Jordan Peterson on Universal Basic Income.. 'Money ISN'T the Problem!'

this one this one is good the first one here what's your take on universal income is it a fast track to new communism capitalism killer or a possible way out of starvation for Humanity thank you well I don't think it addresses the fundamental problem and I think it's a I think it's a mirror of the rights responsibility problem you know you might say well everyone has a right to the basics of life first of all that's a debatable proposition because the question is who's going to provide those necessities and the answer shouldn't be someone else under compulsion so because each rate comes at the expense of someone else's responsibility and so you don't want to multiply rights beyond minimum necessity because you also multiply diverse responsibilities beyond tolerance but more importantly than that I would say is that let's make it more concrete so let's imagine that as the technological revolution progresses more and more people will be in danger of being replaced by intelligent machines now we don't know if that's true because it hasn't happened yet right and everyone has been predicting that that was going to happen since like 1960 and it hasn't happened and so there may be an infinite amount of work and we're never going to run out of work I suspect that's probably the case but let's assume that people do get dispossessed as technologies transform and then we have the problem of the development of people for who have no viable means of making a living and the question might be well what's the fundamental problem there and one answer is well they don't have any money but I actually don't think that that is the fundamental problem I've had many people in my clinical practice who were unemployed and had money now they didn't have a lot of money but they had enough money and enough money to keep privation at bay let's say and had enough money to well that was the rub enough money to get themselves into plenty of trouble and so one of my clients for example was a I liked him quite a lot and he had he was he had worked in a hospital and he'd been hurt and and then he got onto painkillers because he'd been hurt and then he got addicted to painkillers and then he got addicted to cocaine and his life took a bad nosedive and he is actually pretty good unless he had money but as soon as he had a check it was he was gone he was in a ditch he was in a bar he spent all his money and he was facedown in the ditch and that's where he woke up the next day and and the reason I'm telling you that story is because it wasn't that he didn't have money that wasn't the problem really the problem was that he didn't have a purpose he didn't have a place anymore he got thrown out of the structure that would have enabled him to find productive meaning you know and you might have said well he should have been able to conjure that up on his own and perhaps that's the case although he wasn't the world's most sophisticated person you know when people very substantially in their sophistication and and he didn't have a good family he didn't have a support network around him he was kind of a lost character in many many ways and so it was easy for him to fall out of the world which is what he did and providing him with money was not going to fix that what is what is going to fix that well that's a good question I mean we we have a program you people some of you people might be interested in it it's called it's part of a suite of online writing programs called the self authoring suite it's out self authoring com and one of the programs is called future authoring and we've experimented with this program in an attempt to address this problem okay so I to you tonight the idea that we live out a story and we need a purpose to live out that story properly and what that implies is that you need a purpose you need a point you need a name you need a precise aim you need a name that's of sufficient nobility I can't think of any other word sufficient nobility to justify your miserable existence even to yourself and you need to develop that aim and so we built this program I started working on it about 15 years ago when I was giving my students exercises to do University and one of the exercises I had them do was that they had to pick a small problem maybe in their family or with their room and fix it not try to fix it you know but actually pick a problem that was small that they could fix clean up the cigarette butts in the yard outside the residence clean the room we had one kid whose mother had died and the family got kind of fragmented and he decided that he was going to take over the maternal duties in the household and kids were supposed to write about what happened when they tried to put this into practice because doing things like that is way more difficult than anybody ever realizes and so he tried to become mother and the family needed a mother and him he encountered all sorts of terrible resistance which is completely unsurprising I mean first of all people in his family were annoyed that he would dare to try to take their dead mother's place you know even though he was trying to do it for the best of reasons and we played with that for a couple of years and that was very interesting and then I realized that I was teaching students all these stories about purpose but nobody had ever had them write a story about their purpose essentially so I thought wasn't that interesting here these these kids they've been in university they've been in school for 15 years and no one has ever sat them down and said well what sort of character do you want to develop who should you be and why don't you write that out and justify it you know six pages something like that with the same amount of care and attention that you might spend or even more on an essay about the war of 1812 or something like that I think well well more I thought about that the more flabbergasted I would say I became because I thought well what the hell what how is it possible that we could set up a system and run people through it for 15 years and never have them forced so to speak to figure out who they wanted to be in to justify it in an articulate Manor and so I built this program with my colleagues to help people do that and I used in my classes first and so I thought okay well here's the game and this is like rule to treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping and that doesn't mean be good to yourself it doesn't mean let me be nice to yourself it doesn't mean give yourself an easy life that isn't actually what you do to people if you care for them you actually present them with something like an optimal challenge that's what you do with kids if you love them as you present them with an optimal challenge so they can develop and grow so that's what you should do for yourself if you're taking care of yourself so I thought okay well here's the game first of all assume that you're worth taking a care that you're worth taking care of and that it's your responsibility to do so even if you don't like yourself very much and lots of people don't and they have their reasons because everybody is very aware of their own flaws right unless your narcissistic you're more aware of your own flaws than of anyone else's flaws and maybe you're not very happy with yourself and you don't think that you deserve to have an okay life and so you punish yourself and you set yourself up for failure and all and all of that and that happens all the time or you just don't aim or you don't have any goals or you know you're guilty and resentful and feel that you should be punished so you have to abandon all that treat yourself like you're someone you're responsible for helping responsible for helping imagine yourself three to five years into the future you get to have what you need if you're taking care of yourself you can have it but you have to figure out what it is because you are not going to get it unless you aim at it and that's rule ten is be precise in your speech and the reason I wrote that rule is is because you can be bloody sure that you're not going to hit a target unless you aim at it and the more precise you make the target the higher the probability that you'll aim at it that you'll hit it when you aim at it so what do you want you think well I don't want to even think about what I want because as soon as I figure out what I want then I've made clear my conditions for failure and it's the last thing I'm gonna do and so people enveloped themselves in vagueness so they don't have to confront their own failure but then they fail and just don't notice except for maybe you know two decades later when it's too bloody late and they're all catastrophic ly hurt because they wasted their life it's a very bad plan it's better just to figure out what you want and to tell yourself and then to tell your partner and to tell the people around you and maybe you can get it or maybe at least while you're struggling towards it you'll come up with a better plan which is more likely the case what do you want from your family if you could have what you what was good for you what do you want from your intimate relationship how are you gonna educate yourself because you don't know enough what do you want for a career or a job because not everyone has a career how are you gonna spend your time outside of work in a productive and meaningful manner how are you going to resist the temptations of drugs and alcohol and and and sexual misconduct let's say cuz those are the big three how are you gonna maintain yourself physically and mentally well those are seven good questions you can have what you want what do you want it's an operational realization of the New Testament principle ask and you will receive knock and the door will open and you think well no there's no possibility that that's the case it's like actually it is the case if you don't specify what you want you won't get it and if you specify what you want and you want it which means you're willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get it then the probability that you'll get it expands immensely and miraculously in some sense now of course it assumes that what you want is within the bounds of appropriate reason let's say but you could also dream big and there's always the possibility that'll work out too so people ask answer those questions then they write for 15 minutes okay your life is the way you want it to be in four years what does it look like write as much as you can don't worry about being too accurate don't worry about grammar or spelling don't worry about getting it right cuz you're not gonna get it right anyways just sketch the damn thing out if you have what you wanted what would it be and then we have them do the opposite which is all right take stock of yourself for a minute it's all your weaknesses and inadequacies and bitterness --is and resentments and sinful tendencies let's say now imagine that you let all of that go and occupy you just wear which little corner of hell would you occupy in three to five years why don't you write about that and everyone knows where they'd go if they let themselves and so then you have something to avoid and you have something to strive for and that makes you optimally motivated because maybe you're afraid you know you find out you don't like your job and you're afraid to change your job and then you think oh well if I don't change my job then I'm heading for this little corner of Hell that I outlined think well that's not a very good plan it's very threatening and stressful to change my job but it beats the hell out of ending up there and so then you have your anxieties behind you pushing you forward instead of in front of you stopping you cold and then we ask people to write a plan to implement their positive vision to justify it to come up with a strategy for for making it into a real world realization and we tested that on thousands of university students now and the upshot was that it decreased the probability that they would drop out of university by 30% in fact in Canada we we did it for 90 minutes before kids went to college in the fall they came to their summer orientation neither wrote for 90 minutes about something that required writing but that wasn't so relevant or they wrote out of plan and it dropped the dropout rate among young men 50% in the first semester and it had the biggest effect on young men who didn't do that well in high school and who weren't oriented towards a professional career the consequence of that was that the university used it for one year and then stopped doing it so which was not surprising in the least but the reason that I'm laying out this long story for you is because that's what people need they need they need a differentiated and delineated purpose it's way more important than the money it isn't money that you need I know you need money for God's sake I'm not ignorant everybody needs money that's not the point here it's the provision of money without purpose is not helpful and what people need is a purpose and they need that to develop that for them selves obviously because it's something you have to participate in but it's something that society has to foster and the reason they need that purpose is because that's what gives their life meaning think well think about this do you really think that you would be satisfied if you had money without responsibilities so what okay got no responsibility because that's what everyone wants it's like I had a client he wanted to retire when he was kind of young and he and I said well what's your retirement dream he said well I envisioned myself on a beach in a tropical island with a margarita in my hand and I thought what the hell is that it's like okay let's play that out let's be adult about this okay so you go down to your this like redheaded white guy you go down to the Caribbean and you sit on a beach and and you're sitting on the beach and you have like six margaritas and you're there for like three hours what happens the next day okay you're sunburned to a crisp right so you can't even go out of your hotel room and you're hungover okay and let's say now you hide in your hotel room for three or four days and you recover and then you repeat that every day for three months it's like you go outside and all the locals get away from you cuz you're the new drunk lecher who's come down from the north and that's your vision for retirement it's like okay so you have all the money you want no responsibility you don't have to take care of yourself you don't have a partner so you don't have to take care of them you don't have any kids you don't have to take care of them you don't have a job it's like what are you gonna do what are you gonna do exactly sit in the Sun and drink margaritas it's like there's no no that's not a good vision you don't want no responsibilities it's wrong people find the meaning in their life by adopting responsibilities and so provision of money you know they say man does not live by bread alone and there's wisdom in that it's like you don't want no responsibilities you might dream about that if you're crushed by your job but then you have the wrong job or you have the wrong attitude or you have the wrong job and the wrong attitude I don't know what it is you want lots of responsibility and society needs to fall that and we need to help people find their purpose and their place and that's that's more to the point than Universal income it's the wrong solution [Applause]

Channel: Enlightainment

Views: 357,398

Rating: 4.7517157 out of 5

Keywords: jordan peterson, universal basic income, ubi, socialism, meaning, purpose, economics, artificial intelligence, responsibility, self authoring program, philosophy, interview

Id: DR2rYCxT0lg

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 11 2018