Q&A 05-01-2021 | Jordan B. Peterson

hello everyone and welcome to my q a i'm answering questions today that were submitted on the in beta stage social media platform think spot which i had a hand in developing over the last few years as an alternative to patreon although others have contributed far more these answers were posted on thinkspot before their release on youtube so if you want an earlier view of such things you might consider checking out the thinkspot platform i've edited the questions a bit and grouped some of them together so i can address the broader topic i hope you find this worthwhile and interesting i also hope to start live q and a's at some point again in the future when i'm healthier and sharper i would like to know how to believe in the divine even though it is a loose end i know without some sort of grounding any hope about a positive future falls down could you please tell us how your conception of god has changed in the last year or two and has your wife's burgeoning faith had an impact on this conception i was rather taken aback when you said in your return home video posted five months ago that with the grace and mercy of god you might be able to generate original material once again why do you think there are so many people who are prone to just following an ideology seemingly blindly today especially in america and maybe especially among younger people why do people seem to cling to what a doctor an organization or a political stance or what a news network or source says seemingly religiously i'm not talking about religious religion specifically i don't think but maybe what i seem to see as replacements for faith or a good family slash meaningful life etc having listened to you for many years now in this minor clergy in the orthodox church my questions are have you attended any services in the eastern orthodox churches or have you done an in-depth exploration of eastern orthodox christianity how do you respond to the idea that your personal theology aligns so well with what is taught by the eastern orthodox churches well i'm going to try to answer all those questions at the same time let's start with the third set why do you think there are so many people who are prone to just following an ideology seemingly blindly today especially in america and maybe especially among younger people why do people cling to what a doctor etc says seemingly religiously well i would say that something has to be done with the religious impulse so and we could think about what the religious impulse is critically and deeply for a minute so imagine that you might consider defining the religious impulse as the consequence of the necessity of having the highest having a goal at the highest possible level of conceptualization and organization psychological organization social organization we have goals on a daily basis and a weekly basis and a monthly basis and personal goals and familial goals and social goals but all of that has to be nested in the broader world of value let's say all of that has to be nested within something like well what is the ultimate goal what is the final goal underneath which all of those more proximal goals are subsumed and that becomes a religious question i would say by definition it's an impossible question to answer in some sense because to provide a definitive answer would mean that we would have to possess the classic attributes of god at least his omniscience to be able to finally answer well what is it all for but we're still stuck with the necessity of identifying the highest level goal and if and that's really that that the identification of that goal was exactly what our traditional religious structures were attempting to do for better or worse and they did that with practice and with ritual and with drama and with symbolism and with music and with art and with literature with dance um all of which are integrated in more archaic communities let's say those were all our attempts to orient ourselves at the highest possible level of being perhaps we're all striving to be at least in our more noble moments we're trying to be good people ethically and to serve the good whatever that might be and it's the religious domain that strives to answer those questions at the highest possible level of abstraction now if you lack that answer if you're divorced from a religious structure then you have to find a replacement somewhere because the question isn't going to go away the question what's it all for what should i orient myself toward or what should i imitate or what should i be in awe of you're stuck with that or even in its negative sense well what's the purpose of life anyways and why bother um and so that can lead you into a very destructive nihilism and so you're stuck with the problem and if your culture hasn't provided you with a solution or you've rejected that solution or the solution no longer seems tenable to you maybe because it's fallen prey to a rationalist critique that doesn't mean the problem goes away you find a replacement for it and for better for worse now the first of the set of questions i grouped together will turn to it was i would like to know how to believe in the divine even though it's a loose end well it is and it isn't uh i'll answer that in relationship also to could you please tell us how your conception of god has changed in the last year or two well one thing i've been thinking about lately is the idea of thought as a dialectical process so imagine that you posit a question in your imagination your life presents you with the question what should i do today what would a person do what should a person do in this situation what should i do with my life what should i do with this relationship and answers appear in the theater of your imagination or doubts arise but something happens you send out a call essentially and you respond or something in you responds with the generation of an answer or maybe multiple answers and in the case of multiple answers you can then undertake uh an argument in your head that's the dialectical process between the two positions that might have emerged in the course of these revealed answers so there's a revelatory element to thought which is the appearance of new information in the theater of your imagination and then there's a dialectical element which is the combat between different revealed thoughts to evaluate them and rank order them in terms of their credibility and applicability okay so now imagine that we have that faculty we have the faculty for revelation and we have the faculty for for dialectical thought now imagine that you formulate in your imagination or perhaps your culture helps you formulate the image of an ideal being and that might be god as such but it it also might be say in in the case of christianity with christ or buddhism with buddha or islam with muhammad the idea of a person who's divine in some important manner which brings the divinity down to earth in any case whether the imaginary being in the theater of your imagination is purely divine god himself or you know incarnated in some sense in a in a human figure it enables you to produce an avatar of your imagination with whom you can converse and so you could ask yourself well you can ask yourself such questions is as if you're plagued by doubts about what you should do in this situation is well what would you do if you were trying to do the best possible thing or what would someone who was always striving to do the best possible thing do you formulate that question and you might get an answer that this is the proper pathway forward now that doesn't mean you'd be necessarily inclined to implement that it might be too difficult or maybe you even might doubt that that's a practical way forward but not only can you produce avatars in your imagination and then use them as sources of revealed thought but your culture can fill in the attributes of that avatar so for example if you're christian and you've been taught about the life of christ as it's portrayed in the gospels all those descriptions flesh out the personality and then of course the image of christ is reflected in western culture in a multitude of ways all of which inform the structure of that internal avatar and which in principle flesh it out so that it's the potential source of revealed truth in imagination buttressed by all that cultural input and so you would say well in some ways that avatar with whom you can converse is now the internal embodiment of all the ideas about what constitutes the highest good that our entire culture has been able to create and communicate insofar as you've been exposed to that and are able to understand it and then so you could imagine that that could be of substantial practical worth regardless of the ontological reality of that avatar of your imagination but then i don't think that the issue necessarily ends there because you can then ask yourself well does that imaginary avatar share in any real being and then you ask yourself well is there anything real about the hypothetical ideal and it seems to me that there is something real about the hypothetical ideal we recognize its manifestation in other people and we're happy about that we're we're inspired by that we might be in awe of that we certainly recognize it as a good thing we're pleased when that manifests itself in us its manifestation in us certainly makes us more attractive to other people and also i would say of more use to other people and also more likely to be truthful and perhaps able to take care proper care of and love other people and i don't think any of that isn't real and so that means that there's some relationship between the imaginary ideal and reality itself that's not trivial and i don't know what that might mean in the final analysis you have a god in the imagination which is our conception of god and does that bear any relationship to the real god or indicate that there is a real god and the answer to that is we don't know i wouldn't dismiss the idea so rapidly so that's pretty much now there's something else i guess how do i respond to the idea that my personal theology aligns so well with what is taught by the eastern orthodox churches i don't really know that i don't know how to respond to that idea because i don't know the theology of the eastern orthodox churches that well um i do know some thing about it um i know that the eastern orthodox churches stress the idea that the fundamental ethical responsibility of the indiv the individual is to become as christ-like as possible and i think that that is the fundamental ethical responsibility basically by definition because at minimum speaking psychologically which is the safest way to speak about such things the figure of christ is the ideal avatar of the good in the western imagination um and thus it's by definition that your ethical obligation is to imitate that in every way that's possible and that's specified to some degree it means to treat being itself with love even your enemies to not wish them ill but to wish them to wish the good for them as well and to tell the truth and and to live by the dictates of your conscience and that that's the pathway to divinity i think that's all true so you know i was deeply influenced in my thinking as most of the people who are watching this would know by carl jung and he was certainly influenced by his knowledge of the eastern orthodox doctrine and so i've been influenced by the eastern orthodox church via that route i think that there isn't any more serious question than your relationship to the ideal again virtually by definition and that there isn't anything better that you can do than attempt to embody that good as fully as possible and i've tried to make a practical case for that i suppose and perhaps that's why with respect for the idea and perhaps that's why so many people from the eastern orthodox church in particular seem to find resonance in my ideas has my wife's burgeoning faith had an impact on my conception of god well some impact tammy my wife has always taken the idea of truth very seriously her recent brush with death has deepened her religious sense and impelled her towards a life that's more consciously focused on service to others her family in particular but not only her family people beyond the family and i also think that's a function to some degree of our stage of life she's a grandmother now and her children are grown and able to take care of themselves and so she can turn her attention to other people maybe farther afield from the immediate family i'm watching what she's doing and listening to her and watching her practical application of her faith and that affects me just as everything she does affects me because i watch what she does and take it seriously and her recent actions have indicated she's had she's helped a number of people quite substantially uh in the recent past with a group that she's been communicating with and all of that's very interesting to me she's showing me i mean i've taken the idea of god seriously for a very long time and i've said on multiple occasions that i try to act as though god exists and that that's essentially my definition of belief when people say do you believe in god belief is a multi-dimensional word and the question one question is well what do you mean by belief and for me the proof of belief is to be found in action and i decided that i would act as if god existed a long while back and of course i'm imperfect in that uh inevitably now she's doing that more explicitly as well not she wasn't doing it quite well to begin with but she's doing it more explicitly and also more within the confines of traditional religious conceptions although she's not attending church she's associating with a number of people who are formally religious and all of that's informing the way that she conducts herself so it's watching her do that has also highlighted for me the missing praxis in western christianity if you want to be a christian let's say if you think that's necessary it's not exactly obvious what you should do you should go to church but that's not enough i don't think it's she's been involved with um well i think that's enough said about that for the time being i find it useful to contemplate the highest good on a continual basis that sounds so i'm trying to keep myself oriented in that direction it's a religious orientation fundamentally it's an overwhelming orientation but there's no escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of life i don't think next set of questions how can responsibility be differentiated from imposed guilt that's one question how can one tell if one's inner voice judgment or conscience is a healthy one and not a voice that is the result of an unhealthy mind due to past experiences how do i decide if my inner voice is healthy or not and how do i maintain it healthily now that's a really interesting question it's a question of conscience i continually ask my frequently let's say or yearly ask my personality class attendees if they heard the voice of conscience if they had a feeling an emotion emotional state let's say or of voice that informed them when they had done something ethically wrong and that perhaps made them guilty as a consequence and it was essentially a universal experience that's the voice of society within i suppose that's one way of thinking about it the freudians would think about that as the voice of the superego jung carl jung would take that conceptualization somewhat farther he would have considered it the voice of the self which is in part the voice of the ethic that's derived from the broader community insofar as that ethic is valid let's say but also in part the voice of the more thoroughly developed self that's still striving to be born one thing you could say is that you you experience violations of your conscience when you're not acting like the better person that you could possibly become and so to some degree that's your higher self upgrading you for failure to develop in the appropriate direction and that seems to me to be a reasonable way of conceptualizing it now the one question might be how error prone is your conscience given that you're not omniscient and i have an endless fascination with the movie pinocchio and part of that is because it taught me something very sophisticated about conscience in that movie jiminy cricket is given divine attributes he has the same initials as jesus christ for example and um he is deemed the voice of conscience itself by by the magical properties of of mother nature essentially but in the movie it's necessary for the puppet who's still wooden headed and still a marionette whose strings are being pulled by others it's necessary for the puppet to engage in a dialogue with his conscience because both of them have to inform the other and that seems to me approximately right because i certainly saw people in my clinical practice and no people in my private life who seem to labor under a two authoritarian labor under the dictates of a two authoritarian conscience maybe that's the internalized voice of a relatively tyrannical father for example or exaggerated sensitivity to the moral pressure exerted by the broader social world you have to attend to your guilt and your self-disgusting your self-contempt and your self-consciousness you have to understand that the manifestation of those emotions might well indicate a moral failing on your part or a a lack that needs to be addressed well at the same time considering that it is not a straightforward matter to deal fairly with yourself and you can be too tormented by your conscience too rigid too responsible take on too much weight onto yourself deny yourself in a manner that isn't sustainable and so forth that that a moral code a moral way of being can become too rigid and and inflexible and despite its putative aim upward be something counterproductive i think most of the way out of that if there is one is well careful thinking you have to see what your conscience says you have to see how you respond you have to capture that voice and your responses and you have to think it through but most of that is done in dialogue with other people rather than as the consequence of internal thought you know if you have a dispute with your wife or your husband your intimate partner sibling your parents anybody close to you and it's useful to for each of you in the dispute to ask yourself and the other person very seriously if you're at fault or if they're at fault and and for both of you to be able to contemplate that you might be at fault and so might the other person and that it's in your best interest to sort out exactly who's made the error and where and maybe it's both of you and maybe at different levels of analysis um i think the same might be said about your reaction to your conscience it's not uncommon for me to talk to my wife my kids my parents my friends for that matter about something i might be feeling maybe i'm guilty about something i'm self-conscious about something i'm angry about something i feel impelled by my conscience to do something as a consequence to change something uh it's very helpful to discuss such things with other people to say look here's what i think i did wrong and here's how i'm punishing myself but i'm not sure that i'm not doing it in an exaggerated way and you gather other people's opinions and listen to them carefully and are extraordinarily useful in that regard and that can help you calibrate it so i think most of what we do to decide if our inner voice is healthy is discuss it with other people and i believe as i pointed out in my last book explicitly that tremendous amount of our sanity is maintained as a consequence of social interaction so you can't find your authentic self merely as a consequence of a journey within i would say you you're not there's just not enough of you you you have to be informed by the broader social world there's more about that too how can responsibility be differentiated from imposed guilt well i think you adopt genuine responsibility let's say healthy responsibility i think you adopt that more or less voluntarily i mean there's an element of necessity and compulsion in our lives as well because there are things we have to do to survive but if you've explicitly formulated a set of goals and you're pursuing them then you've adopted the responsibility to act in a certain manner to make those goals realize themselves that's that's responsibility that you've adopted rather than responsibility that's been imposed on you assuming that you've thought through the goals and you find your spirit in harmony with those goals you can consult your resentment i think that's a very useful step if you find yourself angry and bitter about the things that you are responsible for doing then that's an indication that you might be operating under some unhealthy compulsion that you're rebelling and that's the reason for the resentment against the insistence that you act in a certain way although it's also possible that you're just immature and that you're rebelling against the discipline that's necessary to attain the goals that you genuinely do want to attain and that are valid and that you are what actively engaged in constructing so you have to get that straight and some of that's a consequence of thought and again some of that's a consequence of of discussion with other people with whom you're intimate enough to have a conversation like that and perhaps they have conversations about similar things with you if you're fortunate i'd love to get insight into why it seems inevitable to become frustrated or annoyed with a loved one's chronic although usually non-fatal illness symptoms i'd love to know how even while caring deeply for someone with a chronic physical condition it seems impossible to suppress what might even be anger while witnessing them suffer even minimally well it's one of the terrible things that you see in any case of illness especially chronic illness is that the person with the illness is often blamed for the problems that the illness causes and some of that's just difficulty in differentiating between the person and the illness when my daughter was ill with rheumatoid arthritis she had to sleep a lot 16 17 18 hours a day and and even during her minimally awoke times she was likely to nod off and that made getting her to school and so forth quite difficult and it was very challenging to not be morally judgmental about that when she was a teenager it's often difficult to get teenagers out of bed it was just very challenging to differentiate the illness from the person and it's very helpful to have other people around you under such circumstances so that you can discuss the issue uh of course you can always discuss it as well with the person who's ill and we i talked a lot to my wife about such things and and to my parents and also to my daughter and to my son as well all of us were trying to calibrate this properly her as well because she didn't want to misbehavior to the list of illness symptoms we we told her not to use her illness as an excuse ever because then she wouldn't be able to distinguish between what she could do and what she couldn't do if she if she used her illness as an excuse that was a difficult job of discrimination for her as well and then i would say well you get angry because you're upset about the fact that the world's unfair and tragic so there's an existential level there too is it's so heart-rending and burdensome to note that the universe is constituted so that people you love suffer unreasonably and unfairly and constantly and often without relief and that anger can easily imagine that manifests itself as a general irritability that makes you more susceptible to being angry with the person who's ill and with all the other people in your life and with yourself as well with everyone it's best to the degree that it's possible to dispose of that generalized resentment because justifiable as though it might seem it is not i've never seen it be it to be helpful shaking your fist at god is not a constructive way of dealing with the world even though it does appear that there are plenty of reasons why such shaking might be justified um it's not a place that the human soul should go and then the third factor that's important i would say is that if you find yourself angry when you're in the position of chronic caretaker it's really possible that you need more help if you're dealing with someone who has alzheimer's disease for example or any chronic degenerative neurological condition or any chronic degenerative condition in general there's only so much you can do before you can't do any more or even that much and it could be assuming that you're reasonably well constituted and reasonable that you're being called on to deliver more than you actually can sustain across time and two seriously ill people are not better than one and so if you find that you're resentful and angry and and therefore lashing out at the person you're taking care of you might ask yourself whether it's time to do whatever is necessary if that's possible if you have the luck and the resources to bring in more help if it's if you're in it for the long haul it has to be sustainable and you can't ask yourself to continually do the impossible it has to be sustainable and you can have an honest discussion with yourself and although this is also something useful to discuss with other people about just what you can take without breaking morally or physically or emotionally uh and for how long and if the resentment is building and the anger is building maybe you have to change the manner in which care is being offered and and given you have to hire a nurse you if you can you have to rely more on other members of the family you have to consider institutional intervention all of these things are very difficult you have to ask others for help but like i said two sick people aren't better than one so those are the reasons why you might get frustrated or annoyed with a loved one's illness symptoms i think i don't think it's a mystery at all why you get annoyed and angry the mystery is how many how it's possible for so many people to engage in long-term care of others without being angry and irritable that's the that's the miracle that's the mystery i've seen people provide levels of care to members of my own family recently for that matter that went far above and beyond what i considered the reasonable call of duty so and i would say too don't torture yourself too much if you find yourself being angry or annoyed at a loved one's illness i i understand why you would think that that's a terrible thing and it it is in some sense but it's also virtually inevitable for the reasons i just described and you do what you can to keep it under control and you also learn as clearly as you can what you can tolerate and what you can't so in regards to your notion of the importance of romantic relationships i presume that also means long-term committed relationships what are the requisites for opening the relationship to other sexual partners well i i don't think that's possible that might just be conservative me um i don't think i've ever seen it work people and i think the evidence that it doesn't work is manifest in the fact that people almost never do negotiate that openly they sneak around if they're going to have an affair and the reason they feel compelled to sneak around is because they know perfectly well that the probability that their partner is going to grant them wholehearted permission and encouragement while simultaneously maintaining the intimacy of the relationship and the desire for it to continue is virtually zero um i think a simple relationship is complicated enough it's very difficult to negotiate intimacy with one other person let alone a number of people uh people might wish that their sexuality could find its free expression untrammeled by the arbitrary restrictions of a judgmental society inappropriately disgusted by ashamed and frightened of sex but i think that's all most all wishful thinking i would put in the coda that i have seen people in my clinical practice who were too restrictive in their sexual morality and that that was doing them harm people from a fundamentalist background who were in their mid-20s with no partner marital partner on the horizon who'd never engaged in any sexual activity of any sort that on a case-by-case basis seldom seemed to be a good solution so [Music] but i don't think there's any evidence that at the personal and social level simultaneously and considering the long term as well as the short term there isn't any viable alternative to committed monogamy and wish that there were is fantasy in my estimation and generally counterproductive and generally very destructive so now you know people differ and highly open people who are low in conscientiousness let's say by temperament perhaps low in agreeableness this is all speculation might find the possibility of open relationships over some period of time i'm skeptical i've never seen it work not without a lot of lies and deception of one form or another not a lot not without a lot of begrudging acquiescence on the part of at least one party in the negotiation you know sometimes people will agree to something that they don't agree to because they feel it's the only way of hanging on to something they truly value so one partner might say well shall we open up this relationship to further exploration and the other agree merely out of fear of losing what they have that doesn't mean that there's been a negotiated settlement so i think there are no requisites for opening a relationship to other sexual partners a set of questions again i have been reading through carl jung's work and more specifically his work on integrating the shadow what is the best way of integrating the shadow in a person's life without sacrificing their ethics or the well-being of others i am way too agreeable what steps can i take to integrate my shadow and stop being a doormat all my life i've had so much anger but i don't know towards what or how to get rid of it i've been through a few different types of therapy and it's a bit better but still takes me over from time to time what advice do you have for me i don't think that there's a better pathway to the shadow let's say than resentment if you're feeling resentful about something there's a shadow that reveals itself in two ways one is it's a pointer to your immaturity you need to be more disciplined you have set goals hypothetically and if you haven't then you're under the sway of someone else or you're undisciplined and unintegrated and incoherent which is all shadow life in some sense you're pursuing short-term impulsive goals because you haven't thought it through you're pursuing goals that other people have established for you you're not pursuing any goals at all because you're too nihilistic to believe that life has any purpose all that's shadowy let's say um but maybe you have set goals and now you're resentful about all the work that you have to do in order to acquire those goals and maybe that manifests itself as a broad-scale critique of social structure it's that's a maturity and so you can delve into that and you can find out where you're still a spoiled child and hopefully take action to rectify that or you may find that you're being compelled to do something that violates your integrity and you need to stand up for yourself and say something that you don't want to say and then you may have to learn how to incorporate your anger into your actions so that you learn how to say no when you need to say no and so that actually means that you're furthering your ethical pursuit as a consequence of integrating your shadow rather than deviating from it aggression which can be repressed sexual sexuality lust let's say which can be repressed those things are extremely useful servants when they're integrated into the hole if you're without aggression and anger and incapable of it that doesn't mean that you're on a good path and that anger knocks you off it that can happen but it's much more appropriate and sophisticated to note that the probability that you're going to pursue a higher good is magnified by your integration of all your emotional and motivational states even the ones that can cause a tremendous amount of trouble when they're left to manifest themselves in isolation you're way too agreeable well i would say you you could practice saying what you really believe that you can take a vow to tell the truth and that will make you much less agreeable agreeable people are perfectly willing to sacrifice what they know to be the case to maintain short-term social harmony and it's not so much that they repress what they think it's often that they don't even allow themselves to fully realize what they think so a commitment to the truth can make an agreeable person will stop an agreeable person from being a doormat i mean if you're in a relationship and the person is irritating you with something they've done you might be highly motivated not to say anything about it because you want to keep the peace you don't want to upset them you don't want the conflict that's all characteristic of characteristic of high agreeableness but once you decide to tell the truth then if you're annoyed you don't get to hide it you don't get to assume you're right you don't get to grab the person by the shirt caller and say look i'm annoyed and you're wrong you get to say uh i've i'm irritated about this situation and i need to think through that irritation to find out if i have a problem or if you have a problem but there's or if we both have a problem or if it's a different problem altogether but you can't hide the fact that the problem has made itself manifest and so if you're agreeable and you tell the truth about your emotional state that will propel you out of that agreeableness by necessity so with regards to anger i don't know towards what or how to get rid of it well something a cognitive behavioral therapist might recommend is for a week and maybe this is already a therapy you've been through but this exercise is generally quite useful first you have to note when you're angry and admit to that and maybe you have to practice that so you have to decide i'm going to pay attention i'm going to see when i'm angry and i'm going to admit to it at least to begin with without judgment i'm just going to observe it i'm going to allow myself to observe it then you have to allow yourself to see what angry thoughts you have and you can ask yourself that what angry thoughts do i frequently have they'll likely come to mind maybe many of them you can jot all those down those are ones you're familiar with and then you can notice when you're angry and you can ask yourself well what am i thinking right at this moment what angry thoughts am i thinking and some of them might be quite shocking you might also manifest themselves in destructive fantasies you know maybe you have a fantasy of grabbing somebody by a shirt collar and pushing them up against a wall or dumping you know hot coffee on your boss or some impulse towards aggression that might manifest itself as a flashing fantasy and perhaps one that you're shocked by and don't want to admit you don't want to admit to the existence of it but you need to see what's happening first in your own imagination if you're going to cope with it and you also it's also possible that a fair bit of the anger that you have is actually useful if you could just find out what it is and what it's directed toward so the first attack is to explore the anger what gives rise to it what situations give rise to it what people give rise to it what are you doing when it happens and what is the phenomenology of the anger how does it make itself manifest in image fantasy and thought and then now you have an anger inventory is anger in this situation warranted what steps do i have to take in order to become less angry and sometimes that might be an adjustment of internal an internal psychological adjustment sometimes it might require changes in the world maybe you're in a relationship that's oppressive and you have been for a long time and the way to fix that isn't to adjust your attitude although it could be but it might be that it's time to get out of the relationship and so differentiation what when are you angry what elicits it elicits it why are you angry who are you angry at what are the nature of the angry thoughts what are the nature of the angry fantasies all of that you have to get that out where you can see it and you have to walk through it and you can do that by yourself you can do that while writing you can produce counter thoughts so if you're angry about something you could outline the reasons why anger is not productive or you could outline the reasons why it's productive and the reasons it's not productive for a full exploration of the issue so then i would ask you too if you're angry all the time is well are you depressed have you been evaluated clinically if if this is a major problem is it a manifestation of depression because anger is an under diagnosed symptom of depression um do do you have well thought through goals and plans and strategies all of that that's a more comprehensive evaluation of your entire life and maybe you have something to say or do that you're not saying or doing it's highly probable most of us have that problem do you have sympathy for the left politically particularly the marxist or group identity focus types i feel like the left has a point and a lot of leftists many leftists have their heart in the right place even though they may misguided in some aspects of their thinking well i have plenty of sympathy for the left um the left speaks when it's speaking appropriately for the dispossessed and there's a unequal distribution of talents and resources in the world that doesn't mean that that's all a consequence of inadequate social organization but it's nonetheless a painful fact and people who are relatively powerless let's say or who are relatively deprived need their voice as well and the left can do that the the leftists that i've met who i've admired were people who genuinely had the interests of the working class uppermost in their minds and they were usually trying to facilitate the ability of working-class people to move forward in the world and to negotiate as well rather than focusing their attention on punishing the hypothetical oppressors so yes i have sympathy for the left i also understand the temperamental advantages of people on the left who tend to be higher in creativity and lower in orderliness they're more entrepreneurial in their essential orientation to the world they're more favorable to the free flow of information at the cost of the borders that divide things and that's a valid point because the free flow of information has utility even though borders and boundaries also have utility uh and so hence the utility of the right um it isn't the left per se that i've ever objected to it's it's radical bitter utopians who place evil somewhere that's convenient for them morally and then have a target for their unexamined malevolence the same thing happens on the right so of course the left has a point you discuss almost any thinker's flaws in their thinking except for jung's what what were his well i think jung over generalized his experiences his clinical experiences he conceptualized the hero's journey as something that was fundamentally creative and interior and i think that that's probably true only for people who are really high in trait openness who are creative and i suspect that jung attracted a tremendously disproportionate number of creative people to his practice given the nature of his personality and his interests i found in my own practice that when i had creative people they were very inclined towards the discussion of literary themes they framed their life in literary terms they were prolific dreamers very interested in dream analysis they enjoyed a literary approach to life my more conservative clients often equally high performing although i had a practice that spanned the entire range of of human ability um they weren't interested or captivated by that at all and for them the primary adventure of life wasn't internal or literary it was external and practical and the more agreeable types their life was primarily social rather than symbolic or creative they found most of the meaning in their life as a consequence of the uh intimate relationships that they were able to establish it wasn't infrequent and this was more true of women than of men and they are higher in agreeableness on average i i had conscientious clients who would frame their life in terms of their accomplishments their career accomplishments that's how they parse their life up temporarily first i was in school and then i went to university and i studied this and then it was all extra it was all achievement oriented whereas the more agreeable types they would say well you know when i was 12 years old to 14 i had this relationship and then i moved to this relationship usually the intimate relationship so sometimes familial framed their life that way jung was an introvert was introverted and highly highly open and so that skewed his view in a particular way and then because he was psychoanalytic he also tended to view the psyche as sane as a consequence of its internal organization and even its internal ethic and placed much less stress on the role of social interactions and society as a whole in producing sanity you know a sane person is not only organized internally but they're integrated with their society and the internal organization actually reflects the social organization they mirror one another and there's although jung being a very sophisticated person of course knew that social adaptation was necessary it was more his colleague alfred adler who const who was more politically on the left by the way as well who concentrated more on the interpersonal aspects of life and the role of socialization in the maintenance and and in and the maintenance of social of intimate relationships say uh in relationship to sanity that's not stressed much in you if you immerse yourself in the union world you you'd end up convinced that we were all creative religious mystics and that was our that was our essential destiny if we were going to realize the highest reaches of our being and there's some truth in that but there's also truth in the proposition that you can find your pathway as an agreeable person in your relationships or as a conscientious person in your duty you know a union might argue that all that still has to be nested in something transcendent at the outer reaches of personality and i suppose that's possible but um that's what i would say with regards to the limitations of jung's thinking um it's also the case that although he identified at least one of the major personality traits extroversion although the modern version of it is somewhat distant from his original conceptualization he didn't notice that one of the major personality traits was neuroticism the tendency to feel negative emotion he never formalized that idea in his thinking and it's a great oversight in some sense because the capacity to experience negative emotion when that's exaggerated that seems to be the core feature of everything that we regard as psychopathology psychiatric and psychological illness it's not the only thing but it's the primary factor so what is the best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and thinking well a large part of that i would say is is habit the the maintenance the development maintenance of good practices habits if you find yourself dissolute uh neurotic if your tenants if your thought tends in the nihilistic direction and you tend to fall apart organizing your life across multiple dimensions is a good antidote it's not exactly thinking do you have an intimate relationship if not well probably you could use one do you have contact with close family members siblings or children or parents [Music] or or people who are even more distantly related if not you probably need that do you see your friends a couple of times a week and do something social with them do you have a way of productively using your time outside of employment are you employed do you have a good job or at least a job that is practically sufficient and that enables you to work with people who you like working with even if the job itself is you know mundane or repetitive or difficult sometimes the relationships that you establish within in in an employment situation like that can make the job worthwhile um have you regulated your response to temptations pornography alcohol abuse drug abuse is that under control i would say differentiate the problem there's multiple dimensions of attainment ambition pleasure responsibility all of that that make up a life and to the degree that it's possible you want to optimize your functioning on as many of those dimensions as possible you might also organize your schedule to the degree that you have that capacity for discipline do you get enough sleep do you go to bed at a regular time do you get up at a regular time do you eat regularly and appropriately and enough and not too much are your days and your weeks and your months characterized by some tolerable repeatable structure that helps you meet your responsibilities but also shields you from uncertainty and chaos and provides you with multiple sources of reward those are all the questions that i would decompose the problem into the best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and thinking how can you tell if the person you're in a romantic relationship with is the right person to spend the rest of your life with ah you can't you actually decide that rather than discovering it um i might say what i might suggest what you might look for on the way to making that decision all things considered a certain amount of similarity on the personality dimensions between the two of you is probably um to be recommended if you're if you differ tremendously in trait conscientiousness one of you is going to find the other unbearably rigid orderly and workaholic oriented and that person is going to find you dissolute and undisciplined and those are temperamental differences and if the gap is large it's hard to bridge it agreeableness it's the same thing the warmer person will find the colder harsher person um cruel and and unkind and the cruel and unkind person will find the more agreeable person soft uh a pushover and contemptibly unable to stand up for themselves and the extrovert will want to be out partying all the time and the introvert will have had his or her fill of that very rapidly so you want some temperamental similarity across the major personality dimensions with the possible exception of trait neuroticism which is the generalized proclivity to experience negative emotion i would suggest that a person high in neuroticism seek out someone low or very low because if first of all neuroticism is one of the best predictors of unhappiness in a relationship and so if you're both high in neuroticism you're very likely to be unhappy in the relationship and it's highly probable that the higher the person who's higher in neuroticism needs the stabilizing influence of someone who's lower so then i would say well this is based on my clinical observations as well as my the experiences of my life i think it's necessary or at least highly desirable that you find the person that you're with sexually attractive and that's somewhat ineffable uh you can be confronted with two people who are by objective standards equally attractive and or perhaps equally unattractive and find yourself very physically attracted to one of them while the other one will leave you cold and that's a deep mystery and i've seen couples try who get along as friends try to bridge that romantic gap by will and i haven't really seen it be successful so i think you need that spark that ignites sexual passion then you have to ask yourself if you can trust the person if you can if there are activities that you can share with them that would make up a life if you're oriented in approximately the same direction with regard to your goals especially important goals career and children being foremost among them if you think you could come to some agreement about how the economic resources could be distributed or at least how that might be negotiated if you can negotiate with the other person and again if you can trust them and i would say of all those trust is the most crucial component may be followed by the ability to negotiate the right person is someone you can negotiate with because there's going to be differences between you and them there's going to be differences in your approach there should be hopefully they'll be because that means that the two of you are bringing different skill sets to bear on the problem that means that you have a more diverse range of potential responses which can be good but also that there's going to be conflict the issue then becomes can you negotiate through the conflicts and will the other person stick to their negotiated solution and then if you find someone like that and they're of approximately the right age and everything else seems to be in order then in some sense they're as good a bet as the next person and life doesn't last forever and so there's real reasons to get on with it so it's it's you have to understand that even in the best relationships the best relationships are predicated on attraction trust and negotiation and it's constant you're constantly negotiating to to maintain the relationship to expand it and you don't find the right person and live happily ever after that life is far too complicated for that does the intellectual dark web exist did it exist does it exist now do you believe there is something that has or needs to emerge to replace it and with you back to your normal self such as that is what do you think the idw members should be doing now well i think the idw was more did it exist well i get parodied for saying this all the time but it depends on what you mean by exists no in that the people who were nominally part of that group had never come together and said we're part of a group yes in that there was a web of interconnected social communications that were made public among an identifiable subset of people who were active on youtube six years ago five years ago uh so it existed as a pattern of communication or as a social network an implicit social network and then it was given the name uh by eric weinstein and popularized by barry weiss the new york times columnist at that point so it existed as a social network that was named so was observed and then named and then popularized and then of course what happened among us who were deemed part of that was that well we were flattered i would say pleased at being recognized pleased i would say as well to to be part of that group which was very intellectually diverse on the religious front and on the political front although i suppose to some degree it tilted in the conservative direction but even that wasn't that clear certainly sam harris and jill rogan weren't clear conservatives i don't think i'm a particularly obvious conservative all things considered either but be that as it may why did the idea catch on well i think a lot of it had to do with the the specifics of revolution in communications at that point this group of us who were in contact with one another were in contact primarily through youtube and so we were all early adopters of this space that computer-mediated video communication opened up for philosophical slash political slash intellectual or pseudo-intellectual depending on your stance discourse we were early venturers into that domain and there weren't that many of us to begin with especially that many in cross communication and so the idw name stuck in some sense because it did give a terminology to an emergent phenomena that was new and different it was the development of the alternative media that has now become widespread that was oriented around long-form conversation which is a revolutionary concept especially as well as revolutionary technology that you could engage in free-form communication around a set of questions or about a specific topic and broadcast that publicly without any real editing without any real a prior restructuring i still think that's completely revolutionary um so i think it the idw did exist and then once we were named that increased the probability that we would mutually communicate although to some degree that's fallen apart over the intervening years partly because of political differences between members of the group but also partly because it was a very loose group to begin with and each of us had our independent existences that weren't predicated on anything like a centralized administration or bureaucracy so i still communicate with many of the people who were nominally part of that group and i would say feel a certain amount of affection and certainly respect for all of them regardless of how their opinions might have differed from mine i mean i had a sequence of conversations that i felt were highly productive from the purely personal perspective with sam harris and was never obvious to me that i was completely right and he was completely wrong these were very complicated issues we were trying to hash our way through and it was certainly worthwhile to have made the effort and to have done it publicly and other people seem to also found that useful what should the idw be doing now well they should continue doing what they did well and many of them are brett weinstein has a very good podcast and um uh ben shapiro's media empire keeps growing as he incorporates cancelled people in i'm still producing podcasts and writing and i'm hoping that all of us what we should do is what we and joe rogan of course is extraordinarily successful and doing what he's doing and many and many other people are doing the same thing now and so what what what is it that we're doing and what should we be doing well we should be trying to have interesting conversations the interesting conversations that this new technology make possible and to disseminate them as widely as possible we should also be to the degree that the idw was a cultural a countercultural movement in some sense well what we all should be doing and i think are doing is exploring the narrative space the the narrative space of politics and philosophy and spirituality to some degree we're we're trying to tell different and hopefully better stories and and to help other people enact those stories understand those stories and enact them to the degree that they find useful and and so what should we be doing well we should be trying to make things better and telling the truth while we're doing so and i do think that that was in the main something that characterized all the members of the idw is that they were committed to the truth in their speech and in and in their mode of being in in their exploration and i think that was recognized by their audience members and depreciated i don't think that stopped as as well so there was an idw and there still is to some degree but it's expanded greatly there's so many people now doing long-form youtube interviews and and podcasts that space has exploded and and that's really good as far as i'm concerned um that's associated with another question how significant a role do you think social media has played in the disintegration of the political discourse in terms of how it enables people to form echo chambers and also for the social media platforms such as twitter engaging in censorship favoring their vested interests well social media i think has played a bigger role in broadening the political discourse and bringing it to a much broader on bringing it to bringing it to a much wider audience and changing the way that political discussion takes place and youtube in particular and podcasts and i think that's all to the good uh political discussion no longer comes in the form of discourse uh generated from on high it's become democratized and i think that's better it looks to me like it's better i think the new media forms allow for more for deeper and more precise truths there's no bandwidth limitation you can expand on ideas indefinitely you can allow the conversation to go where it will you're rewarded for honest engaging conversation there's no administrative or bureaucratic intermediation i think that's all good it does face us with the problem of what to do with an overwhelming plethora of ideas but there are worse problems than that i don't think there's any evidence that social media has actually produced increased tendency for people to exist in silos um i know that's a popular conceit but the research that i've looked at suggests that it's not really the case that people are not more they're not in a mirror chamber now as a consequence of social media any more than they were when those four forms of discourse didn't exist in terms of twitter etc censoring um well that's obviously a problem i i so far it hasn't become a fatal problem and there are i think the i'm hoping that the forces of innovation and diversity in terms of technological development will always stay one jump ahead of them of the more sensorious types it's certainly the case that the idw such as it is has not been censored to the point of that like threat although that has happened in in some instances and i'm not trying to make light of that i know it's an important problem but i don't see that it's a dire that the state is dire um or more that i don't see that it's irreversible i think that this opportunity for free dialogue that the long form platforms like youtube and podcasts allows a very powerful counter force to whatever sensorial tendencies might exist can i see a way forward from this that is positive sure you know i hope that people and i'm trying to outline that i hope that people take responsibility at the individual level that they do what they can to orient themselves so that they're working for the betterment of things consciously that and and note their counter tendencies like i understand that because life is so difficult it's easy to become bitter and cynical and to work to make things better and to find yourself facing something within that's compelling you to do precisely that it's it's it's it's part of the eternal battle between good and evil that goes on in the human soul it's not trivial but you can attempt consciously to orient yourself to the good and to tell the truth and use social media to facilitate that and insofar as we're all doing that things are going to be better rather than worse i mean i see quite frequently on the comment section on my youtube channel when there's a particularly positive discussion i had one with the cure the dawn recently that was marked for this and also with chris williamson and most of the others with russell brand this is happens to after virtually all the conversations i have with people by the way but those three particularly the comments and there's thousands and thousands of them are all incredibly positive even in when when a comment is generating replies not only are the comments positive but the replies to the comments are in the main overwhelmingly positive and so my observation has been that if you engage people in a meaningful and truthful manner about something interesting and important and you explore that and you bring them along for the ride and you do that with respect and you do that as part of the audience as well as you know the voice from on high then that's a very positive experience for everyone who's involved the discussants as well as the audience members and that that all pushes strongly against malevolence and deceit and bitterness and cynicism and corruption and political polarization and and all of that so that's the way forward it's like love and truth uh that's the way forward meaning the pursuit of meaning that's the way forward and there isn't anything more powerful than than that perhaps you could throw beauty into the mix although it's not so obvious how that's related to you know a youtube discussion specifically i suppose there's elegance of speech and cadence and rhythm and poetic uh discourse and and that that's all beauty so yes there's definitely a way forward be a good person that's the way forward be the best person you can that's the way forward everyone knows that everyone knows that thank you very much and that's enough for today

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 697,527

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: Q-geMoCsNAw

Length: 83min 0sec (4980 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Fixed.

[u/Pondernautics]

Statement Post: It’s pretty self explanatory. Jordan Peterson is asked about the Intellectual Dark Web in a Question and Answer session with his viewers. Did the Intellectual Dark Web ever really exist? Does it exist now? What should the “members” be doing now? What is his relationship with the other members...etc, etc.

[u/eveready_x]

He is looking healthier every month.

[u/Scarcity-Evening]

Hail Lobster

[u/Dark_Tranquility]

Why is he making such a strange face in that thumbnail