could do that and and um my own books are available there you can find the youtube channel and the podcast and where my team is translating a lot of the popular lectures into multitude of languages um seven or eight languages we're going to launch in the next month i just recorded the introductions to those so that's quite something because increasingly it is a global market youtube in particular is a global market so we're experimenting with that that's exciting awesome man well jordan thank you so much for coming on the show dude i i am just enthralled by what you're teaching and offering to people and how will continue to drink deeply of the content that you put out like i said it's had a major impact on my life so thank you for everything guys if you're not already uh wildly familiar with jordan peterson trust me when i say go watch everything uh it is absolutely breathtaking definitely read the books they do read as a yin yang of each other um so if you haven't yet read beyond order definitely get that if you haven't read 12 rules for life get that they are extraordinary and you will really understand his philosophy once you've read the tube alright speaking of things that will help you understand life if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care [Music] you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 800,618

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Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Beyond Order, Jordan Peterson, Jordan B. Peterson, self-identity, progress, order, artists, conservatism, conversation, psychology, development, identity, hierarchy, prejudice, order and chaos, individuality, gender identity, identification

Id: 6_IGHMSsdD0

Length: 113min 49sec (6829 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021