Rule 1 - Hierarchies | Jordan B. Peterson

when i talked about hierarchies now it's very important where you are in your hierarchical position with regards to other people in relationship to your mental health and this is a really important thing to understand because you have an ancient counter in your brain and that was the point of the biological uh comparisons and lobsters being one set of comparisons but not only lobsters we know perfectly well animal behaviorists people who know their neural psychopharmacology know perfectly well that the serotonin serotonergic system operates quite similarly across most animals with complex nervous systems and one of the things that it does is track relative status position and in in birds wrens which is another example i used a lot of it is power you know ren's a little bird it's quite a cute bird it sings very nicely and you think it's harmless but but it's not it's a vicious little character and i used to sit in my backyard and record ren's songs on my on my tape recorder and the wren that lived in our backyard would dive bomb it you know four inches away and it was very brave of him and he had a little nest that that was up in a tree and there were some nests that we had built bird houses in in the neighborhoods nearby in the in the yards nearby and he would go like half he's half his day spent stuffing those other bird houses with sticks so full that no bird could get in them you know it was like this is my damn yard which is what he was saying when he was singing so beautifully and you better look the hell out because if you build i'm going to stuff your damn house with sticks and if i see you sitting on a branch i'm going to dive bomb you and knock you off and that's power and that's what ren's do despite the fact that they're cute and chickens do the same thing there are pecking orders among chickens and virtually every animal wolf packs organize themselves into hierarchies and chimpanzees organize themselves into hierarchies and like there are rat hierarchies and hierarchical organization is the rule among animals that live somewhat socially and even those who don't that occupy the same geographical territory there has to be some way of organizing access to relatively scarce resources that doesn't result in chronic combat because chronic combat well look you're ren a and you're rent b and you decide to have it out so you peck yourselves half to death and you're rent c and so you got a little bit more patience you just wait until those two wrens beat each other to death and then you move in it's like it's a stupid solution it doesn't even work for wrens but let alone people and so you know the wrens announced their prowess and they do that with the quality of their song and their displays and and they they indicate to one another who shouldn't be messed with and then there's a minimum of combat and you could make a pretty good case that that's power that that's power but like it's not like wrens get together and build like rent apartment houses and then and then go out on collective worm hunt insects i guess collect insect hunting expeditions and bring them all back and distribute them or or or or make insect farms so that there's more insects for all the wrens they haven't got that far you know they're competing in a zero-sum game and that isn't what human beings do we figured out how to not have zero sum games a very very long time ago and it turns out that if the game you're playing isn't zero sum right it which means that there's only a finite number of resources and everybody has to fight to the death for them and some are going to get the lion's share and others are going to starve if you're not playing a zero-sum game then you can learn to cooperate and compete in an intelligent civilized manner and all of a sudden there's more than enough for everyone now still some people are going to have more than other others you know and but there's nothing down how are you going to stop that and do you want to like do you want to only know what you want do you want to only be allowed to know what everyone else knows you don't get to know anything that no one that anyone else knows because it's got to be equal you want everyone to be exactly the same amount of attractive you know which in if you averaged attractiveness overall and you only allowed each person to be as attractive as the average person there'd be not much attractiveness left in the world and it seems to me that that would be quite the loss you know and strength you're not allowed to have any additional strength or or or ambition or talent or or act or or let's say athletic ability it's like or artistic ability i mean aren't we kind of happy that there's massive inequality in the distribution of talent i know it's it's i know it's harsh and hard but you you can't expect everybody to have every talent that there is and it would be a hell of a sacrifice if no one got to have any talent because it wouldn't be fair and so i don't get the whole equality of outcome thing it isn't it isn't going to work there aren't that many geniuses you know we want to exploit the geniuses and get them to work for us and if the if if the price is is that somebody has more than you do of something well suck it up for christ's sake well jesus seriously man it's like look how much more do you have than most people have you know you need so you need to make thirty thousand dollars a year to be in the top one percent of the socioeconomic distribution worldwide you know you always hear about the one percent right of the evil one percent and they churn by the way because it's not the same people all the time it's like all of you here are in the evil one percent and you think well that's not very fair because i was really only talking about within my country my well that's convenient for you you know or it makes it really really convenient argument for you it's like well all those other people those foreigners they don't count if they're poor who the hell cares it's it's it's it's the australians that matter you know and so no that's that's that's a non-starter you know and and by historical standards you're doing a hell of a lot better than the top 1 percent i can tell you that i read a nice article by a coalition called human progress the other day and they were comparing the typical middle class person who lives now with uh rockefellers in the 1919s and say well would you rather be a middle class person personnel or nelson rockefeller in 1919 and the answer seemed pretty damn clear that well you know if you were nelson rockefeller then you would have been richer than anyone else and there's something to be said for that status right because people do like to have more than others it's a it's a i don't know if it's a good thing or not but it is one of the things that we like and so you'd have that you'd be richer than everyone else but there'd be all sorts of things that you have that now that nelson rockefeller wouldn't have had a hope of purchasing like the antibiotics that he would have needed to stop his son from dying for example you know just as a start and so so i think this this this this complaint about inequality look no one likes inequality exactly you walk down the street this is why i always get a kick out of people who protest i'm against poverty it's like really you're against poverty and you think that's a unique enough attribute so that it was worth your time to make a sign that said that you were against poverty and show other people it's like i've never met i've never met anyone that was for poverty you know you walk down the street with someone who's pretty well off you know and they've got 1920s spats on and a bowler and they're feeling pretty damn rich and a stalkster certificate sticking out of their back pocket and you know there's a homeless person there and they give them a good kick and they say the more poverty the better it's like no you know when people walk down the street and you see homeless people and they're often homelessness is a complex problem like you think well homeless people are poor it's like yeah yeah man that's like one problem they have out of 50. and like i've worked with poor people you know in my clinical practice and poor in multiple dimensions and many of them you gave them money they were just done especially if they were like alcoholics and cocaine addicts as long as they were broke they had some hope of living through the next month but as soon as their unemployment check showed up man they were face down in the ditch three days later right nothing but cocaine and alcohol with all their idiot friends for three days and then they'd show up back in my practice saying you know god i relapsed again well what happened well my money came in it's like yeah money's really going to do you a hell of a lot of good it'd just kill you faster than poverty now not that there's anything good about poverty but it's not like these are simple problems you walk down the street and you see someone who's been an alcoholic for 20 years and maybe they're addicted to methamphetamines as well or maybe they're schizophrenic it's like it isn't unequal distribution of monetary resources that are is the primary cause for that problem and it isn't going to be some sort of straightforward redistribution that's going to fix it because it's way more complicated than that and so and then the whole power thing too it's like look i get it i get the left wing i get the left wing issue and i really do and i i think i get it better than the damn left wingers get it because you know most of the radical types they follow marx and they say well one of marx's dictums was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 112,700

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology

Id: 2s9Pkfva9oU

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020