Jordan Peterson Q&A at Cambridge's Caius College

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] dr peterson jordan thank you so much for that a lot of the way in which the debate has been conducted here in cambridge on free speech has been rather dry in fact it's been heated but quite dry quite arid we've been thinking a lot in philosophical terms and we're talking a lot about milton and and and mill but what you've done for us tonight is show us the existential power of being able to speak freely uh that if we care about well-being we care about psychological flourishing uh and we care about what aristotle called eudaimonia happiness well-being flourishing then we should prize truth and the free pursuit of truth above uh all else now the time has come for discussion for q a this is what we like to do here in fact this is this is what it's all about uh so if anyone would like to kick off um i'm vincent here is going to traffic the microphone around if i could just ask you to speak into the microphone just for recording purposes and for amplification purposes uh vincent you can't miss him he's in ah [Applause] a bone white suit in the middle of uh cambridge november uh so just make sure that your uh make sure that you put your hand up uh clearly so that he can uh spot you and then since vincent will have the mic uh i'll let dr peterson pick the questions as they are emily hello dr peterson thank you so much for coming to talk to us so i um i have a question it's sort of personal so i've recently become convinced that i'm called to work either in politics or at least in the public intellectual space and i want to do that because i really love my country and i want to try to help preserve the values that have have you know been at the foundation of our country but i'm i'm worried that i'm going to be seduced by the loss for power and i was wondering if you had any advice for how to fight the lust for power well that's kind of a germain question altogether isn't it because part of the cultural battle that we all find ourselves enveloped in is partially due to the claim that there's virtually nothing other than the lust for power and you know i would say fair enough in some limited sense which and that's that bears directly on your question because you see that as a temptation that might be powerful enough to bend and distort you as you attempt to make your way through let's say the halls of power well [Music] i heard recently from a reliable source that putin's conversion to orthodox christianity might be genuine and then you might think well if you're atheistic well that's not necessarily a good thing or maybe you think it's a bad thing or maybe you think it's an irrelevant issue and you may also think it's a lie but i would say that i would be more inclined to trust someone who thinks there's something higher than himself and then you might say well what is it that's higher than ourselves and that's worth thinking about and we all need to think about this regardless of the particulars of our religious belief and i would say again from a clinical perspective service to others is really something people who are depressed tend to use the pronouns i and me much more frequently than people who aren't depressed and i'm not saying that people get depressed because they're selfish i'm not saying that at all i'm saying that one of the way out one of the roots out of depression appears to be an increase in service to other people and i think the reason for that is because we aren't power mad demons at the core even though we may be tempted by such things and that we find the genuine meaning that offsets genuine suffering in the genuine service to others and i think it's a big mistake to be cynical especially prematurely about such things as political activity because they're necessary despite let's say their adversarial and uh and uh party-centered nature partisan nature you have to be clear about what you serve and why and that has to be held higher always than mere victory mere operationalized victory or instrumental victory it's a very very difficult thing to to negotiate particularly because in the political realm in some sense you have to defeat your enemy right because you have to win the election and the other people have to lose it's a binary choice but so often i see in partisan discussion the proclivity to assume that all the ill will and malevolence resides on the other side of the chamber and that's a big mistake and you could think about that more deeply too is that we all have to put we all need a place to place the existence of malevolence right because malevolence clearly exists and we're all suffer from the weight of malevolent history right because even the grounds we walk on here which this is a remarkable and wonderful place i mean english soil is soaked with blood just like the soil of every place in the world that's part of the human heritage and all of us bear the marks of that conflict in some sense in our souls partly because of the possibility for us to engage in that but also partly because part of the reason we're here in all this privilege is because of all that catastrophe well the best way to localize that malevolence is inside you right and to remember that the enemy that you're fighting with the greatest enemy that you ever fight with is in your own heart and that'll also stop you from confusing that true source of malevolence let's say with your mere political enemies and that isn't to say that you won't encounter malevolent behavior although most of it in the political sphere as it is everywhere most of it is more ignorance than malevolence although willful blindness certainly plays a large role and so you need to know what it is that you're serving and i would say one of the ways to do that practically or a couple of ways to do that practically is you need a good team around you the people you really trust and who can watch you and who do it with a certain degree of impartiality and who are disagreeable enough to talk to you when you do something wrong so you need trusted advisors and then the other thing i would say is you really need to listen to your constituents because they will tell you what the problems are if you listen to them and if you really listen to them well then you'll have your feet on the ground which is where they should be and you'll know what the problems are and you will win elections because what people really want from their leaders is to be listened to and then for those leaders to articulate what they've heard in the halls of let's say influence and power and so if you know those things if you know you need to listen you need to get in touch with the people you're representing as regularly as you possibly can and mostly to listen um i knew a man in canada who started a political party which is a very difficult thing to do and not only did he start it but he wrote it to sufficient success though that he became the leader of the opposition in canada within about 10 years and i asked him how he did that because it's like well really how did you do that that's actually really hard and he said he would go out from constituency to constituency and make his stump speeches but what he really liked was the q and a's because people would tell him what their problems were then he knew what the problems were and out of the dialogue would also emerge the answers that the audience found compelling and so not only would they tell them what the problems were but they would tell them the answers they would like to have it have have what instituted to solve those problems it's the same thing that comedians do when they when they finesse finesse their acts in front of live audiences before they practice them in front of a large audience they lit they tell jokes and the audience either laughs or they don't if they laugh then you keep that joke and if they don't you throw it out and soon you're just as funny as the audience can possibly manage and it's the same thing you can also do that in a dark manner by the way which is what hitler did so he could utter terrible things and wait for a response and collect those and so then you become the embodiment of the shadow of your people so i would recommend that you probably don't do that thank you very much you're welcome thank you dr peterson um my question is what does this uh listening posture look like over time um and with your knowledge of personal psychology i think we can all say we've somewhere encountered one of those relationships where one person does all the work and the other person can't engage in this even if they have been listened to over and over and over again but at our society level um if that does happen now let's try it i totally agree with you let's let's listen um if we wind up in this sometimes it's always listening and it never turns into listening back um right what what what's that like over time you do test for reciprocity so children for example when children are investigating play potential play partners on the playground they'll they'll come up to a child let's assume a child of roughly the same age because that would be the most common situation maybe we're talking about kids who are four or five years old and they'll throw out a play gesture that's rather simple so maybe that a two-year-old could manage and then if the person manages a proper response then they throw out a little more sophisticated gesture and if the person responds appropriately then they ratchet up to just above their developmental level and then they play like that at that level and that'll make them friends and so partly what they're testing for there continually is whether there's something approximating reciprocal altruism right it's it's tit-for-tat in the positive sense and i would say that well we know there's actually a literature on this which is quite interesting this is also something very practical to know and i'll get to another practicality here so there have been psychologists who've done empirical investigations into what predicts the longevity of a relationship and so here's one experiment that was conducted multiple times and i believe this is very reliable data so imagine you have the two partners in a marriage each rate the number of encounters they have with their other partner a day it's kind of an arbitrary and subjective measure but it doesn't matter you might say well i talked to my wife eight times today we had eight different interactions and then you'd say well did you rate those for whether they're positive or negative then you can calculate a ratio of positive to negative and then you can use the ratio to predict the longevity of the relationship and the data show that if the relationship interactions fall below five positive to one negative then the relationship deteriorates and is generally doomed and so and so five to one that's preponderance of positive interactions but we're wired so that negative interactions hurt us more than positive interactions help us if they are of the same magnitude so for example people will work harder to avoid a loss of five dollars than they will to attain a gain of five dollars and you might say well why is that and the answer is you can be absolutely dead but there's only so happy you can be and so it's better to err on the side of conservatism in the domain of negative emotion and so but interestingly enough um if the interactions rise so that they exceed 11 positive to one negative the relationship also deteriorates and so what that suggests is that there's some it's kind of like smiles with teeth right you want a fair bit of positive emotion and reflection from your partner but you don't want them to be a naive dependent pushover who's afraid to stand up for themselves and so you want to you know because you're a nasty horrible human being and now and then you poke your partner just to see if there's anything there because that's what you're like and if you find out there isn't you'll run roughshod over them and you think you won't but you will especially if they're very good at implicitly encouraging that which dependent people sometimes are so so you do assess for reciprocity and the basic rule is you want approximately equal reciprocity in relationships that you want to maintain now maybe you know you have enough additional resource to be the giver more often than receiver in some relationships but i don't even think that really works that well with children you know i mean you obviously have to take care of them but it's not like they don't deliver the goods to you if you have a good relationship with them and and you want to you want to some degree to enforce that reciprocity now you might say well what happens in relationships where that's impossible and well i give you a practical piece of a suggestion on that front and this is another thing you can do in your own household this is so useful man if you get good at doing this your life will get so much better you can't believe it is watch the people around you and whenever they do anything that you would like to see repeated on a regular basis tell them exactly what they did in detail with you know be positive about it obviously and and just indicate that you noticed and because i saw this when i was grading student essays you know and so i taught this seminar for a long time and i was trying to teach kids how to write they were in their fourth year of university in the honors psych program you'd think they'd bloody well already know how to write but they didn't and so i'd have them write a four page essay on a given topic and then they had to rewrite that to a six page essay and then they had to rewrite that to an age eight page essay and the first essay i graded i it was only five percent of their grade and i told them i'm going to cut you into ribbons but it doesn't matter because it's you know five percent of your grade and so they could tolerate that and generally by the third essay they had written the best thing they'd ever written in their life and they learned so fast it was unbelievable but one of the things i noticed was that they did a little testing with the first essay they'd hand in something it was just like god formulaic boring they weren't in it at all you know there was nothing of the person in there there was no thought there was just the kind of cycle babble that they learned especially if they were in faculties of education and and it was dry and dull and and everything about it was wrong and so those are hard to grade right what's wrong with my essay well the words aren't right the phrases they're not so good they're not organized well into sentences the sentences aren't sequenced well in the paragraphs the peregrines paragraphs don't make a coherent argument and the entire thing is empty but other than that no problem it was often easier just to rewrite those essays than to grade them no so in any case though one of the things i did learn was that even in an essay like that there is usually like one sentence or two sentences buried on like page three that was an actual thought and reasonably clearly stated and somewhat gripping you know it was like the person popped out from all the background rubbish and said well what about this and if you saw that and checked it and said hey you hit the mark right there the next essay would be like two-thirds that and that was really fun to see and then maybe by the third essay maybe it was all like that and then they were really thrilled it's like wow i wrote this you know and sort of the culmination well it was a fourth year seminar it was the culmination of their their career as a psychology undergraduate so that was great fun but you can do that in your own household if if if if the envious part of you isn't jealous of the revelation of the goodness of the person and so here's the opposite tact if you want to do this so imagine that you're a man who's managed to attract a mate and he believes he's punched above his weight so this woman is more attractive let's say more vivacious more desirable than he deserves so that's going to grate on his soul a fair bit right partly because her shining casts a dim light on his lack of utility let's say and so you can imagine someone like that being prone to jealousy for obvious reasons and so the best tact to manage in a situation like that if you're that man is to wait till your wife dresses herself up in a particularly attractive manner and then either fail to notice by occupying yourself with something trivial while she's attempting to gain your attention or by criticizing her directly for what she's just managed to do and if you do that 50 times let's say you can be sure that she'll never reveal her attractiveness to anyone else for the rest of her life including you and you'll get exactly what you deserved so that's the opposite of watching people carefully now i learned this in part from skinner b.f skinner the famous animal behaviorist because he was very he used all sorts of reinforcement contingencies to shape animal behavior and skinner was unbelievably good at this he trained pigeons in world war ii to guide missiles by pecking at photographs so they could map the photographs onto the missile trajectory viewing the territory underneath and peck accurately enough to guide the missile to its destination that was discontinued as the technology for guided missiles developed but skinner could do that and you know we think pigeons well they're not that bright it's like they're smarter than you think pigeons that's why they can live in cities that's not easy for a bird to pull off you know it's not their natural habitat and so but skinner although he would use punishment technically speaking which is the uh the application of a certain amount of pain or threat which is the use of anxiety but what he believed was most effective was reward but it required a tremendous amount of attention so for example if skinner was trying to train a rat to climb up a little ladder and then across the ladder and then maybe do a pirouette and come down which he could do with no problem he'd wait he'd just watch the rat and then when it get close to the ladder he gives a food palette now his rats were starved by the way down to three quarters of their normal body weight so they were pretty eager to work for food it's not something you necessarily saw in the methodology section of the papers but um well and that's not a critique of of skinner it's just an indication of how simplification takes place in laboratory experiments but in any case he'd wait for the rat to get near the ladder and give it a food pellet and soon the rat would be hanging around the ladder quite a lot and then now and then just more or less randomly the rat would put a paw up on the ladders food pellet well then the rat would hang around the bottom of the ladder with pop well if he did that continually through observation he could get the route to do pretty much anything that you could imagine a rat could do and then maybe some things you couldn't imagine and this isn't a manipulative technique by the way although it can be used that way it it's not effective unless you do it with a certain degree of wisdom you want to think well what do you want your house how about peace tranquility happiness and humor something like that it's not a bad first pass approximation and you've got to get that in your head it's like do you want that or do you want the delights of endless martyrdom because you have to make a choice and you might think i wouldn't pick martyrdom it's like really really you wouldn't eh you'd pick peace and happiness and humor and so everywhere you go that's all you're ever surrounded with it's like highly on highly improbable so don't be so sure you're aiming up but if you can orient yourself in that direction and then and carefully and and knowing full well what the hellish alternative is because you need to know that then you can watch and see well when when is this manifesting itself in the people around me and then you can tell them in detail i noticed sun i noticed today we're having a discussion at dinner you know when you made a spectacularly witty remark right at the right time and it was provocative but not annoying and so good work and then the kid thinks oh my god he noticed and then he's like twice as funny the next day and maybe not in some unbearable manner and that really works it really works but like i said you have to quell the envy that would otherwise beset you and you have to want to aim up and then you have to not be jealous of the other person's goodness and you have to be extremely attentive but man as a transformation technique even in extraordinarily difficult relationships which goes back to your point there isn't anything i know of that's more effective and i've been working with moderate democrats in the united states recently and with a number of republicans and suggesting that to the democrats that when the republicans do something that isn't absolutely malevolent and stupid in your opinion you might want to just say something like that's not as bad as it could have been you know something at least and the same for the republicans in relationship to the democrats and that because it's also one of the ways that you can reduce the for tap proclivity right you want to give the devil as do especially when you're not actually talking to the devil but just the person who's sitting across you let's say in the house it's an unbelie and people that's another issue i mean if you want people to appreciate having you around learning how to listen that is that is a skill that is absolutely unbeatable and this this uh technique of summarizing to their satisfaction that works like a charm and it's not you know you might be a little awkward when you first try it and might feel a little manipulative because you're not that good at it but if you get if you get expert at it it's and you have the greatest conversations with everyone you know i had people in my clinical practice who were extraordinarily impaired intellectually and suffering from all sorts of assorted pathologies in addition to that and if i was listening to them properly they were as fascinating as anybody i had on the say more able and competent end of the spectrum and you learn so much because there is nothing that people won't tell you if you listen it is absolutely amazing what people will tell you and so quickly they'll reveal things they didn't even know about themselves and they need to know those things often they've been hidden for years it's so rewarding and then this this use of attentive reward that's also it's it's it's so it's it's fun in a game-like sense once you learn to play it because you're watching you think i'll just wait this person's going to do something good sooner or later it's like pat good work and people are so thrilled that that little manifestation of goodness in their heart that managed to sneak out past their cynicism and boredom was recognized they're so what is it what is it it it it restores their faith in what's good inside them it really does it's unbelievably powerful and so that can work if you're if you're embroiled in a difficult relationship you know and you can't escape easily or maybe you can't escape on moral grounds that listening that's that helps a lot you might have to listen a lot but that use of judicious reward man that's a powerful technique so dr peterson thank you so much for your work and your passionate defensive free speech in relation to and therapy as well the uk government's currently consulting on banning so-called conversion therapy and i wondered what your view was as a therapist on that in relation to talking therapy in particular well the first thing i would say about that is that as soon as it's termed conversion therapy the argument's already over right because this is one of the things conservative politicians are particularly bad at this by the way there there that's why i mentioned at the beginning that you should never discuss viewpoint diversity i mean you think about what you're doing when you discuss viewpoint diversity you think you're conservative let's say that you've just pulled a fast one on the lefties it's like you're so you know gung-ho about diversity what about viewpoint diversity and you don't even notice that you just subordinated the highest value in the hierarchy of values to diversity you lose buddy it doesn't matter what argument you make after you've done that it's like i defined the terms of the debate i established the questions i you seated the terminological ground you can flap your lips all night but you're not going to change that and so the conversion therapy issue right there is the way as soon as that's framed in that manner it's a lost cause a guy had a client a young man who was being pressured quite intensely into a homosexual relationship by someone who was attracted to him and he was genuinely confused about his sexuality and certainly about how to respond well i wasn't going to do conversion therapy i mean i don't know what what's up with this kid i have no idea and neither did he and so the goal there is if someone comes to you who's confused about their sexuality and like have you met someone who isn't confused about their sexuality it's really complicated especially when you're 16 you know well you listen and you try to sort them out and if you have any sense you realize that you have enough trouble with your own destiny to not bother imposing your viewpoint moral or otherwise on this teenager you want to help them come to their own conclusions and it's an axiom of clinical practice that only those formulations that come from the client themselves will result in anything approximating lasting behavioral change so you know you could come to me and i could give you advice and you might even think it was good advice but you're not going to take it because you can't even give yourself advice and take it how are you going to take it from a relative stranger but if you go through the process of thinking it through like really deeply thinking it through and you draw your own conclusions and then maybe you practice their implementation there is some possibility of change and you just can't do that by well like conversion therapy so and it's partly because there is enough temperamental variability in people that you don't know what the right answer is for the person who comes to see you no more than you know what the right answer is for your children or for your mate and hopefully what you do is in this process of dialogical relationship and and mutual revelation the person's pathway becomes clearer and i do believe that that the goodwill exchange of thought does in fact what constitutes that process so i yeah as soon as it's conversion therapy the game's already lost but there's a fair bit of fluidity in human sexuality and people have to come to terms with that you know you might say as a rule of thumb and i think this is true your life is going to be a lot simpler if you adopt something approximating traditional sexual rules and so you step outside of that confine at your peril but it might also be your necessity who's to say so when you help the per in humility you help the person discover that for themselves and so so i think the talk of conversion therapy you know if someone's saying well i'll cure you or cure you of your homosexuality it's like well it's not a disease first of all and so it doesn't need a cure and probably you can't do that anyways and it's not it's not the proper way to advertise clinical services let's say because that isn't really how a clinical relationship works so the argument in some sense is beside the point as far as i'm concerned so thank you so much for such an amazing talk and the definition you you gave of freedom of speech i think is not heard enough um something i would like you to perhaps talk about is many people talk about the failure of the university as the failure of the marketplace and many say the failure of their leaders or the university uh the university setting as a failure of the marketplace and some say it is because freedom of speech has fallen out of fashion and is not um used enough and being criticized too much my question is do you think the marketplace of idea if you believe in such a thing can be fixed by imposing i mean poising uh putting at um more upfront what you've been redefining as freedom of speech or is there something in the marketplace of idea that is broken and perhaps we should fight specifically some ideas all the time and it's not good enough to have them on the marketplace of ideas that are very evil and bad themselves is that well it might not be good enough but it's the best we have that's the thing you know and it's also the case that substitutions tend to make things worse we don't have anything well what do we have except for the free expression of ideas we have tyranny and conflict because the alternative to politics is war it's not peace that's for sure peace that's hard man that's a hard thing to attain and so you have the intense battleground of ideas and you know the people who are concerned about uh let's say offense like they have their point you know words can hurt and they can hurt deeply but they don't hurt as much as sticks and they don't hurt as much as knives so it's a little bit of what ails you use you might say to stave off something far worse and that doesn't mean that the intensity of discussion i mean you can have discussions that are incredibly upsetting but the question is well what do you have when you don't have them and if you think that what you have by not having those discussions is peace then you're either naive willfully blind or malevolent those are the options so i mean i've seen in my clinical practice one thing i got deeply convinced of and it wasn't something i wanted to be convinced of i would say is i never saw anyone in my clinical practice ever get away with anything not even once you know so they'd come because they were miserable for one reason or another and sometimes deeply miserable and we would trace back the genesis of the mis misery there's always almost always an act of deception at its root either their own deception of themselves or some other some other person who putatively loved them deceiving them and so it was unbelievably painful to walk through that in this free speech sort of manner but the alternative which was living with the insane tension that accompanies the unrevealed truth let's say in the bosom of a dysfunctional family like as terrible as it is wading through the monstrosities living with them endlessly as they grow that is no solution and so we don't want to be pollyanna about this like there's nothing free speech does not lack savagery but compared to the alternative it's it's infinitely better and it's the only valid pathway to peace except maybe the peace of the grave you know i mean if you and i disagree and i kill you well that's the end of that argument but it's not so good for you you know and it's really not the end of the argument anyways because the probability that you are revealing in your opposition to my thought something that will then reveal itself within me in opposition to my thought is almost certain and so we have to hash through the ideas to make peace and you know the idea if free speech you say free speech has fallen out of fascists like was thought fallen out of unfashion because they're the same thing like most people i would say 95 you know six percent of people buy books okay how many people engage in internal dialogical critical self-evaluation 10 maybe you you it takes a lot of training you think what you have to do a thought has to reveal itself to you in the theater of your imagination and so that happens to everyone to to a lesser greater degree you know some people have a thought a month and some people are just flooded with them constantly it's a temperamental variable and variable associated with intelligence but once the thought emerges you can either accept it as a revealed truth which is the general course of action you know a thought occurs to you and because you're a naive thinker you just think well that's how it is but let's say you're a bit trained you can divide yourself into two avatars one takes the pro side and one takes the con side and you can have the debate internally but you have to be unbelievably highly trained to do that now all of you people or the vast majority of you do that as a matter of course but don't be thinking that's the way people work because it isn't most of what passes for thought and i'm not being cynical about this and i'm not looking down on people you know people all people have their their their talents and and and their abilities and some people are good at dialogical dialectic thinking some people don't have that skill particularly the way that most people think is by talking you know they and you see this if you have a close relationship with someone perhaps who isn't as intellectually inclined as you they'll be pondering something and they'll sort of offer a thought in it in a questioning sort of manner and it's an invitation it's like well i thought of this and i'm kind of scared of it or i'm doubtful about it and what do you think of it and then you play the role of what would otherwise be an internal avatar and they play the opposite role and maybe you switch you know from time to time if it's kind of playful and you evaluate the thought well that can't fall out of fashion it's like that's like reading a map has fallen we need to get somewhere but reading a map has fallen out of fashion it's like well we're not going to get anywhere then are we because that's how you get places and there's no that's why i said earlier freedom of speech is not just another freedom among freedoms and certainly not another right among rights it's certainly not and that right is certainly not granted to us by the social contract or a derivative of government fiat that's an absolute misapprehension which is why i think as well that there has to be something like for atheists and believers alike a divine hierarchy of value outside the political process to which the political process refers and one of the wonderful things about the english law common law tradition is it's grounded in such a metaphysical reality such that we have all the rights there are except those that are expressed expressly forbidden to us by the common law tradition it's like yes good work english people so you know as opposed to french civil law let's say so because there you're granted the rights by the state and that's just your rights are not a social construct that's just simply not the case it's not the case psychologically or physiologically for that matter so hi um first of all i'd like to say thank you for having the courage to pursue the truth and i'm very proud that you're canadian especially since truth has been so fraught lately in canadian politics my question is what would you say to someone who has been through a traumatic experience and wants to avoid the culture of victimhood that encourages people to identify with their trauma and capitalize off of being the most victimized person okay well there's two things that i address there people say this courage they say they talk to me about my courage fairly frequently and that's not right exactly like i just learned to be afraid of the right thing and i really mean that i mean i saw an endless repetition in my clinical practice and in my own private life when my eyes were open the consequences of not saying what was true it's like whatever hell you might fall into by opening your mouth when you have something to say that isn't popular it's nothing like the hell that you're going to envelop yourself in if you lose control of your own tongue and mind and i like i said in my clinical practice i never saw anyone get away with anything even once and so all you have in a situation like that is what is the truth now you know of course you only have your approximations to the truth but that's better than nothing and so you need to be afraid of the right thing and you should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deceit that's what you should be afraid of that will definitely do you in and i know exactly how what happens is you know garbage in garbage out the old programmer's saying goes and so you'll fill your head with nonsense and no one will call you on it except you but you can steal that voice if you try hard enough you just wait until you get in real trouble you know one day there'll come a point where you have to make a decision and the decision is the difference between life and death or worse between someone else's life and death or worse between health and the suffering that's worse than death and because you've compromised yourself to such a degree you will not be able to rely on your judgment and you will make the mistake you shouldn't make and then you're done and that will absolutely happen so you tell mistruths voluntarily at your exceptional peril and you avoid the unpleasant truths that you might have to delve into in all their messiness at your absolute peril and the peril of everyone around you and so if you see that you become afraid of that that's hell and hell is worse than death so and i mean that most sincerely so okay and so that's the courage issue and then you asked about sorry i'm sorry i obliterated the last part of your question traumatic experience and wants to avoid the culture of victimhood um or ideas yeah well well the first the first thing is well if you want to avoid that you're sort of on the right path already right because you have some vision of what it might be like not to be traumatized to not be a victim well first of all i mean in some sense there's no shortage of victimhood i mean you know the existential psychotherapist in the 50s taking a page from heidegger talked about throneness right the arbitrary nature of our existence i mean here you are you you have the ethnicity and race that was bestowed upon you you had no choice in that you're the victim and the beneficiary of this particular historical moment you know you and you're the victim and beneficiary of all the atrocity and the wonders of the past you deal with your own emotions you deal with the fact of this specific time and place all of that and there is a sense of well there's a sense of mortality certainly that's associated that with fineitude and mortality and you can easily say in some sense that we're all victimized deeply by our own susceptibility to vulnerability and tragedy and i think that's true but but then the question is well what's the best way of dealing with that and falling prey to it when my daughter was young she was very ill and one of the things we told her repeatedly and which i think she did very well to her credit was often she was too ill really to be able to go to school because she couldn't wake up in the morning and she was in pain and but she needed to go to school and well one of the things we told her was don't use your illness as an excuse right because you're already in trouble kit you know you got your problems and it they're serious but if you can hold on to the distinction between the part of you that can in spite of this and the part that can't because of it and not blur that distinction then that's one more thing you have on your side while you're attempting to struggle through this and to her credit she managed that and quite pristinely and that was extraordinarily helpful it was very difficult at times after she had had her hip replaced she she couldn't get around that well and so we decided to put her in a motorcycle course which was rather terrifying thing to do since she just had a hip replacement but she needed to have a scooter to get around and so she went with her mother to this motorcycle uh course and they were driving motorcycles not scooters and at one point one of the people who was being trained wiped out on the motorcycle and you know it was rather traumatic let's say and uh she woke up the next day and was too afraid to go to the course and so we said well you know it's understandable why don't you just get in the car and go to the course and see when you get there if you can manage it and she got herself out of bed and went and managed it and then she passed the course and then she had a scooter and could zoom around the city for the next couple of years and so that was really good but it was it was very hard to draw that line right because in some sense she'd been victimized by this arbitrary illness and you know you you tend as a parent to have an outpouring of empathy the empathy that can destroy under those circumstances because you you cuddle the person more than is absolutely necessary right and you have every reason to because they're suffering like mad but you want to be a victim and be a tragic figure you know and you might say yes but you wouldn't if you thought it through so and then if someone asked me that question say in a clinical setting i would do a little analysis of it's like okay well you're suffering from this traumatic experience you want to get over it we'd have to figure out what the practical steps might be and that might be finding somebody to talk to or there's other ways of dealing with it but you delve into the practical realm to sort of address that so okay thank you so much for your talk on a couple of occasions you mentioned judeo-christian values during the talking in the recent question you talked of the english common law which sort of alludes to the divine one in every six people in the world live in india today india has a democratic secular constitution and yet the culture is vedic and caste is central to society how would you speak about the freedom of speech into a culture that has that in its faith and beliefs and at the same time in certain fringes of the political movement certain radical ideological movements there's a belief that these freedoms are a western import so how would you healthily speak into that culture about upholding the freedoms well the first thing i would want to do if i was doing that practically speaking is i would like to talk to as many people who hold those particular views as i possibly could to find out why they think the way they think you know when they say that it's a western import well what do they mean because in some sense it is a western import i mean india has a body of laws that at least in part is derived from the english common law tradition and so it was imposed upon or introduced into that culture now it took to a large degree and i don't believe that you can import a propositional structure without the underlying imagistic ethos and behavioral proclivity it just won't work right because the infrastructure so to speak isn't there and so the fact that it has worked at least to some well i would say some remarkable degree because india is really a remarkable success story indicates that there is some correspondence between the english common law tradition which emerged gradually and in some sense incrementally and organically out of the will of the english population and it matches the same strivings and proclivities that you might find elsewhere i would also say that the the relatively radical comparative economic success of states settled by england in its in its history of colonization let's say also points to a decent fit between the english common law tradition and a whole variety of other cultures that doesn't mean the match is perfect and so to some degree the argument is correct it's imposed at least as a set of propositions but it's incorrect because i think it reflects something that's fundamental at the level we've been discussing today but if i was trying to mediate those disputes and i've been having increasing numbers of conversations with people on the islamic side of the world trying to do exactly that is the first thing i want to do is listen a lot because i don't know what i'm so ignorant about such things i just don't know what people actually think and so you can't begin to address a question like that till you find out why those who stand in opposition to your claims let's say why they think the way they think now the probability that there's no tradition say within indian families that approximates free speech in flourishing families it's like that's zero because it's not possible you know and if it's just a tyranny let's if it's a tyranny well tyrannies aren't sustainable chimps can't even sustain tyrannies you know and i'm saying that for technical reasons you know because there is this idea that's quite promoted that complex animals like chimpanzees live in dominance hierarchies and it's the meanest toughest male chimp that rules the hierarchy right and he's like stalin except in chimp form which actually places them somewhat higher on the evolutionary scale than stalin and so but franz dewal has investigated the structure of those societies in great detail and it's simply not the case that the most tyrannical chimp is on top in fact the chimp males who sustain leadership across reasonable amounts of time are unbelievably reciprocal in their interactions especially with other males but they're also particularly attentive to the females and the infants and part of the reason for that is well let's say you're you know joe brute chimp and you're strutting around like a fullback and in georgia constantly showing off your physical prowess it's like well one day you're a little thick or a little tired and two chimps that you've tyrannized will tear you into pieces and that happens quite frequently in chimpanzee disputes where a two tyrannical male will be literally torn to pieces because chimps are very brutal when they get their mind to it and they're just taken out and so this this there's a principle of reciprocal altruism let's say that's associated with the free exchange of ideas and something like mutual valuation and that's recognition of the soul i would say on a metaphysical level that's a precondition for peace everywhere not just in the west and that's been propositionalized and formalized into law in different ways in different cultures and sometimes not formalized so much yet let's say because many cultures are governed primarily by ritual and custom rather than you know a fully articulated body of laws but the fact that that does not mean by any stretch the imagination that english common law is somehow purely arbitrary social construction it's like that that's such a it's a preposterous claim so i would start by listening and find out exactly what the issues are and then well then proceed from there uh thank you so much dr peterson for what you've given us this evening um you've spoken now in a very complimentary way about english common law and and i'm very pleased to hear it um but freedom of speech is something novel uh largely in in our civilization um you just have to think about how dissenters and catholics were treated in this country not too long ago you couldn't go to this institution if you were not a communicant of the anglican church um i'm not an anglican but i sympathize with them because if you've got something good you want coercive and directive measures to protect that thing and in fact uh you might be committing a very serious injustice if you don't put the context and structure in place to prevent people who want to repudiate that good thing from invading and corrupting what has taken so long to put together and spoken like a true conservative and that's not ironic or denigrating i mean yes absolutely so how do you reconcile that well there is no permanent reconciliation of that conundrum right because and i've traced the development of that paradox back as far as i'm concerned back into mesopotamia past through egypt the egyptians had two primary fundamental male gods and one of them was osiris and osiris was the founder of the egyptian state mythologically speaking kind of like george washington but he was also the spirit of stone and so he was the he was the representation of conservative order that's a good way of thinking about it but the egyptians portrayed him as old and willfully blind specifically willfully blind which is extremely interesting and subject as a consequence of his willful blindness to the evil machinations of set and the sun sets and so that's how you know the egyptians thought about the sun and set and so seth was the evil uncle essentially and he cuts osiris up into his pieces which were also by the way the provinces of the egyptian state and sentences him to the underworld and then rules instead that's the danger of an unthinking conservatism because all our cognitive and social structures deteriorate with the passage of time because time changes all things and so we're always fighting to maintain what we have and that includes our categories of perception themselves in the face of a continual onslaught of novelty at virtually every level of analysis while the second god of the of the egyptians this is a very cursory overview obviously was horus and horus was the son of the he was the rightful son of the true king raised outside egypt and alienated in some sense from the tradition that gave rise to him but he was simultaneously the falcon and the egyptian eye that famous egyptian eye that open eye so he was the god of attention and he his mother is isis and she's the chaos that arises when order disintegrates gives rise to the hero horus goes to the underworld to rescue his father and the egyptians conceptualized the soul of the pharaoh so that would be the proper source of sovereignty itself as the union of osiris and horus the living union of li of osiris and horus so they would celebrate the pharaoh like you do when a new king is is uh crowned in the aftermath of the death of a a reigning monarch the king is dead long live the king right the kingship passes and that's osiris the tradition passes but it has to be the tradition has to be living it has to be allied with attention and the mesopotamians put a modification on that which was also magic speech so tradition always has to be allied with attention and it's like you know this is true if you own a house you know especially if it's an older house well the four walls are there and they're necessary and you want to protect it and uh and preserve them but you have to maintain them and sometimes you have to replace them and how do you tell and the answer is with a careful and judicious eye with some humility and gratitude for what you already have but with some understanding that in the face of continual transformation some change is necessary and then you might ask well how do you decide when change is necessary and the answer is by engaging in political dialogue mediated by free speech that is literally because this is an insoluble problem the conservatives are not correct but neither are the progressives it takes a dialogue between them to specify the target and it's partly because the environment itself shifts and changes literally unpredictably and so all we have is well consciousness itself is the mechanism that mediates between order and chaos and and political dialogue when it's done in goodwill is the manifestation of consciousness in the repair of mechanisms that need to be sustained and transformed and so there's no end to the necessary dialogue because the future differs from the past and that's the limit of conservative thinking right it's like well the noble traditions it's like fair enough man if you can walk down a road that's already been walked down successfully that's a wise choice but sometimes you know there's a flood and the road is changed the underlying tomography has shifted and then you wander blindly into into a cliff or into a pit so even as a conservative and conservatives have more of the temperamental proclivity let's say to preserve and to respect but they still have to be open to the transformations that are necessary to keep abreast of the times and so we try right we winnow through the wheat and the chaff of the past and we attempt to garner the wheat and dispense with the chaff and the only way we can do that is through continual dialogue with ourselves honest dialogue with ourselves and with others so um you speak about the concept of the soul um do you associate this with any psychological constructs not any psychological constructs that are more valid than the notion of the soul you know there's i would say what we mean by soul is something like animating spirit and you might say well what's a spirit and well that's actually rather easy to answer so when a child of four is playing house let's say when a child of four is playing house she acts out the role of the mother but acting out that's a strange thing right because she doesn't literally duplicate in her actions or her perceptions in the game what she observed her mother literally doing so for example she didn't go into her mother's bedroom when her mother awoke and watched her turn her head in a particular way to awaken and count the number of blinks so that she can mimic that in her play and you know you think that's absurd but it's not absurd if it's just mimicry it's not it's unbelievably sophisticated so what the girl does is she watches her mother manifest maternal behavior across a vast array of instances and she integrates that with the image of the mother she's received from all the books she's been read and all the little movies she's watched the disney movies and so forth and she abstracts out the animating principle of the maternal and then she embodies that in play and usually with a little boy and that's practice for what's going to come later it's unbelievably sophisticated and she's embodying a spirit and the spirit there is the abstraction of the central animating principle from multiple embodiments of its manifestation and if you think children can't do that well then you don't know anything about children because they do that all the time in their pretend play which is a necessary precursor to healthy psychological development and so part of what we refer to as the soul is the presence of that spirit or maybe even the capacity of embodying such spirits and it's very difficult to know how deep that goes you know i had a vision at one point of all the men in my life who've been particularly influential in a benevolent way you know and so and you think well just the mirror notion of the idea that there could be a benevolent way that would unite the acts of benevolence across a series of men that's all comprehensible to you that's you take that as a matter of course when you say that there are such things as good men and you can identify them right something stable about whatever is good across multiple manifestations of of incarnation let's say and i saw that transform into the the father person of the trinity as the embodiment of that benevolent spirit now i don't have any idea what that means metaphysically because who does but but that that spirit manifesting itself within is certainly part of what we refer to when we talk about the soul and you can see that shine through people i mean it's part of what gives someone charisma it's part of what elicits the instinct to imitate in you you know when you see that even in simple things when you see a remarkable athlete do something incredibly athletic to put the goal to put the soccer ball the football ball through the net to score the goal and everybody leaps to their feet in celebration of that well that's that's a celebration of the divine capacity to hit the target dead on and it grips you at such a lo a low level way down inside your soul that you're compelled to your feet to cheer and you don't even know what you're doing but you enjoy it that's for sure and that enjoyment is also a sign of the depth and utility of that response you see this in all all the things that people do that are you know so-called popular entertainment it's unbelievably sophisticated the soul is participating in that in the fullest extent and you know you can say well there's no use for the religious there's no necessary use for the religious terminology it's like well until you come up with a better word there's plenty of use for it because it's a very complex and deep phenomena and to you know just cast it into the realm of superstition in some casual manner is it's just not helpful not in any possible it's not helpful scientifically it's not helpful ethically it's not helpful existentially try treating someone for a while as if they don't have a soul just really i mean it just you know treat them like a deterministic machine if that's your belief really act it out you'll be like the most hated person in town in about 15 minutes well i mean what do you make of practical evidence like that i mean you interact with people as if they're free souls capable of choosing between good and evil that's what you do all the time and maybe you can addle yourself out of that by some ridiculous rationalist ideology but that just means you're kind of a gambling fool and it's just going to make you trip over things you don't even notice in all of your social interactions and you tell me i don't care how you think philosophically or ideologically you bloody well know that what i just said is true so and that's true even when you're interacting with an infant or a small child it's true when you're dealing with someone who's elderly and virtually incapacitated in every way you still see that divine spark for lack of a better term and we do lack a better term by the way you see that everywhere if your eyes are open and if you're willing to see it and to the degree that you're responsive to that then your actions are guided by love and your words are guided by truth thank you very much [Music] um well ladies and gentlemen that concludes the formal part of the evening's proceedings thank you so much for coming along uh it would have been so easy for our speaker tonight never to set foot in this university ever again it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to go to any of the other hundreds of universities that would have rolled out the red carpet and had him back after his marathon bout with all sorts of difficulties over the last two or three years and i think it's a testament to the caliber of his character uh his generosity and above all his graciousness that he was willing not only to come here and speak to us this evening but but to spend the best part of two weeks with us opening up all his views to scrutiny to criticism to debate arif and i have been going at him pretty much all morning and he's he's got more of that to come uh and this is just just a slice of some of the engagements that that he's going to be undertaking uh here and i think it's quite quite remarkable that he's got that kind of resilience stamina that that raw authenticity that has moved and changed the lives of so many so it's been a great privilege for me to be part of this and i hope that the same is true for you thank you all so much for coming i believe that uh colin hewlett here will be taking uh photos uh with jordan as he may be tempted to come out uh so you won't have to uh fumble awkwardly with your iphones and i'm sure he'll be around for a few minutes just to to speak if if you would um be be cognizant of his time um but but i'm sure he'd like to say uh hello to as many of you as possible if the last few days walking around the streets of cambridge are anything to go by thank you all so much [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

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Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, jordan peterson lecture, lectures jordan peterson, cambridge jordan peterson, jordan peterson Q&A, Q&A jordan b peterson, AMA jordan peterson, Questions Jordan Peterson, Jordan Peterson cambridge

Id: EskHqQ1gm5U

Length: 65min 42sec (3942 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 03 2022