Q&A with Bret Weinstein, Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau - SFL Regional Conference, Vancouver

so I'm not really sure how to introduce this but you all know what this is so first question any advice for public university administrators who do not have tenure who have been asked to participate in equity and diversity conversations or committees and who want to speak out against post-modernism intersectional ISM and authoritarianism but are inhibited from doing so due to cultivated insecurities Ilias star asks us that question well the first thing you want to make sure is that you know you prepare yourself for that right you because otherwise you'll get afraid and so you this is something to know for you younger people to like you want to put yourself in a situation in your life where you have options when you have to make moral decisions and so sometimes that means keeping your resume sharp and clean and making sure that if you needed to make a lateral move in your profession that you could probably do it because otherwise you end up in slave to your insecurities let's say and that you really want to think about that because you want to set yourself up in your life so that to the degree that it's possible you can you can say what your conscience demands that you say for the administrators I would say don't underestimate the number of people that agree with you there's likely far more than who disagree with you but they're just as worried as you are about speaking up and they often don't hold the positions of power because they're off doing useful and important things instead of worrying about like imposing political politically correct idiocy on everyone else but there's more people out there like you than you think and you'll be giving voice to what's almost inevitably the silent minority and then the last thing I would say is if you're gonna oppose unconscious bias training then you need to go online and familiarize yourself with relevant literature to the degree that you can so that you know way more than the people that you're talking to and then advance with caution and don't make unnecessary enemies and that's that's pretty much all I can say about that yeah I guess I would maybe add a couple things I think Jordan is right that the it's not even necessarily silent support but it's non public support is immense and things are a little different for an administrator administrators are in a position to serve their own interests as they betray their colleges professors are in a different spot my feeling for professors in this situation is that if they serve their own interests by not speaking up in the short term then they end up living under the regimes that get set up and chances are if you're feeling really uncomfortable about a policy initiative that is moving down the pike eventually it's going to target you so it isn't really a question of whether or not to stand up it's a question of whether to stand up now or later and now is almost certainly the better choice there is also an issue though of organizing in a way that academics are not good at academics need to be able to gather when something is moving through a governance structure you need to be able to gather with other reasonable people and plot a course and the very best thing that you can do is figure out how to protect each other one is almost never in a good position to defend themselves but if you stand up and defend somebody else you have a lot more leeway so one of the things that serves these these movements is the fact that people have to defend themselves and they're compromised in so doing if people can agree to protect each other and stand up in numbers they will be much harder to defeat and so figure out how to gather privately and talk about what's actually taking place and you know amp up each other's courage I've found YouTube presentations of stefan molyneux and others on our case selection theory and the tendencies of liberals and conservatives fascinating and troubling as much explanatory value as there may be in looking at politics through the lens of the to survival reproductive strategies in nature it could easily be twisted by lesser thinkers into justification for other izing political opponents in terms of predators and prey humans are not lions and rabbits but our case selection theory may provide some understanding of how the cyclic rise and fall of civilisation unfolds how close to the truth is it that has common values like free speech unravel genes and environment takeover polarizing groups into conflict and how meaningful how can meaningful common ground be created to avoid a catastrophe of unconscious social processes I guess that's targeted at me I have to say I have not seen Mali news videos on this so I have no idea what the hypothesis that's being advanced is I will say that people do not appreciate the extent to which we have not escaped our evolutionary nature people tend to think that evolution is what created us but that it is not an important factor in our current circumstance and nothing could be farther from the truth we do live under novel circumstances for which we are not evolutionarily prepared but the toolkit that we bring to the table is thoroughly evolutionary which means that our reactions to things have everything to do with a program that is not well understood by most people once you realize what it is that evolution has set us in motion to do a good person will have no choice but to reject it it's not an honorable program it is no different than the program that drives a liver fluke or malaria or a spruce tree the the evolutionary program has an objective and it is singular and that is to produce more copies of the genome in question having freed yourself from obligation to that program understanding what kinds of dynamics have allowed human populations to move from one opportunity to the next is vitally important because if you look at our current situation you will realize that we stand at a precipice we have ancestral wisdom that has been generated by evolutionary processes and it is completely inadequate to the problems that we face we have to generate new wisdom and that is something that many ancestors have also had to do we have to resist therefore those tendencies that derail that process those tendencies that make us unable to talk to each other candidly about what's going on so that we can access the toolkit that allows human populations to bootstrap a new mechanism for being that is the place in history we are the only difference between this one and all of the predecessors that looked like it is this time we are all in it together the way we have rigged civilization technologically means that our fates are now linked across the globe and we have to put aside our differences if we're to survive another hundred years I'd like to add something to that it's probably a point on which we disagree slightly I mean I certainly don't disagree with Brits supposition that were driven by evolutionarily determined factors to a degree that people don't appreciate I mean we don't appreciate our own biology because it's so complex we can't understand it so it's not it's not that surprising but I'm I'm less pessimistic than say Richard Dawkins about the relationship between the genome and and actually manifest behavior because think about it this way one of the things that men are adapted to is the existence of the male competency hierarchy and I call it a competency hierarchy because I think dominance hierarchy is the wrong word because it's been around for a very very very long period of time like you can trace hierarchical structures governing animal behavior back about a third of the billion years so it's it's older than trees and what happens is that the males at the top of the competence hierarchy are much more likely to leave progeny and the other men basically vote for them because men in functional societies organize themselves into competence hierarchies and so I actually think that men are driven at least in part by the desire to emulate the pattern of behavior that moves them up competence hierarchies because that's what makes them attractive to females and that's what increases the probability that they'll leave offspring so I actually think that genetic structures and the moral structures act much more in accordance with one another than people like Dawkins and apparently people like Brett assume so you know well so that's what I have to say can I can I just respond a little bit what I would say is I don't disagree with that formulation I think that our cultural apparatus and our genomes are actually built to function together in a particular way and that we are built to solve these problems by various mechanisms my concern is that the novelty of this moment in history due to technology and and other factors is going to interrupt the processes that would normally solve this problem that would allow us to bootstrap our way out of it so my pessimism is not about the human capacity to do this or even the human instinct to do it my pessimism is about the fact that the proper mode is not going to be triggered in time what advice would you have to improve ones conscientiousness for people with attention deficit or similar disorders which directly interfere with this trait anything other than schedules / routines anything other than scheduling well I mean in order to focus your attention you have to have your emotions aligned because otherwise it'll fragment and you know ADHD is a loose diagnosis you might want to take an online personality test to find out if you have ADHD or if you're just really high in openness and extraversion and low in the other three traits because it's not a pathological condition it's just a temperamental variation like creative people tend to think laterally and and and they're somewhat scattered and extroverted people are somewhat impulsive so if you're extroverted and open and you're not very conscientious and you're not very agreeable you're gonna manifest yourself as somewhat attention deficit disorder it's not necessarily a pathology and the fact that ADHD medication works for you is no indication of the validity of the diagnosis because ADHD medication makes everyone concentrate more it doesn't have a paradoxical calming effect on people with ADHD it's complete nonsense so one of the things I would recommend this is partly why we built the future authoring program is make a bloody plan and make sure the plan includes two things where you want to be in three to five years and how to get there and where you do not want to be in three to five years and you need to really think that through like and make both of those things potential realities and then your emotions will align with your goals and increase the probability that the unconscious mechanisms that direct your attention will stay on task and focused and then the other thing I would say is learn to use a schedule but don't treat it like a tyrant that's the mistake people make with with schedules a schedule is not a tyrant what you're using the schedule for is to design the days that you would like to have if your life was optimized and so it's actually a friend it's the discipline equals freedom thing that the jakka willing talks about you know if you learn to manage your time you actually have way more time not less you have way more freedom not less and it might take you two years to get good at using a schedule and following it so specify your aims and your counter aims and and and and organize your use of time and and just practice that you'll get better at it you can discipline yourself it takes a little while but but you can learn to do it I would add something to that as well which is that I think we don't really understand what human emotions are for we sort of treat them as an anomaly that are untrustworthy because they don't necessarily make sense in analytical terms and really that whole system of emotions that actually dominates most of our living experience is a system to program us to function better so with respect to something like ADHD I have to agree I'm not a huge fan of this diagnosis it seems to me that it results from the fact that we're living under circumstances that caused some of us trouble rather than the fact that we're actually broken in some way but what that suggests is that the answer to the question of how to become more conscientious if you're not sufficiently conscientious is to put yourself in circumstances where conscientiousness is helpful to you and if you do that if you seek out those circumstances then when you fail to be conscientious it will generate psychic pain that psychic pain will cause you to de-emphasize the patterns that got you into trouble when you do it right you'll feel pleasure that will cause those systems to be elaborated and suddenly you'll be more conscientious do you believe we are experiencing a Christian Renaissance I have no idea I mean all I can I can all I can account to is my own experience in this in this field I know that for the past year I've been taking on this crazy journey that I didn't expect at all and by now I'm getting emails every day and the emails are basically the the PI there's a pattern that emails are the same and it's I have a vague religious upbringing and became an atheist Sam Harris style in college discovered Jordan Peterson realized religion isn't stupid discovered your videos and thought wow okay and now like I want to go to church and it's like I don't know I have no idea like I don't know what numbers those represent like I don't know how many people write me and how many people who are going through that don't write me but for sure as a person I believe that to dive back I mean that my stake my entire life on this being an icon carver and talking about the things that I've talked about tonight are completely related together I believe that the the underlying grammar that was developed in Christianity especially in the first 1000 years the underlying relationships of symbols is like an algebra and it and it's it's like a mesh through which we can look at the world and I think that to recover that to the extent that it's possible is one of the solutions out of our morass and so I've staked my own yeah my life on that so yeah yeah well I mean it was a surprise to me when I learned say 30 years ago that our cognitive architecture and our perceptual architecture were grounded in this grammar that Jonathan referred to and that there's no escaping from it you can either understand it or not understand it if you don't understand it you live as a mess of internal contradictions and that that paralyzes you in many ways you're a house divided within itself these archetypal stories let's say Christian or not but certainly they're Christian insofar as the West is predicated the West is a society predicated on those stories they're they're inescapable and of ultimate value they're that because they lay out the patterns this is actually the point of them they lay out the pattern of being that enables you to maintain nobility and sanity in the face of suffering and evil now if you don't believe in suffering you're evil then while you don't have a problem but you're not very bright if you don't believe in those two things I mean you're just like you're naive beyond belief and you need an antidote to to those forces because they'll tear you apart and the question is is there an antidote and then and the answer is well there's a best path forward anyways and the idea that the best path forward has something to do with shouldering your cross and taking responsibility for your own malevolence is there isn't a better answer that anyone has ever come up with than that so now are we experiencing a Christian Renaissance I have the same feeling as Jonathan who who then who knows like more than a year ago I should probably let you go on here so I don't say what I'm about to say we're just gonna get me in a lot of trouble I have a feeling but maybe we're going through a Christian Renaissance but we shouldn't it's not a good idea and that is not to say that there are not a tremendous number of values to be rescued from Christianity as there are from any ancient tradition that has survived into the present however I would say if there's one thing I'm convinced of as an evolutionary biologist who has been very focused on human beings it is that there is no ideology that we can pull off the shelf that is adequate to our present circumstances so whatever it is it's gonna be a 3.0 or a 4.0 version it's not going to be the version that we have available to us now and that is that is not to argue that the versions that we have now are not wisdom from a past era they just simply aren't up to the challenge you know I gotta say dr. Weinstein during your talk you come to this event put on my libertarians and you say both left and right libertarians are wrong and then you go up on a stage with an orthodox iconographer and say we should not experience the Christian Renaissance and I kind of feel like you just want to get into a fight all right Thomas Lindner wants to know are you familiar with Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra and oh yeah and if so will we see Chaka when the walls fell universally none of you all man do but so in the Star Trek The Next Generation oh yes okay Patrick Stewart gets stranded on a planet with an alien who looks suspiciously human which is weird how that works and this alien can only speak in metaphors and stories so he for example says Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra which is like this famous bow or two guys to come together to defeat evil and he keeps trying to say this to Patrick Stewart and he doesn't know what the hell he's saying because yes but from the 90s man so essentially he has to learn to communicate with of being a species of beings that can only speak through story and metaphor and analogy based in their own history and their own myths and their own symbols so thomas Lindner rightly thought this would be an excellent question to ask and i'm sure he's very disappointed that none of you watch Star Trek I am as well [Laughter] too drawn Peterson I wanted to ask you about psychopaths and mythology mythology is a conscious outgrowth of our underlying cognitive structure accumulated over history that teaches us how to live people who score very high in psychopathy have measurable differences in brain structures linked to cognition and affect leading to high charisma no empathy remorse and lower impulse control I was wondering how these differences influenced their sense of relief influenced their sense of religion mythology and if so could Marxism Nazism and other pathological ideologies and religious sects represent an attempt by Psychopaths to create their own mythology and erase the history and culture of empathic humans in brackets I realized that psychopathy / pathology are on a continuum is asked by Michael goodwill I don't think that we really understand the neurological differences between Psychopaths and normal people very well I know the literature pretty well so it isn't obvious to me that Psychopaths are qualitatively different I don't think that we formulate the question properly I think that the person who appears psychopathic is likely very low in agreeableness which does increase the probability that you'll end up in prison and very low in conscientiousness and then the other traits very the charismatic type of psychopath generally would be also very high in extraversion so I think it's a normal although rare temperamental variant I also am not convinced that there are people who are born psychopathic I think it's a I think there are children who are born who are very very tough and aggressive and difficult to socialize and that some percentage of them become psychopathic so I'm not convinced that it's genetically determined in its entirety having said that I mean there are very aggressive people who are deceitful who use manipulation to move forward the question is what role do they play in the formulation of political movements or belief systems well I don't I don't think we know the answer to that the only thing I could say is that the sort of person and these might not necessarily be the psychopaths the sort of person who wants mayhem are going to gravitate towards extreme political what extreme those who profess extreme political beliefs because the probability that violence will erupt is higher and there's certainly no shortage of people who would rather that violence erupted that's actually one of the reasons that the current situation is so complex you know among the anti-fatigue sand among the radical right-wingers there are people who are praying for violence because that's actually their natural milieu or maybe they're resentful and hoping for destruction but I'm not sure that you can draw a line in a simple manner between that and psychopathy per se I mean Psychopaths generally aren't group oriented right they're they're more individual predator types and maybe they can find a niche within an organization but it's it's not exactly it's not exactly their normal hangout I would say for Jonathan or Jordan or Brett it's often said that the fight against evil only makes it stronger by adding fuel to the fire but sometimes it seems imperative to openly engage in opposition to or at least draw attention to a subject in order to dismantle it how have you decided when to speak out against things versus simply being an advocate for the things you value and love I have no idea I think I mean I'd like in my case I've just it's just been circumstance where I felt like all of a sudden I was in a place where people were listening to me and so I said things but I don't know when that should be for a person like I until now I've never had any public persona and so I have not figured that out at all yet got a longer public persona though well for me it was when I knew that the cost of not saying something was higher than the cost of saying something because one of the things I do in my clinical practice and this is something that you can practice as a as a habit of thought like what happens to people is that if they're in a routine they discount the danger of the routine now often that's intelligence because if intelligent because if you're in a routine and nothing terrible is happening then it looks like the routine isn't very risky so it's not surprising that you stop being afraid of those things that you've routinized but let's say you're bored to death in your job so and you're thinking well should I take the risk of leaving my job it's the wrong question the right question is there's a risk in continuing with my job because I'm bored stiff and I'm getting resentful and I'm not working very effectively and there's a risk associated with leaving my job and which of those two risks would I rather take that's a way better way of thinking about it and so if you're deciding to speak out you do the same thing you think well okay which there's risk both ways which of these would I rather live with and you know I'm was very sensitive or am very sensitive maybe even very oversensitive to the risks associated with the suppression of free speech because you know I don't know for with certainty how large a social risk were taking right now with the moves especially on the radical left to delimit people's ability to speak and think freely like maybe it's a tempest in a teapot that's that's certainly been an accusation that's been leveled at me but for me personally it was that it was very personal in some sense which was that I guard the ability to choose my own words under every circumstance I would say as of crucial importance and so when legislation was afoot in Canada to infringe upon that right I thought that the risk of not saying something about it far outweighed the risk of saying something about it and so I said something about it but I don't think you can do that you see this is also why it's so useful to really deeply understand that in some sense that you're doomed and that life is suffering you have to understand that and you think well that's a horrible thing to understand it's like yeah it's true though but so like it or not there it is but there's an advantage to understanding it because it kind of frees you up because then you know that sometimes you don't have a path that isn't without catastrophe but you still can choose the paths and that looks like bravery like I don't really think it is in some sense maybe it is it's just that for me I picked the path that was gonna cause me less grief as far as I was concerned and so I also think that you speak out when to not speak out makes you resentful and bitter and unless you want to be resentful and bitter and I wouldn't recommend that because it's a it's a it's one of the prime pathways to hell so to speak and so if you're resentful it means one of two things you should grow the hell up and shut up and get at it and be mature because you're just whining or you're actually being subjected to a certain form of tyranny and unless you want to be a slave you should stand up and say something about it and so you also have to decide about that you have to decide on the conditions under which you regard your life is worth living and then you have to speak up for that and Brent made a point earlier which is exactly dabbed on it's like I also so thought the same thing last year in September it was like well I can either speak up now when I can pick the time place I can pick the matter of an engagement I can pick the topic or it can wait five years when this is way worse I'm much more compromised and the opportunity might not arise again so that was an easy choice it's like if you're gonna fight something that's growing you might as well fight it when you're young relatively speaking and it's small so those are all factors that you have to take into account so I find the the missing element in almost every discussion about human beings and what they're like and why is development that we do not appreciate the importance of developmental environments and we do not appreciate how long development goes on for human beings I think because human beings are so unusual in this regard but the question of whether or not to speak up is in some sense not a question if you've had certain developmental experiences one of the crucial ones is that for some reason you have spoken up and you've lived to tell the tale if you have that experience then you know something that other people don't into it which is how you get from A to B and feel alright about it I would also say something is not analytical about this choice and I don't know whether this is true in general or not I do know that people who end up speaking up and becoming well known about it become focused on this question because in some sense we are all interested in the question of how to get other people to stand up to so that society can move in a reasonable direction but for me the phrase that I think of is it allows me to sleep at night if I don't stand up I mean then I lie there in bed at night and wonder why I didn't and if I do then even though things go haywire I feel good and the point is it doesn't mean that I'm necessarily going to come out ahead but it does mean that I'm ok with myself that I don't have to be angry at myself for not saying what I know needed to be said so anyway I'm sure that comes from early developmental experience but it doesn't have to be early you can try it out try it out on something where you know you can survive and see what happens and you'll develop the toolkit I just made I want to add something because that made me think of what happened terms of Jordan is that I knew Jordan before the whole pronoun thing and I had come to appreciate him and I guess in my case the the the thing that prompted me to speak out was that I saw someone that I could identify it wasn't an abstract thing anymore cuz political correctness is just a very abstract concept that's floating up in the air and I saw someone that I could identify that I knew who was being targeted and so it was actually how could I like it was the easiest thing in the world then to say something because it was like okay it's happening now here and I can imagine that I mean I didn't have I'm not in a university setting so I don't have that opportunity all the time but it seems like in both your cases it was also what was happening it's like it's happening now I to to to my environment I have to I have to speak because it's it's it's my life like it's it's it's there so yeah Helen asks in order for the concept of equality to work it must stem from the idea that everybody on earth has the same value / dignity regardless of lineage talents beliefs or status how can we convince ourselves of our own Worth and thus influence others to see their own worth as discovering one's dignity is an inside job easy question yeah this is this I think is another one of these that has a little bit of a bitter pill to it because I actually do function on the principle that all people are effectively equal that there might be tiny little differences between populations and that one day we might ultimately know what they mean this is certainly not true athletically by the way different populations are good at different things because different habitats select for different things but that's not true of the cognitive capacity and the moral capacity those things are effectively selected for universally the bitter pill part is that effectively we are all equal at birth what happens to us after separates us out and it seems to me that it is essential that we actually provide everybody with an environment that is enriching and allows them to develop full capacity and then they can sort themselves out based on how they decide to spend their their time and effort but I do think at least as a as a working premise imagining that all people no matter where they're from no matter what population they belong to have equal capacity and given enriching environments will attain the ability to do things that are very rarely seen because most of our environments really aren't as enriching as they might be so I don't know how but this one's typed so whoever did that I'm from Montreal although I've been in Vancouver for more than two years now I still follow the news over there from time to time and I was wondering what were your thoughts on Bill 62 which the Quebec government calls an act to foster adherence to state religious neutrality and in particular to provide a frame in framework for religious accommodation requests in certain bodies so for those who are not familiar with it here's what you need to know here's an excerpt of the bill personnel members of bodies and public services must exercise their functions with their face uncovered unless they have to cover their face in particular because of their working conditions or because of Occupational or task related requirements similarly persons receiving services from such personnel members much must have their face uncovered so the fear here is that this bill only targets Muslim women who wear the niqab this vision of a secular society is closer to what the French have in France and it's often perceived as latent racism in the rest of Canada of course the libertarian side of me doesn't want the government to tell anyone what they can or cannot wear but at the same time I recognize that the niqab is a symbol of oppression and it carries value values that are contrary to those of our society how do you reconcile the two is it okay to force freedom on people with laws that in a way restrict that same freedom I can't answer that probably because I haven't thought about it enough I mean I can see like my gut tendency is that it's a bad idea I would say I think probably because it it expands government power in a manner that is likely to be counterproductive in the medium to long term that's how I feel about it I understand why the French do it in France and why they're following that example in Quebec you know it's and it it's not obvious that everybody who's wearing the niqab is doing it by choice but it isn't clear to me that the government attempt to restrict that is going to cause more good than harm we'll see right we have a chance to watch it unfold because it's happening in Quebec it's an experiment of sorts we can watch it unfold we can gather some information time will tell I suppose yeah well I guess I'm to québécois I don't have I don't have a solution for that question I think that I do have a thought and I have a thought about what our societies are kind of based on and I think that one of the the idea of the face of encountering someone's face it's it's a very very deep part of what our world is based on because it has to do with trust has to do with this this capacity to encounter people and so the whole idea of a democracy or a free society has to do with that capacity to encounter someone and and so I think that the niqab like veil I don't like I've never I've never mind like veiled people but my the first time that I encountered a woman in niqab it was very odd because it it is my first reaction it's not even thought out but like my to ative reaction is that it's difficult to see that that's a person and I know she's I know it is obviously I know it's a person but the the grammar that we use like that that Western society is used for ever to to to know that you're interacting with someone is not there and so I can understand the the difficulty with especially the face covering I can understand the difficulty that that society is trying to figure out like how do we do this how do in a society that's based on on trust an automatic trust right that's our society is based on automatic trust the first reaction you have to someone when you meet them on the street is to trust them and I've lived in places where that is absolutely not the case and so it's for me it's a it's a it's a question like I don't necessarily think like Jordan said I think that I either live in Quebec and I know how left-leaning the Quebec government is and how it loves to really put its fingers down into people's private lives and so I also have a tendency in myself to to say back off but I think I was a bigger question in terms of of our be like kind of essential values I think it's it's something that has to be played out and like Jordan said we'll see how it plays out you have said dr. Peterson that there is absolutely no connection between IQ and wisdom or being a good person has there ever been an effort by psychologists to quantitatively measure wisdom and if so what is its relation to life success happiness etc yeah all right well the best way the best we can do is is measure the big five an IQ and after that it's pretty sketchy from a from a personality or psychometric perspective and I mean my own sense is that I mean people get more conscientious and more agreeable and more emotionally stable as they get older and so that might be part of what constitutes wisdom we've also been sort of investigating the hypothesis that part of wisdom might be you know imagine that you're an introvert but that you learn the skills of an extrovert so you sort of expand your toolkit of adaptation and that you're a nun conscientious person so you know how to relax but you learn how to discipline yourself you know I think you can expand your your your bag of tricks and then match your behavior more specifically to the situational demands in an appropriate way and that's something like wisdom but we're a long way from being able to to quantify it and people have tried you know and they've tried to quantify well-being it's something that Sam Harris really is he's an advocate of that approach oh I'm extraordinarily skeptical about it I think the psychometrics are dismal but we're not wise enough to quantify wisdom I'm really surprised I've heard you say this about the lack of relationship between intelligence and wisdom and I'm not surprised that they aren't the same thing but I am surprised to hear you say there's no relationship at all I mean it seems like at least very low intelligence probably results in the failure of wisdom to emerge is that not true in your experience no I wouldn't say that I mean I've seen some I could tell you a story all right I'll tell you a story so I had this client years ago many many years ago who basically presented herself like a street person she wore pretty dirty clothing and she was pretty unkempt and she was unbelievably shy like she couldn't approach a person without going like this like bowing down literally and going like this it was like there was a light emanating from the people that she was approaching and she couldn't bear it and she had come to this unit on a mental hospital grounds that I was working on and nobody had actually really listened to her when she came into the unit and I was assigned to teach her more pro-social behavior because the way that she approached people was well obviously quite strange and so people were reacting to her in a somewhat negative way but I actually listened to her and I tried that for a while but then I listened to her and it turned out that she had been in the hospital and at that point the hospital had emptied itself of most of its residents and the only people left in the hospital were people who were so ruined that you cannot even conceive of it the hospital at that point is quite an old hospital about the size of University that had tunnels underneath it connecting the buildings so that people didn't freeze to death in that cold Canadian winters and many of the residents of the asylum were down there and they were it was like walking through down T's Inferno or painting by Hieronymus Bosch or a collection of photographs by Diane Arbus like it was seriously disturbing and strange and those were the people left in the hospital and she'd been an inpatient from time to time but she well I can tell you some more things about her she she wasn't very bright she wasn't educated she wasn't very attractive she wasn't skilled in the world and she had she lived at home and she had an alcoholic boyfriend who was schizophrenic and was always muddling her head with satanic delusions and I think it was her aunt was dying at home and like man on every dimension of life quality and potential she was in the low percentiles you know and when I listened to her she told me a story about this dog she had she's taking this dog out for a walk and she liked this dog and she was pretty good at taking care of it and then she had this idea she'd been released from the hospital and was holy and then was seeing was an outpatient instead of an inpatient and she'd actually come to the hospital to find an administrator who would listen to her because she had an idea and she couldn't really distinguish between the administrators and the psychologists as far as they were she was concerned they were all high status people they're just all the same and so we weren't really the right people to even be talking to but her she had conjured up this idea and the idea was I could take this dog and I could go get one of those inpatients and I could take the inpatient for a walk at the same time that I walked my dog and that would be good for them and I thought she just blew me away it's like this woman she just had she had a rough life man like it was rough and despite the fact that it was rough and despite the fact that she was not as an intelligent person in the psychometric sense and that she had virtually no advantages that were detectable she was able to look outside herself and generate this act of kindness that really required her to go out of her way and pursue it to you know in against him superable odds in some sense given how unbelievably shy she was and that was one of the first times that I came to understand that if there was a relationship between intelligence and wisdom there wasn't much of one and the other thing I've noticed among my clients is that well among the people that I've dealt with is that it's very often that intelligence allows you to drive yourself crazy and unbelievably creative and and manipulative ways like it's it's quite common for psychologists to experience a phenomena where the intelligent client who's having mental trouble is in much more trouble than the less intelligent client because well first they're arrogant and second they can argue like mad for for the validity of their pathology let's say even though they know perfectly well that it's destroying their life and so I really do think they're they're not they're not self-evidently related so that's that's been my thought and experience anyway so as someone who is very soft-spoken and nervous about speaking up I found myself falling into the position of tool of sjw's I have taken the steps to leave however friends and people who I know are good well-meaning people are becoming for lack of a better word radicalized or encouraged to violence and bully tactics how could I approach these people who still think I'm a member of their group to at the very least to reevaluate their positions or take steps to leave also is it even my place to try to help them leave to all thanks here's the key I think the SJW program is an unconscious automatic program the alternative is a conscious program so what you're up against is the fact that when people are on autopilot they're hard to reach the thing that causes the mind to become conscious to invest in this expensive way of processing things rather than to continue on autopilot is error that is to say when you detect an error it wakes you up so I don't know how much hope there is it really depends on the individual you're talking to but the best hope you've got is to attempt to cause them to see contradictions in what they're saying when they detect that they are generating an error they will have to wake up in order to reconcile them as I mentioned in my talk it's difficult because they've got this hermetically sealed set of beliefs that have an answer for everything but if you can somehow detect a fissure in that thing and exploit it to get them to see that they are making a logical error they will have to wake up to answer you and then you can talk to them consciously I would say prepare yourself to leave and partly do that by trying to think about what your life would be like if you don't leave because it's gonna be hard to leave but obviously you've decided that it's going to be hard or impossible to stay so you're in one of those situations where you know you've got a choice between two poisons pick the healthier one and then I would say if someone asks you why you're leaving tell them but don't tell them to convince them because if you tell them to convince them you won't you'll just raise these defenses that Brett referred to you just tell them what motivated your decision and you really have to be neutral and detached about it and they might listen if they don't listen shut up that's it took me a long time to learn the meaning of the biblical injunction to not cast pearls before swine it's a very harsh injunction and it's very apropos to this situation that you're in if someone is not listening to what you say when you're doing your best to delineate out a truth then you violate the truth by continuing to delineate it you're not where you think you are just back off shut down because they're not ready to hear the message and Carl Rogers for example the great clinician he regard he thought that there were prerequisites to to successful psychotherapy that the psychotherapist him or herself couldn't induce and one of those was that the person who is seeking psychotherapeutic change had to be ready to change you couldn't take someone who was ready to wasn't ready to change and use psychotherapy to get them ready to change they had to already have encountered that error that that indicated to them that in some manner the jig was up and they needed to learn something and if you're talking to someone who thinks that they have everything tied up and they've already got all the answers then all you do is sully your your words by continuing to share them it's harsh but that's how it is muster up your courage take the pathway that you think will be least harmful to you and if you're questioned say why but don't try to convince anybody because all it'll do is raise their defenses now the the fact of you leaving that's actually a pretty strong argument so you're doing you've got your argument best formulated in terms of your actual action and that could easily be sufficient so and the probability that some people who are doubtful will be curious and ask you is high so you then you also want to have your story straight you want to figure out what it is really deeply truly that tipped you in the direction of this that this was a bad idea and then you can share that with them and you share it as like a fallible person who isn't certain that this is the right thing to do but that you're willing to risk it and maybe the part of the other person that isn't completely possessed by the ideological slogan will be awake enough to listen but that's really all you can do so how do counselors break through the victim mentality when clients find power and this identity well first of all they often don't find power in that identity like if they're if they've come to therapy for example they know that something's up what I what I usually do when people are adopting a victim stance is to explore is to ask the person why it is that they construe the situation in that manner you know so first of all it's very individual thing right so there's no cookie cutter answer you you want to find out I mean first of all the person might have been victimized there's a high probability I mean most people are victimized at some point in their life in some serious way and so you don't let that unpack itself and then and then you got to ask the person well what do they want like how do they view themselves in the future and and they have to kind of build an ideal that they're aiming for and generally if you let people think through the idea of the ideal that they're aiming for like cringing victim is not what comes out like they may have learned that that's the only card they have to play but that's usually a fairly easy thing to fix because you can you can use assertiveness training techniques you know speaking in a low-resolution manner to help people learn how to stand up for themselves and you do that basically and this is sort of relevant to the issue that everybody asks about to begin with is like how do you know when to stand up for yourself I mean one way of figuring that out is like maybe you're not ready to take on a political battle in fact you're probably not I would say like do that at your peril but you might be willing to say one thing to someone who's pushing you a little bit too hard you know after thinking about it for a while that would tilt that relationship away from the tyrant slave axis you know because you'll walk away Brett said well sometimes you don't say something then you can't sleep at night and when you're not sleeping you're thinking about all the things you should have said because that's what happens when you sleep like that because you've sort of violated yourself in a sense and you know if you walk away from an exchange and you're feeling resentful and all these potential responses are going through your head then you kind of you sort through those responses and you think well is there one of those things that I could tone down a little bit and then actually say to this person and usually you'll find something so you sort of progress towards that kind of courage in in increments and that's fine like the the trajectory you're on is more important than the position you're in and so if you want to take on the tyranny of the world let's say you start by addressing a problem that's bothering you and making you feel resentful that you actually could take on like maybe there's something you need to say to your brother or your sister or your boss or an employee you know because they're taking advantage of you in some way that's making you resentful and you think well what do I want how would I rather have this be and then is there some small thing that I would be willing to do that would tap it in that direction and you know that that almost always works it certainly encourages you and embolden you and and well encourages you in the technical way which is that it makes you more courageous and so you you start but you start speaking up let's say or you start telling the truth partly by not lying that's really helpful but you also start telling the truth by taking small risks of a size that you can actually manage and you develop the expertise in doing that you know you don't want to like if you're gonna be a good person you don't walk this down the street and pick up the first homeless person that you see and take them home it's like that's not gonna work you just don't have the ability to do that you are not in any position to manage that it's gonna be a catastrophe and it's the same with taking on major ethical battles it's like well start with some of the smaller ethical battles and you build up some muscles you know develop some expertise and everyone knows you you sit down and think to yourself for a bit everybody knows that there's someone to whom they should say something that they're not saying you know and and then you want to say that with minimal necessary force something like that and and you want to do it at the right time and that'll that'll make you a little taller your own eyes and that's a good thing maybe you'll even stand up a little straighter that's a good thing it'll put you on the right trajectory and and then at some point you might be able to be take on like a major battle without getting crushed by it so given that intelligence and conscientiousness are the two biggest predictors of success in life what advice do you have for someone in the 99th percentile and one and the first percentile and the other asking for a friend well I would say look at your other traits you know first percentile and conscientiousness is pretty rough first percentile in intelligence you wouldn't be taking the test so I'm assuming it's first percentile in conscientiousness it's like first you're probably young people get more conscientious as they get older it's gonna be a problem no matter what you do so you've got to learn to discipline yourself it's very very difficult but you know you might be very high and trade openness for example which means you're gonna you're gonna involve yourself in creative pursuits and the interest that's generated by the creative pursuit might be sufficient to keep you on task while you're engaged in the creative act independently of whether or not you're conscientious like there's many forms of motivation right and so most stand-up comedians aren't very conscientious like that's not a lifestyle you could have if you're conscientious most rock musicians aren't very conscientious because for what for the same reason conscientious people can't tolerate that deviant routine it just drives them crazy so I would say look at your other traits and see if there are some strengths but you know might not be a bad idea to make a life plan and try to work on the discipline because first percentile is you know it's gonna cause you trouble we have seen an increase in political polarization and identity politics / tribalism in modern political culture my question is what do you believe is causing this and how can we go back from this so I think this is a really interesting and important point the the issue is that we human beings are built for an oscillation between boom-and-bust circumstances and in a boom we experienced what economists would call growth and when things are growing you can afford to be decent to other people when you reach a point of austerity what happens is tribalism breaks out because the way to deal with what is effectively an addiction to growth that we have when the growth runs out is to generate pseudo growth by figuring out who can't defend what they have and going after it and this is the thing that has caused the worst atrocities in history and the task for us is to realize that the increase in polarization and tribalism at the moment is actually something we should expect it happens at this point in history and the trick for us is to figure out how to break this boom and bust oscillation so that we are not repeatedly exposed to these extremely dangerous outbreaks of tribalism well I I I don't know I I don't I think I agree but I I there's another move in history and a move and and there is a move in history which is that when certain civilizations become actually quite wealthy and quite content they tend to fragment because they they have everything they need we saw that you know in the in the late Roman Empire and it's as if they lose they lose the capacity for their own cohesion and when that happens those who are tribal can come in and Ram through that that like kind of weakened civilization and just like and I sort of bust through it and so to me I get the sense that the the increased polarization in in our society is that it's not just polarization I think there's also just a basic fragmentation and and and that fragmentation is is almost physically real its physical even in the manner in which we develop our are the layout of houses and the layout of like of suburbian neighborhoods where we don't like I've been in my neighborhood for 15 years and I barely know my neighbors and I think most people in North America have that same experience it's like we are we are like a are the tissue that the mesh that's that created whatever it is that we are like whatever civilization whatever is is is is fragmenting and so I think that that's one of the thing that is causing the chaos at least and those and the problem is that those some people who see that fragmenting they're afraid and they then they want to pull back and say okay we need to get something really straight something really hard and then they they they tend to go towards tribalism you know it's like it's beyond like the economic mean I think that the economic the economic thing can can kind of unleash it but if you look at by Maya Germany and you look at where we are now the the the social tendencies in like the the kind of underlying feeling that things are falling apart were there too and then a so then an economic disaster created that crazy kind of so I think there's a there's a there's a quite a quite a few level of things happening at the same time I think I think we don't exactly know what's causing the polarization I I think that you could attribute it to some degree to rising levels of inequality that might be particularly true in the US but the polarization is also occurring in Europe and it's also occurring to a lesser degree in Canada so I think it's something inequality is no trivial thing and it has profound effects but I think there's other things going on as well we we don't know the role that social media plays like I do think that it's working as an amplifier you know you you now hear about every idiot thing the left radical left does right instantly and you hear every idiot thing the radical right does too and I think it radically distorts your perception of how unstable the world is like you know one of the things that was really interesting over the last two or three decades is that crime took a nosedive in a major way at exactly the same time that the incidence of crime reporting in the news climbed to new heights and so people are convinced we're convinced well even now that things are far more dangerous than they have ever been ever and that's not true like general civil society is safer than it's been since 1962 and in 1962 it was basically safer than it's ever been ever in the history of the world and so the media that were the information matrix that we're looking at the world through isn't giving us an accurate sample of what's out there and I think that that and I can see this to some degree when I'm when I'm looking at Twitter is that I get a feed of outrageous things that are happening on campus it's like how god there's hundreds of colleges and universities and at any given time the probability that someone is doing something that's stupid in a newsworthy fashion is like a hundred percent and in in any reasonable society basically I'd never know about it and so then I'd have to sample the environment that's right around me which actually turns out to be pretty damn stable like at the University of Toronto the proportion of people who are committed and Tifa type radicals is like none it's one in a thousand maybe or maybe maybe it's one in 500 but we're looking at the world through this mediated perceptual structure and it isn't clear that it's giving us unbiased information so please tell us how we can tell the difference between misguided SJW types versus the people with evil intent yeah that's an interesting question I will say empirically I don't think it's all that difficult I think they sound very different and I think maybe the approach is to ask questions if you ask questions of a misguided person who's going along with something based on the label on the box rather than the contents of the box then they will tend to say more reasonable things about why it is that they are doing what they are doing if you question it in other words they will defend some version of equity that's actually recognizable as a type of equality rather than some undefinable booby-trap that's been set for you in general the the hardcore bad actors are pretty few and far between and unfortunately it doesn't take very many many of them to set something like this in motion but for the most part the movement is composed of people who are misguided at one level or another and people who are cynical are small in number but important in effect I think that one of the ways you can tell is that you can actually have a conversation with someone who's misguided let's say if you you know if you start the conversation properly you can ask them questions and they'll engage and you know with a bit of care you can actually start to talk but someone who's malevolent it's like you can just forget about that that's not getting off the ground because that just undermines the game that they're playing and so if if despite your genuine goodwill you can't find the human being underneath the ideology then it's best to back away and you know in the McMaster see you some of you have seen the video at McMaster University where I was completely shouted down essentially with air horns and chants and all of that most of those people in there they're just dopey kids fundamentally you know and and their idiot professors had used them as avatars for their pathetic ideology and you know I think while they're 19 years old what the hell do they know if you met them in in a pub like 20 minutes later they'd be chirping away in a perfectly reasonable manner like your neighbor's kid you know but not everyone in the crowd was like that you know and it's the feminists men are the ones I really worry about often especially the bigger guys because I'm not sure what game they're playing but I've seen a couple of the same suspects at a number of different protests and I can tell they've got blank eyes and they're just looking for trouble like there are there are people I would avoid on the street I can I can see them and there's no haven't come there's no having a conversation with those people like in fact the mere fact that you would like to have a conversation with them is enough to demonstrate that you're their enemy because they don't want to be moved away from their their manipulative grip on route to power it's something like that so so dr. Weinstein he came here looking for a fight mr. posh I made a response video to to something you said in the Joe Rogan experience do you have anything to say I'm glad you're asking that I was hoping it would come up so I don't know how many people have seen the video and what it's responding to but the short version is that I said something on the Joe Rogan podcast about there being different kinds of truth that I argued for something I call metaphorical truth that something can be literally false but it can contain wisdom and the way you know is that if you act as if it were true you come out ahead of where you would if you act according to the fact that it's false and I then said that scientific truth is the top truth in the hierarchy and the response was that it was arrogant of me to say that there was a top truth that you know effectively from what position do I do that and yeah I can you want to go ahead I just want to say that's not the argument the argument is that there was a performative contradiction in your in your statement because you talked you said that factual truth is higher than metaphorical truth but then to say that there's a top-level truth or that there's an overarching truth is to use a metaphorical structure to to demonstrate where you're placing your truth and so within the statement there was a car there as a performative contradiction in terms of you have to resort to metaphorical truth to speak of hierarchy because all the language of hierarchy is metaphorical and therefore to place factual truth at the top of that hierarchy is a performative contradiction so that's my argument so I will I will plead guilty to using metaphor to defend my position because of course language is composed of metaphors both living and dead and it's really hard to communicate anything without running afoul of that standard but I will defend in spite of that guilt I will defend the idea that scientific truth is the top truth in the hierarchy and the reason is really simple it's because there is no mechanism for sorting between metaphorical truths that belong to different traditions and are in conflict with each other so in other words if we take to like behave well when you die you go to heaven that's cool you should do that on the other hand if you behave well in Brahman Atman system you may be reincarnated as something better than you are now that's also cool but it's not the same truth right so you can't sort out these are both kinds of wisdom and I think we know exactly what kind of wisdom they are or at least we should which is if you behave so as to be reincarnated as something better or to go to heaven what it will do is in all probability it will leave your descendants really well positioned in their in their culture and that means that your genes which you might not have been in a position to say anything about will be well positioned to persist and spread because your descendants will be well placed so in effect going to heaven or being reincarnated as something better than you were our stand-ins for a genetic truth that we can't say and so what I'm arguing is that what makes the scientific truth hierarchically superior is that it explains all the subordinate truths in a way that is logically consistent whereas if you were to prioritize heaven as a truth then you would have to say well reincarnation is therefore false or you would have to have them all simultaneously be true in some unreconciled l'ile way so the only one that has the special characteristic of accounting for all the others is the scientific truth okay so I'm gonna get into this now so I think that what you just did was nested your claim for the validity of scientific truth within a pragmatic Four work which is what I claimed when I was talking to Sam Harris was necessary because you said I believe that the justification for for assuming the truth of the of the of the mythological representation was its effect on on something that's associated with a Darwinian process right and that's how you used that's how what you used to justify your claim that it was in fact true so in the discussion that you're referencing my point so my point was essentially that there is something called metaphorical truth and that it's a real thing so I was I'm in agreement with you on that where we might be in disagreement is that there is simultaneously a thing that I would call literal truth or scientific truth and by the way I'm not saying that what scientists say is in this category inherently scientists can be wrong but the point is truth that is scientifically verifiable that makes predictions has a special priority in this hierarchy because it is the one objective version it is not contingent on being nested in another in a series of beliefs so what if it's a scientific truth that's metaphorically wrong oh and they're like I can give you an example okay so I read this the memoirs of a KGB scientist KGB agent who worked with the Russians in this biochemical lab and their job was to meld Ebola with smallpox because smallpox is Ebola is not that contagious and so that's kind of annoying if you're trying to kill people whereas smallpox but it's really fatal whereas smallpox is really contagious so if you could get the two together and then develop an aerosol spray you could kill a lot of people and in fact they did kill about five hundred Russians by mistake when some of what they were doing escaped but it isn't obvious to me that that's an invalid scientific pursuit but I do think that it's an invalid ethical pursuit and so that seems to me to indicate that the ethical pursuit supersedes the scientific pursuit with regards to truth clay so I'm gonna disagree with you I would say it doesn't supersede with respect to the truth claim it supersedes with respect to considerations of behavior and policy so I absolutely agree with you there are plenty of scientific truths that are deeply unfortunate and I want to take what you said the first thing that you said okay if you are good you die and you go to heaven if you're good you die and you're reincarnated as a higher being those two things are the same okay in terms of their effect there are restating of the hierarchy the hierarchy religion is all about the hierarchy that's what religion is about the the restating of the hierarchy in those two terms have the same effect in terms of what we're saying is that if you're good you will not meld those two things together and that is the hierarchy the hierarchy itself is the capacity to be above quantitative purely quantitative considerations and to apply qualitative thinking and the whole language of hierarchy is all a language about a movement from from quantity up to quality like that it's its movement it's about going up a mountain it's going up the base and then going up to you to unity and when you stand in that top place then you can look down and you can judge what facts because there are there is an innumerable amounts of fact there's an infinite quantity of facts you can decide which facts are worth pursuing and so that's what religion is and that's what the hierarchy is so if you take if you take qualitative if you take a quantitative tidbit of information and you say that is above let's say qualitative judgment how do you even why why are you even focusing on that quantitative data because there's there's an in infinite amount of them so you have to have a matte manner by which you focus on something and that is the hierarchy and that is the whole language of of the religious hierarchy so so what do you do where religious traditions and what I'm calling metaphorical Truths conflict so let's say mating systems I would argue that monogamy is a superior mating system because it does not sideline any significant population of males if you sideline a significant population of males by having what biologists would call a polygynous system or people would generally call a polygamous system if you do that then you have sexually frustrated males who are left over and inevitably become something like a marauding horde or an army or something immoral like that now wait wait now you're assuming that's bad yeah and so you're falling into Jonathan's trap because you're saying you see you have this a priori framework that monogamy is better because you've already decided what constitutes bad you can't help but lay a moral framework over your selection of facts and so that I mean I'm not trying to trap you I know this is a crazily complicated problem yeah but but the idea that you that that the fundamental idea is that you can't select the damn facts and order them which you have to do you have to do it without applying an a priori moral framework right so I would say I am applying an a priori moral framework I am NOT treating this as us I mean you know we could also look at the behavior of people as a physical process it's equally a physical process as it is a moral behavioral process I'm not doing that I'm being a human being and I'm saying from the point of view of values that probably everybody in this room would share it is not desirable to have sexually frustrated young men roving around being violent because they can't find a mate because some other highly-placed males in the society have many mates that's not a good thing that's not me speaking factually that's me speaking morally but my point my point is not that that's what should come out of this conversation my point is different religions that contain metaphorical throughs differ over what a viable reproductive strategy is in other words Christianity prioritizes monogamy modern Judaism does too but the Torah does not so okay so okay so your claim is that because it's very difficult to adjudicate between competing moral systems that science is preferable with regards to truth claims because there's a way of adjudicating between scientific truths but I would say the mere fact that it's difficult to adjudicate between competing moral claims doesn't indicate therefore that science is a higher truth it just indicates that science has an advantage when it comes to comparison that ethical systems don't it doesn't means that ethical systems are perfect no no so this is one of these places where I don't exactly know what I'm running afoul of and why I think my brain is built around some sort of model that makes it hard for me to understand why we could possibly be disagreeing over this my point is you have a thousand different belief systems they're all built out of metaphorical truths in a certain amount of real truth let's just stick science in with the rest of them it's it's belief system a thousand and one okay now let's say well which of these is best how are you even going to do that there's only one of them that has a distinct characteristic its number a thousand and one what's its distinct characteristic it explains why all the others work so how is it not just by virtue of the fact that it does something that nothing else can how is it not the top one in the hierarchy we have run a little bit past eight would we would you all want to which i'll be interested in getting together for a an organized debate like a little tag team Peterson patch out versus Weinstein Harris sure okay that's a good place to end so [Music] [Applause] um that's it so we have the reception I'll explain the yeah explain the stuff about the reception now it's at 11:28 west hastings you go up Erard until you get to west hastings you take a ripe and it's like two blocks up on your left it's a five-minute walk got room for like a hundred people so you know first-come first-serve I suppose free food not free drinks but I'll be worth it and yeah that's it so thank you all very very very much for coming we really appreciate it and have a good night

Channel: Jonathan Pageau

Views: 194,786

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Jonathan Pageau, Students for liberty, Vancouver, Free speech, truth, religion, atheism, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, debate, atheism vs. religion, christianity, symbolism, hierarchy, religious symbolism, interpretation, pageau, christian symbolism, jordan peterson logos, what is symbolism, how science is nested in religion

Id: 0cLLFSdKZLI

Length: 83min 5sec (4985 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017