Jordan Peterson on The Necessity of Virtue

this lecture is called virtue as a necessity and the reason I I gave it that title is because virtue ethics morality isn't a field of study it's a mode of being upon which all fields of study rest it's also a mode of being on which everything you do in your life rests the way you understand yourself or fail to the way you understand other people or fail to and more deeply than that what role it is that you play in your life in the world one of the things I've learned for example being a clinical psychologist I spent thousands of hours helping people sort out difficult problems is that lack of virtue makes people ill I'm not saying that my clients themselves lacked virtue I suppose some of them do and some of them don't but to the degree that they're embedded in a network of relationships where virtue is fundamentally absent they're tortured and tormented and they're unable to find firm ground and that's not a biological problem even though biologically fragile people might be hurt more by a lack of virtue a lot of what you do in a real relationship with people and at least to some degree a clinical relationship is supposed to be real is provide a forum where people tell the truth and that's hard because people don't like to tell the truth particularly the truth is difficult it's difficult for a variety of reasons so when I first thought about this lecture I had a slightly different title that the title was virtue as an existential necessity and that's a bit philosophical so I modified it but there was a reason for that because the concept of virtue means to be virtuous and existentialism is the study of being right and I think that you can't really understand what makes up virtue until you modulate or modify your notion of what constitutes being this is a hard thing to do modern people are fundamentally materialistic and there's some utility in that we're masters of material trance information and the fact that we're materialist in our scientific philosophies has made us extremely powerful maybe too powerful for our morality extremely powerful from a technological perspective but it's blinded us to certain things and I think one of the things that it's really blinded us to is the nature of our own being because we make the assumption that the fundamental constituent elements of reality are material we fail to notice that the fundamental constituent elements of our own reality are not material their emotional their motivational their dreams their visions their relationships with other people they're conscious they're dependent on consciousness and self-consciousness and we have absolutely no materialist explanation whatsoever either for consciousness or self consciousness and we don't deal well from a materialistic perspective with the qualities of being and everyone knows those qualities exist I mean for most people there's nothing more real than their own pain right pain transcends rational argument in that you can't argue yourself out of it it's just there and materialist or not there's very few people that are willing to allow their claim that their pain is merely an epiphenomena epiphenomena of some more fundamental material process pain is fundamental and consciousness is fundamental and I think that unless you understand that you can't think properly about virtue so I might start the discussion of virtue with a discussion of being well what is human being looked like well the Buddhists say life is suffering that's the first fundamental Buddhist dictum and I suppose a modern person would tend to think of that as a very pessimistic claim but I've found when I've shared that information with my students once they understand what it means it's actually a relief because people run around madly suffering away and all of them inside their little shell think well there must be something wrong with me because here I am suffering and you know I mean that that isn't how things are supposed to be well then you might say who says that's not the way things are supposed to be the Buddhists say life is suffering so that what that means is if you're not suffering that's a good thing that's lucky that's fortunate that's not the way of the world that may be something to be grateful for ecstatic about even and of course in Christianity the central symbol of Christianity is a crucifix which is not a positive symbol in any way it's a symbol of betrayal by friends opposition from the state and mortal vulnerability it's about as powerful a symbolic representation of the idea that life is suffering is you can put together which is of course why the power of that symbol extends across several thousand years Judaism well I don't think it's going to come as a shock to anybody in the audience that Jews are acutely aware of the suffering that's involved in life so it's useful to know to understand what it means that life is suffering it's a fundamental ontological truth it's a fundamental statement about the nature of being and there's a reason for that it's not incomprehensible it's perfectly comprehensible we're finite right we have a life span that's bounded temporally you're going to live maybe a hundred years and that will pretty much be it and then there's other forms of extreme limitation that are imposed on you that have very little to do with you they're arbitrary facts of being you're a certain height you're a certain weight you're a certain amount of attractive you're a certain amount of intelligent you're a certain amount of athletic you're a certain amount of mentally ill you're a certain amount of predisposition to cancer and do it's frequently the case that people like to attribute those vulnerabilities to some flaw in their own nature but what they are instead are conditions of existence human being is predicated on a kind of fundamental limitation in that we are what we are and we're not other things and so that means inevitably that the awareness of human being comes along with suffering and life poses the quest how to conduct yourself in the face of suffering not only yours but everyone else's and it's an inescapable question except that maybe you're fortunate and you'll have periods of time where something absolutely horrible isn't help happening to you now you think about this because you might think this is pessimistic but it's not pessimistic it's it's actually one of the most freeing things that you can realize for maybe there's nothing particularly wrong with you at the moment but there's a high probability that you have a family member that has something seriously wrong with them and there's a very high probability that if you don't you will soon or maybe you'll have a partner that has something seriously wrong with them and to know this frees you from the false illusion that life can be conducted without suffering suffering is an integral part of being now why is that well who knows it's a metaphysical question but I have some ideas about that that have helped me and there are things that I've read I read for example an old Jewish commentary about the reason for creation there it's like a Zen koan this idea you take a a being with the classical attributes of God omnipotence omnipresence and omniscience all right the totality and the question is well what is a being with those attributes lack and answer is limitation and then you think well what's so important about limitation well if you can be anything or do anything at any time whatsoever there's no being because everything is one thing there's no differentiation between things so something that's absolute and total has no being it has to be parceled out into limited being just and you know this because you'll all play games you play video games you play games with other people you may play games you don't even know you're playing and when when you play those games you put you put limits on yourself you play by a set of rules and the reason you do that is when you limit yourself arbitrarily in some ways whole new worlds of possibility emerge and so there's a powerful metaphysical idea that being is not possible without limitation so that's an interesting question that's an interesting idea so you say well what's the price you pay for being the price you pay for being is limitation and the price you pay for limitation is suffering so the price you pay for being is suffering so what's the problem with that well suffering makes people question the validity of life all right everyone does that if something terrible is happening to you you're going to wonder why you that that's for sure why not you might be a better question because it's inevitable but you will wonder that why you and you'll wonder well is it worth it especially if what's happening to you is terrible and prolonged is it worth it does the cost that you have to pay for being justify itself and therefore is being justifiable and everybody adds asks and answers these questions and in fact the process of asking and answering those questions underlies everything you do all the time because you're answering when you act one answer which is yes being justifies itself and you're answering a different way sometimes when you act which is no being does not justify itself and the question that might be what happens when you answer one of those two ways well done tangle this the first thing I want to do is to talk to you about the antithesis of virtue because it's always struck me that when you're talking about something that could conceivably be regarded as optimistic it's difficult for people to fundamentally believe you you know if I stood on stage and said well the purpose of life is to be happy you you might find out vaguely comforting but there's not a chance in the world that you'd believe it if you have an ounce of sense because if you lived you know that there will be periods of time where happiness is not your state and so there has to be more to life than happiness because there'll be a lot of your life that isn't happy Solzhenitsyn Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the book The Gulag Archipelago that was one of the axes that brought down the thick tree of calm is utopianism said of the idea that human beings are made for happiness he said that's a philosophy that's undermined by the first blow of the work assignor cudgel and what he meant by that was if you find yourself in a particularly terrible situation if you're enslaved for example by malevolent utopians you and they're pushing you into a form of slavery and they're beating you to attain their ends the idea that you're made for happiness is not going to be of much comfort under those circumstances and so Solzhenitsyn's point was you're weakened by your belief that life is for happiness because that philosophy cannot sustain any sustained challenge and you will for sure encounter such a sustained challenge I don't think that modern people can believe in virtue but not easily because virtue sounds religious in a sense and we have real trouble whether we're religious or not with religious preconceptions because our scientific forms of knowledge and our fundamental materialism has really radically undermined our ability to believe in any transcendent being but one thing that modern people can believe in I think without much difficulty at all is evil Solzhenitsyn said for example that the most important event of the 20th century as far as he was concerned was the Nuremberg judgement and you may know you should know that after the World War two a group of National Socialists from Germany who were deemed particularly responsible for the absolute horrors of the final solution the mass factory genocide that accompanied it were put on trial and a standard defense for their actions was well I was ordered to do it and the Nuremberg decision denied human beings regardless of their ethnicity or national background or beliefs the legal right to use that as a defense under certain limited circumstances and that the argument was there are some things that are so self-evidently not good not virtuous that if you engage in them your existentially guilty you're guilty outside the bounds of your culture there's a transnational and trans ethnic morality we don't know what it is but we know what it isn't it isn't pointless torture and genocide at minimum to be virtuous is to live your life in such a way that the probability that you would engage in such actions given the opportunity is minimized now people think well they're already doing that because if they were in Nazi Germany they would have been a rescuer not a perpetrator but that's wrong you could take this audience and put them back in 1939 or thereabouts and 90% of you would 95% of you 99% of you would either be in the perpetrator class or the going along with the perpetrator class and you may sit and believe that you'd be in the 1% maybe you would because how do I know but that isn't how the historical facts sort themselves out and it turns out that it's not that difficult generally to put people in a situation normal people where they'll do something that really doesn't look very good those of you who are familiar with psychology know about the Milgram experiments for example I know about the embargo prison experiments take perfectly normal college students and put them into a situation that they know is a drum attic farce they know isn't real give some of them the power of prison guards and make some of them some others arbitrarily into prisoners and in three days you have to shut the whole experiment down because of the prison guards have turned into Nazis and they're enjoying torturing the prisoners even though they know whatever no means that they're innocent well that says something about the manner in which you people conduct their existence they're very susceptible to malevolent action if you look at Genesis very old book and very influential book there's a strange sequence of events that befalls Adam and Eve right it's in two sentences the snake gives them an apple and that wakes them up well there's a good book by a Southern California primatologist that was just published last year that suggests that the reason that humans have such great vision way better than most animals except for Rob doors birds is because our visual systems were designed to detect predatory say snakes and the way she discovered that was by comparing the populations of predatory snakes around the world to the visual acuity of the primate groups that lived in those areas and what she found was essentially a one-to-one correspondence our visual system which is the ability to see and to be enlightened let's say because enlightenment for example is associated with vision the snake gave that to us because we had to pay attention to predatory things that were after us for tens of millions of years and fruit that's interesting we have color vision because we were fruit eaters our color vision is precisely evolved to detect ripe fruit so that part of the story is right there's a story that involves women too but I'm not going to tell that one today you have to be awaked out smart women that's the story and so that's why they're tangled in there with the serpents and the fruit what happens when Adam and Eve wake up oh it's a it's a series of strange things the first thing that happens is the scales fall from their eyes so they can see all of a sudden they're awake in a way they weren't before and the next thing that happens is they realize they're naked now one of the things that people have nightmares about is being naked on a stage which is often why when you see people on the stage they don't tell you anything they think because they don't only not want to be physically naked they don't want to be metaphysically naked either and they protect themselves from the inquiring eyes of the audience no one likes to be naked on stage why well to be naked is to have your defenses stripped from you when the Soviets wanted to really torture the hell out of you at two o'clock in the morning they'd stave in your door and then they'd strip you and shave you when they got you to prison because once you were exposed in all your suffering catastrophe then you are much easier to torture to be naked to realize you're naked is to realize that you're vulnerable you're vulnerable that's why Adam and Eve immediately cover themselves up right they realize they're naked they cover themselves up it's a story about culture once people woke up and realize their limitations their mortal limitations which is also their knowledge of death the first thing they do is cover themselves up and the second thing that happens is they know the difference between good and evil and that's a strange thing it's not good and bad it's good and evil specifically it's also something that animals don't know and I think I thought about this really for 20 years what does that mean and then earlier this year I think I figured it out I think what it means is you don't know how to torture people until you realize that you're vulnerable as soon as you're self conscious of your own vulnerability then you can take what might only be a predatory act say on the part of a wolf because a wolf will bring down a moose or something like that and eat it and drag that out into three months of artistic torturing and so that means that your recognition of your own vulnerability immediately allows you to determine what's evil well then you might ask yourself well under what conditions would you be likely to manifest that drive well I think that's easy to figure out if you watch yourself you know if you watch yourself without presupposition which is which means to watch yourself honestly or to watch yourself as if you're someone you don't know because you don't know yourself because you're too complicated to know yourself anyway so you might well as well just come right out and know that I mean one of the things that's kind of useful about recognizing your capacity for evil if you can do that without traumatizing yourself is that it's the pathway to recognizing your ability for good you don't get to one without the other because you have no idea what you're like before you know how terrible you can be and not only that you won't take yourself sufficiently serious seriously if you know you're a loaded weapon and an unstable loaded weapon and you're much more likely to pay attention to what you do but that means you're not particularly nice and it means that if you were given the opportunity maybe you would have been the Nazi prison guard now in Genesis the first thing that happens after Adam and Eve wake up is they they they have two sons Cain and Abel and Cain who's Abel's brother he doesn't get along very well with God now I don't really care if you believe in God because I don't know what people mean when they say they believe in God anyways but the story goes that Cain doesn't get along very well with God and the reason for that is Cain keeps doing things and they don't work his everything Cain touches turns to ash whereas his brother Abel God likes him god only knows why and everything goes real well for Abel so Cain Cain is kind of a failure and Abel's a smashing success and not only is he successful at everything he does but he's a good guy too which is really rude because if you're really successful at things you should at least be wretched interpersonally so that people can forgive you so so Cain takes this for you know a decade or two and then he's just had it he's had it with God he thinks how can God make this sort of universe where I'm you know breaking myself in half here and get nowhere and my brother's door is open for him left right and center so goes and complains to God he says look what what's going on here what sort of reality did you conjure up here Abel has it good I'm having a miserable time maybe you should do something about that and you think that's pretty interesting you know that that Cain would think that because you have to ask yourself what sort of presumption does Cain have to assume that the dismal quality of his being is attributable to God because what Cain does it not instant is to make himself the judge of being and I would say that you should be cautious about making yourself the judge of being because there's always the possibility that there's a few things that you don't know so God sort of lets Cain in on the secret he says look the fact that you're suffering miserably away actually isn't my fault it's your fault he says to Cain sin crouches out the door like a predatory cat ready to jump on you but if you wanted to you could overcome it this is not what Cain wants to hear Cain wants to hear that he's an innocent character and he has nothing to do with his own misery and it's all God's fault and God says instead straighten the hell up you know you could do it and even though you know you could do it you won't and so that that's that for Cain like I mean he was upset when he first went into the discussion but after he got this little piece of news that his suffering was to be laid at his own doorstep then he's out of the realm of human and the story says his countenance falls which means he's angry and upset and the first thing he does is run off and kill Abel why what's revenge right Abel is God's favorite and Cain is already judged being and found it wanting and the best way that he can express his desire for revenge is to find someone who's having a pretty good time of it and to arbitrarily eliminate them and it might be of some interest to note that one of Kane's grandchildren is the first person who makes weapons of war so that brilliant little story so long ago associates the moral failings of the resentful individual who is unwilling to take responsibility for the nature of their own being directly with atrocious acts of social conflict and that's another thing to know because if you're going to be virtuous you have to take yourself seriously and if you start to understand that you're networked with other people you're not one little dot among seven billion your network with other people so you know a thousand people and they know a thousand people and so you're two people away from a million people and three people away from a billion people you're in a causal Network and all of your actions matter the associate instance said there's many centers of the universe as there are individual consciousnesses and that's a very interesting way to think and why can't it be that way we don't know anything about conscious consciousness and it certainly seems to be how it feels if you're one of those conscious centers and so maybe it is that what you do matters I think that often people come to the conclusion that life is meaningless because that's a better conclusion to come to them the reverse because if life is meaningless well then who cares what you do but if life is meaningful if what you do matters then everything you do matters and that puts a terrible responsibility on the individual and I think that people are generally unwilling to bear that so life is suffering what does that do to people makes them resentful these are pitfalls of being said being has a structure one of its fundamental structural elements is suffering but suffering produces other characteristics of being resentment is a characteristic of being people feel resentful when they believe that they've been taken advantage of and maybe if you feel resentful it may be you're being taken advantage of it may also be that you should screw your head on straight and look at things properly and it may also be that you should talk to somebody to find out if you're being taken advantage of or if your head just isn't screwed on straight but to talk to them then you have to tell them the truth and in order to tell them the truth you have to have practice being honest because if you haven't practiced being honest then you're not going to have a friend you can talk to and even if you did you won't be able to tell them what the problem is and then they won't be able to help you sort out whether or not you're being taken advantage of or whether you're a little bit insane if you're resentful then maybe you have to tell the person who's taking advantage of you that they should stop doing that and maybe you have to tell them in a way that will make them stop which is no easy thing or maybe you're resentful because you're a nasty little bit of the world and you know you have a chip on your shoulder and no matter what people do with you you're resentful in which case you have some internal restructuring to do and you might ask well why should you do the restructuring and the answer to that is that well resentment along with hopelessness and nihilism and and all sorts of other moral pitfalls puts you on the road to cruelty and atrocity misery loves company and if you feel that things are fundamentally unjust and that the slings and arrows of being are aimed specifically at you why should you treat anyone else with compassion or justice because things are fundamentally unfair and even more deeply why shouldn't you conclude that things should be eradicated because fundamentally they're unfair now I think that's what Hitler concluded I also think that's what Stalin concluded the evidence suggests that Stellan was gearing up for the third world war I mean he had hydrogen bombs he'd already killed 30 million people I mean he had his practice trials and you know there's an old psychoanalytic idea and the idea is if you can't understand the motivations for the behavior look at the outcome and infer the motivations and so Hitler killed 100 million people if you include the whole second world war and god only knows how many Stellan killed and don't killed more than Stella why well their cover story was utopia and I guess people believe that well why did look very utopian when all those millions of people were dying I think all those people who participated in those processes used their rational utopianism as a cover story for their willingness to participate in the atrocity because what they wanted to do was participate in the atrocity they didn't give a damn about utopia then you ask yourself well you know how much do you try to force the world to behave according to your terms you know they're Catholics I've always had trouble with rationality and modern people especially the sort of hyper atheists that you hear from now and then we don't like that because they believe that rationality is the highest virtue and that's wrong I mean it's a terrible thing to say in a university except maybe the university isn't here to teach you to be rational maybe it's here to teach you to be virtuous and those aren't the same thing the rational person says well I understand and having understand stood I impose an order and then I work to make that imposed order a reality that's what every ideologue does it was whatever utopian does it's convincing and I think the reason that people do that is because they well it's complicated partly they want an explanation for their being but more importantly than that they want a mask that covers up their tendency to atrocity with the appearance of virtue and most utopian thinking is of that sort even though the masks can be very well argued and you ask me why I believe that and the reason I believe that is because we had a hundred years of it and that's how it turned out one of the things that was terrible about living in the Soviet Union was that you couldn't suffer because things were perfect so if you were suffering and you even admitted it then you were instantly an enemy of the state so if you're an ideologue your own suffering makes you a heretic right you undermine the your belief in your own bloody system by suffering well and that's fine if your belief has stopped you from suffering well more power to you but if you're still suffering a bit or a lot or a tremendous amount then you can ask yourself maybe there's something I don't know here's an existential exercise so when this is not rational you say let's assume that virtue is worth pursuing and I say it's worth pursuing because a virtuous path is the only path that justifies being to itself that's the definition of virtue a virtuous path path justifies being to itself being is suffering so you need a justification for your suffering so then you might ask yourself are there times in my life when I feel that my suffering is justified and this is a good question and you could ask yourself the reverse question to which is are other times in my life when my my suffering is clearly not justified and I could say well watch yourself for three weeks just watch like like you don't know anything and see when you're somewhere that justifies itself now I might say you might say well how do I know and I'd say okay well here here's some hints you're not self conscious you know it's not good to be self conscious right it loads on neuroticism it's a negative emotion I mean we think of it as a higher order cognitive function but people find it unpleasant you tend to be self-conscious when you're false or ashamed if you're deeply engaged in something your self-consciousness disappears so engagement something meaningful seems to make self-consciousness damage it also makes time vanish right because if you're doing something that is intrinsically meaningful then the sense of passing time disappears and so that temporal limitation that plagues you vanishes and I could say maybe you're having a miserable time of it you only spend 2% of your waking hours in that condition and maybe you don't even know when that is but you could watch you could see and you could say hey look Wow I spent 10 minutes there I hardly even noticed and I felt that the nature of my being justified itself well maybe you wouldn't say that to yourself but but you could you could say that was worth it and then I could say well practice that above all else forget about everything else and then there's an alternative exercise pay attention and figure out when absolutely your being does not justify itself that's even easier you know because that will happen whenever you do something that you immediately regret or ashamed of or that even more precisely makes you feel disintegrated and devalued Nietzsche said people betray themselves for the sake of their good name all the time you can feel this it seems to center in your solar plexus when you say something or do something that is not virtuous then you'll disintegrate and then you're weak and you can feel that and then you'll cover it up with a bunch of rattling arguments trying to convince yourself and other people that what you were doing was actually okay but you know and it's your rational arrogance and authoritarianism that forces you not to drop your stupid presuppositions and just pay attention to what your being is revealing to you we don't think that way we don't think being reveals things it reveals things all the time we just don't pay any attention why I think we don't want the responsibility I really believe I thought about this for a long time I really believe that that's the case here's our quote from the daodejing I have a great translation of this book it was written by louts outsi years and years ago so one of the world's classics of literature the person who wrote this wasn't a philosopher the person who wrote this was a master of being that's a different thing because the philosopher thinks but a master being doesn't think because thinking is a tool and being is something that supersedes any tool he said it is by sheathing intellects bright light that the sage remains at one with his own self ceasing to be aware of it by placing it behind detached he is unified with his external world by being selfless he is fulfilled thus his self hood is assured I show my students in my maps of any class Pinocchio Pinocchio is very complicated story for the Disney version in the previous version it's but a deep mythological base one of the things that happens in Pinocchio a lot of strange things happen that people just swallow right there's a puppet it turns into human being there's talking cats there's blue fairies there's Star there's whales that eat people and everyone swallows that with a no problem right you'll go to see Pinocchio you don't even notice that a puppet has just gone into a whale and you know what the hell is going on and the reason you don't notice that is because it means something and you don't know what it means but you know that it means something and you're willing to ride on it weirdly enough because it compromises the irrational principles completely it does it does these are religious experiences that people have in movie theaters they suspend disbelief they go along with it it's not rational but they believe it and if someone says you know they'll be you and say that's not real you say to them maybe you could shut up so I could watch movie alright you don't want their rationality in turf because it's it's the wrong time for it's the wrong place for it Geppetto wishes that his pet puppet could become real is a very unlikely wish which is something he says very unlikely it's unlikely to happen I think actually Jiminy Cricket says that to have that happen Geppetto has to wish on a star it's a strange idea the star is something that's partakes of the divine you could say that if you look at the night sky where you can really see it you know that right you look at the night sky and infinity opens itself up before you and there's nothing to say except there's nothing to say and to wish on the star is to put your eyes above the horizon and to pick a transcendent point and to wish for something to want for something that's beyond the concreted and immediate and to become virtuous and to not be a puppet is to aim at something transcendent I could say well at least it's the absence of evil that's something well maybe it's even more than that maybe it's virtue in and of itself there's a line in the Sermon on the Mount a very strange sermon and the line is take therefore no thought for the morrow for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof it's a very strange piece of advice it sounds completely impractical right mean limit the focus of your consciousness to the day and leave the worries alone well it means something meditative I think when I do therapy with people I try to do this I don't think because I don't know if I do sometimes but but I shouldn't I don't necessarily know what their problem is or what they should do about it but I can listen and if I listen and maybe I learned this in part from Carl Rogers writings if I listened then thoughts will occur to me I'm not thinking them it's different I'm letting the thoughts come up and I dare tell my clients try to tell me the truth and I'll try to listen without being too much of a son-of-a-bitch and maybe you know maybe we can work something out and then they'll say something to me and maybe I'll think well that thing you said now and the thing you said half an hour ago don't seem to be they don't seem to be coherent so maybe you could straighten that out or you know it seems more like I'm tracking what they're saying and when I'm listening to them I'm in the same place they are we know the neural mechanisms for that you are in the same place with someone when you really listen to them and then thoughts come up and I tell them what they are it's it's impersonal it's impersonal because I'm not trying to get them to do anything particularly I'm just aiming maybe at helping them figure out what's going on and having a little bit less suffering and it's not the imposition of an ideological structure and the idea behind this particular piece of advice is you can try this too you wake up in the morning and you think okay this could be a good day whatever that means you don't know right what a good day is but maybe you've had a couple and they're not so bad and so maybe you think you could have another one but you don't know and you think okay you ask yourself and this is meditative what is it that I need to do today so that this would be a good day and your brain will tell you it'll say you know that build it's hiding under five pieces of paper on your desk you should haul that sucker out and pay it or there's something you're avoiding that makes you anxious that your brain will pick on right away and say you have to do these whatever number of commitments today and if you do them then you fulfilled your obligations and the idea behind this piece of advice is that if you fulfill your obligations every day then you don't have to worry about the future and that's a very interesting idea and it's predicated on the notion that there's a wisdom inside people that's deeper than mere rationality and I believe that to be the case because we're far older than mere rationality from an evolutionary perspective from any perspective you want we're deeper than rationality and we know psychologists have learned in the last 20 years that rationality is bounded ridiculously in all sorts of different ways it's not the master it's a servant and it's an unruly servant even though it can be a very powerful one the totality of you the wisdom that's embodied in the totality of you is far outstrips rationality and if you listen to yourself and do the difficult things that yourself tells you to do the idea is you don't have to compute the utopian future because following what it is that you tell yourself to do every moment is the best path to whatever the best outcome is that's a strange way of thinking because if you're a utopian and a rationalist you already know what the right outcome is then you have to run around pointing guns at people to make bloody sure that they do the right thing so that the outcome you've computed occurs and that doesn't seem to work very well and so you see this idea in Taoism - the idea is to give up the end because you don't know what it is and you don't it's an admission of ignorance where are you headed you don't know but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be headed somewhere follow your moral intuitions stop doing the things that make you feel weak I'm not talking about following a moral code although that can come into it if you really don't know what the hell you're doing at all then following a moral code is a good idea because at least get the ball rolling it's a form of apprenticeship so you know not doing the obviously bad things is a form of discipline it isn't the the notion that I'm talking about now this is a different thing this is pay attention to what's meaningful because you can see what that is you may find you're terrified of it because everybody's got this little secret wish I really love doing I don't know what it is it's different things for different people but they're afraid to do it to really do it because as soon as you do what you really love then you expose your nakedness right you say this is what I'm really like instead you just shove that under the bed you do something you don't care about at all and then if people judge you doesn't matter but the problem with that is you there's no life there there's no force there's no you and without that the suffering will do you in and then you'll become a bad person and that's not a good thing so you have to see what it is that you find meaningful whatever that is and then you have to fight for it you have to fight against yourself you have to fight against other people because what do they know about it you have to fight against nature maybe even to stand up for what it is that sustains you and that takes courage it also takes honesty partly because if you're not honest you can't trust your own intuition so this is an important thing you think about this and this is why virtue is a necessity if you lie to yourself or other people then you you corrupt the structure that you use to interact with being you corrupt it and if you corrupt it then if you listen to it it will guide you the wrong way or maybe it'll be so corrupted you can't listen to it at all then you have to listen to somebody else and that might not be a good thing especially if you're already corrupted because then you'll listen to the person who tells you to do what you really want to do but won't admit it to yourself and that explains how Hitler found all his followers they'd abandoned their own mode of being it made them bitter and resentful and empty and Hollow and weak and cruel and then they trained their leader to tell them what they wanted to hear if you're honest which is painful you'll see that a lot of things you say aren't real you'll see a lot of things that you do make you weak you'll see that a lot of people you associate with are probably not good for you and then you have a lot of difficult choices to make you can start with the obvious lying that will clear things up for you a lot and you can start communicating with people one of the things I teach my clients is if you're resentful say something about it say something about it you tell the person look what you ask me to do is making me resentful now if they're your wife or husband or someone you love you should listen to them because they might say well grow up take your damn responsibility and leave me alone and maybe and maybe they're right or maybe they're a bit of a bully and you have to say quit pushing me around and then maybe you have to have an argument with them an honest argument where you say look this is what's happening to me and they say look this is what's happening to me and you battle it out until you reach some sort of settle bit and then you don't have to be resentful anymore then you won't be mean and cruel and vicious and you have to be honest in order to do that here's a here's a way of thinking about error you don't exactly know what you're doing so how do you get to the point where you know what you're doing I think follow your internal intuitions be honest about it and what will happen is a star will appear and guide you the star is whatever makes your life meaningful and maybe you'll take some tentative steps in that direction and you'll get a little ways and you'll think no that's wrong and then the thing that makes your life meaningful will appear over there and then you take a few tentative steps in that direction and but as you step and walk towards these things you change and as you change you get wiser and what happens is if you keep following these things that make your life meaningful then you correct yourself across time you see the thing there and that's wrong and you see it there and that's wrong and you see it there and that's wrong but you keep chasing it as you chase it you move forward and as you move forward and you do things and you learn from your mistakes because you're honest and you're watching you get wiser and wiser and the consequence of all those mistakes is you'll self correct the mistakes in twenty years down the road maybe you won't be making so many mistakes they say it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert at something so you would need 10,000 hours of practice following what it is that you need to follow I'm going to close with two things I've come to the conclusion as a consequence of studying the things I've been telling you about that belief has a religious substructure if you go all the way down into someone's belief structure right to the bottom what you find are religious presuppositions the person might not agree but I don't think that matters I think generally people don't know here's an old religious presuppositions older than Christianity suppose Christianity is the most powerful proponent of this viewpoint there's a heaven and there's a hell and you should live your life so that you end up in one of them what Samba Christianity is that that's an afterlife thing I don't think it is an afterlife thing I think it's a now thing I see people who are in hell all the time and you can see them if you walk down Bloor Street if I'm not kidding it's it's no joke if you walk by someone in Hell you can't look at them you won't look at them you'll you'll give them a wide berth and if you look at them and you really look at them they'll either become aggressive or ashamed because they do not want you to see where they are because they don't want to see where they are and by the same token heaven is a real place - and now and then you're in it but you don't notice because you don't believe in it there is an old gospel Gnostic gospel that was dug up in 1957 a Gospel of Thomas and in the Gospel of Thomas Christ says the kingdom of heaven is spread out on the earth but men do not see it and I don't think that's a metaphor or maybe it is a metaphor it's a deep metaphor it means that life human life is very expensive and we live in the middle it's kind of a mediocre middle often at one extreme there's hell and the other extreme is heaven and we bounce back and forth between them without really noticing and I could say well here here's something to consider if the things you're doing are landing you in hell stop unless you want to be there and you know if you think you all you have to do is think about your life over the last year you you can be certain that you can call the mind times when you would have rather that did not happen and so the lesson from that is clear don't set up those conditions anymore and by the same token if you watch yourself you can tell when you're where you want to be and I could say well if you're where you want to be and that's really the right place then all you should ever do is practice to be there the kingdom of heaven is spread out on the earth but men do not see it so this is what I would say about virtue virtue first is the attempt to see that heaven and it's a questioning thing in it I'm not saying it's the same for everyone I don't believe that at all because people are individuals just to see it and the second thing is to attempt to live in it and I truly believe I truly believe that there is nothing that you can do that's better for being not only for yourself but for everyone that you interact with none of you know your potential people are amazing creatures you know that people can be a busily awful but they can be as remarkably good as they are abysmal e awful I think it's rare but it's not beyond the realm of possibility what's a human possibility well no one knows maybe it's it's near infinite we know nothing about our own being or about our relationship with the totality of things we may occupy a more important place than we all think and the consequences of our actions our virtues or our lack thereof echo may echo far beyond what we want to believe so I would say try to find out what's good for you just watch don't listen to anybody else or maybe you should maybe they'll give you some hints you know but you got to sort it out for yourself and when you find out what's good for you and what isn't do the things that are good for you until you like being alive and - until you're thrilled to be alive let's see what happens and I would also suggest there's nothing you could possibly do that will be more profound and useful than that you

Channel: TVO Docs

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Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, education, public, television, Elwy, Yost, Steve, Paikin, big, back, yard, ideas, Canada, psychology, values, morality, morals, religion, spirituality, virtue, Big Ideas, society, individual, meaning, beliefs, word bomb, singular they, pronoun, podcast, they

Id: gwUJHNPMUyU

Length: 51min 5sec (3065 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 04 2011