Truth as Glorious Adventure | Douglas Murray | EP 376

the people that you and I spend a certain amount of Our Lives railing against is in part because they are censorious bullies they want to tell you and me and and everyone else what we should find funny what we should read what we should say what we should think how we should act and in my mind it's an invitation which I decline these people who are so primed so unfunny so tediously repressive in everything they do don't stand a chance in the long run [Music] hello everyone watching and listening today I'm speaking with author columnist and political commentator Douglas Murray who's been on my podcast a number of times we talked about his latest book not so long ago the war on the west we discuss how a misguided purpose leads to abject misery and hopelessness the cowardice of experts who choose silence experts and others let's say you choose silence in the face of malevolence the psychology of fear and the necessity of willful exposure to combat that fear so we went out for dinner last night to Royal 35 which was very good that's a steakhouse that looks like a classic mafioso place as far as I'm concerned but they make great steaks and um one of the things we talked a little bit about was your burgeoning interest and purpose and so I'm curious about that so the first question I have I guess is why why you think that's attracted your interest that particular topic I think it's because I just increasingly noticed as I'm sure you do that it's the question underneath or miss all questions in our day um a lot of the things that that you and I spend a considerable amount of our time railing against our um things we critique or criticize find holes in push back against but you're always confronted by the fact that you're dealing with somebody who believes that they find their sense of purpose from the thing that we find you know untruthful irritating or worse and you see all of these versions in our day I think of misguided purpose purpose right used for the wrong ends uh mean meaning found in places that really don't give much satisfaction um but but give people the drive to get up in the morning and act sometimes well often malevolently um more often than not perhaps them relevantly but that it seems to me that this sort of meaning crisis is one that many of the people that you and I have problems with should we say are actually addressing I mean in their in their own inept and sometimes malevolent way they are so sort of speaking to adapt well one of the things the left goes very well there's a developmental psychologist named Jean Piaget who is a great psychologist and uh he he called himself a genetic epistemologist actually because he was interested in knowledge structures and how they developed and so he really thought he was a practical philosopher but in any case um he noted that human children as they develop go through stages of development each stage was in some ways a different you could say a different theory of being and that the last stage that he identified was the Messianic stage and developmental psychologists haven't paid much attention to that because they tended to shy away from anything that smacked of let's say religious thinking even though Piaget was motivated fundamentally by the desire to bridge the gap between science and religion which by the way I think he did quite well the Messianic period is late adolescence and you might think about it anthropologically I suppose as associated with the need for individuals of that age to move away from their immediate local friendship Group which would have been the bridge from dependence on their parents to identification with the broader culture and so what they're trying to find at that point is uh something like a sense of universal purpose right and yeah and and that that touches on this issue of of purpose obviously and meaning and you you in the way that you laid this out when we began this discussion you you implied a number of presuppositions of that there are malevolent purposes that there are fractured purposes that there are counterproductive purposes that there is purpose I presume you would also agree that there are shallow purposes and purposes absolutely yeah I mean like there are there are shallow enjoyments and deep enjoyments one of the things that Burke says in his work on the sublime is that of course there are there are the things you immediately know to be enjoyable and there are acquired pleasures and that's just on the level of pleasures and he gives the example I think of cigar smoking or whiskey I think as an example of a pleasure you don't get straight away um and uh so yes I mean there are things that can drive people and give also an ephemeral sense of purpose but the issue of deeper purpose is is one I just see as being very Dangerously unaddressed in our day and I think I I think it's it's uh I referred to this recently in a speech in London um saying if for instance the the left approach you with uh the opportunity to spend your life rampagingly campaigning to provide you know I know Cosmic social justice on this earth now the planet saving the planet um not burning to death tomorrow or various other things and also are driven by things like Envy resentment very very deep deep human instincts in a radical human instincts but if you don't like what they're doing and what they're suggesting you can't just answer on a technicality um and the example I give quite or I gave him that speech in London was you know if if if if you have people telling you can get a burning sense of of of meaning in your life by being resentful uh conservative or somebody on the right cannot simply say well we've got a tax break we've discovered right right I mean don't simply say that resentment is wrong because the alternative isn't well fleshed out well the alternative as Nietzsche says is gratitude well right right right which is uh which is doable but you need to work at that more than you need to work a resentment yeah well that okay so there's a bridge there between the idea of longer term and acquired purposes and practice and work you said that you have to work at gratitude right and so that makes it a practice and I don't think that I think that people generally presume that uh a sentiment or state of mind like gratitude is something that descends upon you rather than something that you acquire through effort and I think that that's a real mistake right absolutely I mean that you and I I think both probably have the same attitude on this which is that we know that you know we're very lucky today to be sitting in a city which has its problems but is very successful um you've got some chance of being mugged in the street but not all that much if you do you can get Justice there is a justice system uh there are people who hear you if you have suffered an injustice we know that all of these things are actually worldwide at the moment and also historically very very unusual so you and I might have quite a developed sense of gratitude because we might remind ourselves of these things on a daily basis I might remind myself I walk past some Patrick's Cathedral this morning I think uh what a building now you can take that for granted or you cannot and you can think even for a second about the amount of Labor and devotion that went into that but but that is something that some people need to be reminded of my suspicion is that the societies will live in now in the developed West you do have to work at it and the reason why is there's this massive context collapse whereby we assume that the state that we are in is the natural state of mankind and somebody I know who well and there's also conservatives on the Progressive types tend to differ on what constitutes the natural state of mankind because the conservatives and I would say the wiser people tend to be more um influenced you might say by Thomas Hobbs than by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and we assume that let's say that um this the state of brutish natural life is or the state of natural life is brutish and short and miserable rather than some pre-industrial paradisal state where everyone lived in harmony with nature well I I gave the example in my last book in the war in the west of his rather delicious but uh Savage lesson that a group of French Sailors learned uh after Rousseau they're big russoians they land on an island in New Zealand and um assume that the natives live in a state of nature uh and uh I think they're all killed in Eaton um the ones who survive the Expedition and end up with a very low opinion of Rousseau right um they loved it the hard way um that's the same Rousseau that led all his children rot in orphanages right yes yeah um but but but anyhow I I think that this this issue of are you talking at comparable deaths remains important gratitude is obviously a part of this gratitude becomes easier to to feel if you know what the alternatives are one of the things they always say about resentment is that's a good opposite I think yeah and um I know I know a school teacher who says that the single biggest thing that will change the behavior of a child is if they are of anonymity an immigrant background and go back into school holiday to their country of origin right you know you if you meet your second third cousins in Pakistan or Algeria or Sudan you have a different view of Canada Britain or America yeah well that that also touches on part of the reason that you laid out for ingratitude the way you conceptualized it to begin with say talking about walking down the streets of New York being unable to compare that with anything outside of New York to this present so ignorance is actually one ignorant problem is that if you don't know anything about history and there there's a there's also I suppose as well as willful as well as ignorance there's willful blindness and and the unwillingness to put in the effort that it would require to be great absolutely so you know I've been considering the Book of Job in some depth recently and it's a very interesting book and and it it pertains to purpose I would say so by the time the Book of Job is written and eventually introduced into the biblical Corpus there's a real transformation in the conceptualization of God and one there's a key figure in that transformation which is extraordinarily interesting the figure is Elijah so when Christ is transfigured on the mount two prophets appear with him one is Moses and that's obvious why that is but the other is Elijah and Elijah compared to Moses is a relatively minor figure and so there's some chapter or some verses devoted to his story but not a lot but what what here's the key psychological significance let's say of Elijah so Elijah set himself up against Jezebel who is a queen at that time a foreign queen of Israel who had introduced the worship of fall into the Israelite into the Israeli culture and ball was a nature clock and so Elijah has a famous dispute with the prophets of Paul and ends up with yahweh's help defeating them and so he establishes Supremacy over ball this is the golden cough he builds an altar he builds an altar and uh challenges the prophets of ball to have the sacrifice destroyed by their God and that doesn't happen and then he calls on Yahweh who sends down fire to destroy the not only the sacrifice but the altar itself and then he has the prophets of Baal put to death which doesn't exactly thrill Jezebel and then he runs away because she's after him and this is where the radical transformational curse so he's hiding out in a cave and uh he he feels he's the only one left who's still an acolyte of Yahweh and the entire you know in the entire Israeli uh Israelite uh polity and a thunderstorm happens a very very violent thunderstorm followed by a very violent earthquake and Elijah realizes that God is not in the earthquake and not in the Thunder that he is instead the still Small Voice that's where that phrase comes from so it's the first it's the first marked internalization of the notion of the deity is that whatever the highest Aid is is something that you can commune with internally that is roughly equivalent let's say to the voice of conscience and so that's Elijah it's amazing now what happens in job is so interesting because in the story of Job God has a bet with Satan it's very nasty story right and the most beautiful it's a brutal story it's a brutal story it makes you wonder why it wasn't edited out of the of the biblical Corpus and the constellation at the end isn't much because well exactly exactly and so um uh job is a good man and God thinks so and so does Satan and Satan is invited by God to have a few words with him and says I bet you that I can destroy the faith of your of your good man job and God says yeah I don't think so have at her buddy and so job loses everything and in the most painful possible Manner and what he does as far as I can tell is that he uses that internal guide of conscience which was now say allied with with the voice of God in some sense against these terrible external forces that are conspiring to bring him down right because his wife dies and the children will die children die the cat will die he's covered in boils yeah and his friends are making fun of him because they think he must have done something to deserve this right so he's like he's like taken to the bottom of reality but he refuses to lose Faith now you might say and and this is where the story I think transcends something like mere rationality but we can argue about that you might say that the logical consequence The Logical conclusion from that misadventure is that job has every rational reason to shake his fist at the sky and curse God right but he doesn't he maintains faith in the goodness of being despite the fact that he's suffering dreadfully yeah and and see that and despite what the voice in the Whirlwind says to him which is the least comforting thing that the voice could say which is uh who a huge quest in the Lord thy God right right but this is you see this is so this is such an interesting issue here because I I've I've watched people in the Deep throes of misery and I can tell you that one of the things that will make misery hell is in gratitude and so part of the story of Job seems to me to be an injunction and that is that no matter what happens to you and that means in some sense no matter the facts at hand that you are called upon never to lose faith in the essential goodness of the being right to conduct yourself as if as if what would you say the cosmos itself is well structured despite the evidence that happens to be being presented to you within the confines of your life and I think that's the same as I think that's the same as the practice of gratitude um I'd agree by the way bring that to a rather maybe um not obvious segue but we were also talking last night about the fact that I saw you discussed recently uh the question of euthanasia and uh the way in which Canadian authorities have been doing this I mentioned to you that some some years ago I went to speak with euthanasia doctors and need patients in Belgium and the Netherlands they're very Advanced on this and I wrote several long essays on the subject it's a horrible subject to dwell on of course but actually one of the reasons why I've always remained exceptionally uh suspicious of legalized diet I I I have as we all have friends who you think at the end I wish that suffering could just stop yeah so I recognize that this if you wanted to be in the hands of the government or or any more in the hands of the doctor than it already is let alone in the hands of the family or anything I'm not sure about that allow the crossover of physical suffering to be equated with mental suffering and you start putting down depressed uh youths as they are on the continent or for example have been giving reasons for a set in Canada absolutely I mean there's a poor girl who survived the Brussels Airport attack she saw most of her classmates blown up her life didn't really recover and she was put down The View laser by the Belgian State last year at the age of I think 24. now apart from the insanity of a society that will not out of principle execute the perpetrator of an attack but will kill a victim apart from the insanity of that and all we know about the genuinely slippery slope in this area one of the instincts I realized I had that I just couldn't let go of was that there was something fundamental about us as human beings it means that it is deeply ungrateful to what we have to give it up even a minute earlier than you have to and that you know in the end I I quite often revert to literature but I think it's uh Gloucester who says in King Leah you know man must enjoy his going hence even as his coming hither and that actually endurance endurance of birth endurance of death is is part of the cycle but there is something that but the resentment you feel for instance when somebody commits suicide and people around somebody who commits suicide very often do you feel resentment as well as deep Guild is partly you've broken The Pact to the fundamental level you've you've you've made all of us see something we didn't wish to see or conceived something we didn't mean and left us powerlessly and left us powerless and anyhow I mean that's so independent of whether or not you want to put the power to euthanize people in the hands of the state which and the answer to that is most definitely 100 not well I mean absolutely obviously if the Canadian government uh can't uh work out how to organize the banking system or passport delivery passport delivery or some of the roads I don't want to give them life and death particularly not over mentally ill people so so when you see people suffering I mean I saw this in my clinical practice a lot is that if you and I saw this with my daughter you know we we talked to her too about this one because she was very very ill as a child and we did everything we could to stop her from being bitter yeah and the reason for that and and this is an interesting it forces an interesting consideration of the relationship between facts and values so she had 40 deteriorating joints and each of them were painful and that's a lot of joints and that's a lot of pain and that was only a few of the things that were wrong with her and but had she become resentful and bitter then she would have had all those problems plus she would have been resentful and bitter and as far as I can tell the way you turn tragedy into hell is by becoming resentful and bitter now yeah and yeah now you here's a fact value problem so you tell me what you think about this so I she could have said to me you know Dad given the facts at hand The Logical conclusion to derive so that's an induction let's say The Logical conclusion to derive is that you know life is terrible and unjust and it would be irrational of me not to be bitter and you know I think and this is the conundrum that you see in job too is that you know when you set up a story so that someone loses everything you set up the story so that they have lost everything and the conclusion to derive from the loss of everything The Logical conclusion seems to me almost pro forma given that you've lost everything is that you have every right to shake your fist at the sky yes but the the the Oddity of it and the Oddity is you know about resentful people or or bitter people is that and again at this point I've made a lot since the war in the west came out is uh we are I think we probably all have the same experience everyone watching and you and I which is we've probably all come across very bitter and resentful people in our Lives who seem to have quite a good lot I mean for instance who are financially secure yeah um I suspect we've also come across people who seem to have who have nothing yeah materially or otherwise who live lives of gratitude those are the people that strike you those those people really strike you when you meet them absolutely sure but yeah but they seem this one of the reasons I'm interested in this is because it seems fascinating to me that you can have that that you can have it an attitude which every socioeconomic thing doesn't actually matter yeah you know if if if if you're a resentful person and you're given a million dollars tomorrow you will be a resentful person the day after or the week after as well right this isn't going to make any difference right well so that so does that does that imply see this is this is I'm trying to wrestle with the distinction let's say between faith and and reason let's say and so like it seems to me first of all I don't think faith is the willingness to believe in stupid superstitious nonsense for which there's no evidence like which is which is the definition that is mainly written through the last few days yes exactly I but I think faith is a decision to act in Courage and trust and I think it's a decision to make that a practice and I think in some ways it's a decision to make that a practice God damn it regardless of the evidence so you know I have a friend who was brutally tortured in a Canadian residential school when he was a kid and you can't listen to what happened to him without it like tearing you can't listen to it it's unbelievably brutal and awful you know and he was devastated by that um and was on the street for a good while drinking and and doing drugs and like tearing himself into pieces and he he had great grandparents who really loved him and he was an inheritor of his cultural tradition a genuine inheritor and so he he made a decision that he wasn't going to live a bitter and resentful life that he certainly wasn't going to pay that catastrophe forward with his children he learned to play he learned to lurk at himself in the mirror again no and he's he's conducted himself as a good man for decades now and that's in it you already made the case you know that you see people who have everything in some real sense and who are bitter and resentful nonetheless and then you see people who have nothing who aren't and so you can take the same set of facts or even an opposing set of facts and derive different conclusions and this points at the fact value problem right is that the facts don't speak for themselves and some deterministic Manner and it seems to me that there has to be something approximating wow something we've always defined as a leap of faith in the positive direction and that that's tied too it's tied in a strange way to something you said earlier which is that you know there are shallow pleasures and meanings and deep pleasures and meanings and the proper faith is Faith In The Deep pleasures and meanings and so yes and I I'd add one other thing to that which is and the end of Faith the the the the recognition of the depth is telling you something yeah well so I've been trying to puzzle through what depth means technically let's say so um in the scientific literature your work is more is deeper that's one way of thinking about it the more other people cite it so it's a dependency Network right so here's a here's the definition of depth more ideas are dependent on a deep idea than ideas then the number of ideas that are dependent on a shallow idea absolutely so it's like criticality right so you can imagine a web of presumptions with some presumptions at the fundament okay so I think that religious axioms are the deepest fundamental and I think that I think we could say that by definition and here's here's part of the reason at least they speak to the deepest fundamental well but but I I think that's part of and this is where it gets complex again that's part of the evidentiary structure you know if you're if you know you have a profound aesthetic sense and so some things move you deeply and in principle those are profound things the the reason they move you deeply is because they shift large sections of your perceptual and conceptual structure simultaneously rather than the shallow things which are evanescent and irrelevant and so and I I think as well that we do in fact feel movement in the depths oh yes I mean you you of course you know it when you feel it um and that's why music as an art form is so extraordinary because it it speaks to a depth that speech can't do right or it speaks at a register the speech can't do if you say why why did you find this particular piece so moving it's often extremely hard even harder if you're a musicologist to explain why there are certain ways you can explain why um certain things to do with Harmony tonality um a phrase of Music returning to its its natural firm yeah I mean that's a very almost all things have moved people are the resolution yeah um however long delays is in fact the longer delayed it is the better the resolution the greater the satisfaction in it but it's not just that it's that sense that this is speaking to us in a register that we understand um and we see but we can't quite reach but it speaks it speaks to my in to my mind music is the closest thing you have to religion not because I want to make a religion of it various people tried that including Wagner but um but rather that it's it's the language of religion and sound president Trump recently issued this warning from his Mar-A-Lago home he said and I quote our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world standard which will be our greatest defeat frankly in 200 years there are three reasons the central banks are dumping the US dollar inflation deficit spending and our insurmountable national debt the fact is there is only one asset that has withstood famine Wars and political and economic upheaval dating back to Biblical times gold Birch gold can help you own gold any tax sheltered retirement account that's right Birch gold will help you convert an existing Ira or 401K maybe from a previous employer into an IRA in gold 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philosophy behind police crime Gordon tape so what do you do in the philosophy departments you play language games so why was it important to do that oh it's absolutely crucial because nobody knew how it happened and they feared that this was one of the components and we're still working that out I mean we're still working that out that's that's why there are certain and you know as you know if you speak to a somebody who teaches philosophy at any University there are several philosophers with enormous regularity that always appear as the philosophers that students want to study like Nietzsche outranks most people like 30 to one uh um if you're in political philosophy people love machiaveli [Music] um some might go for Heidegger or something like that my point is is that they were known to be dangerous thinkers well and Heidegger is a good example is a good example although the the the the actual texts uh give you really very little compared to what you could take from nature if you need nature badly yeah um or Machiavelli but uh it's it it's it's very interesting to me that there are there is this awareness that uh philosophy like culture actually in general which again you can see in the in the visual arts and others uh in the last in the latter half of the 20th century become about not very important things and it's because there has just been this fundamental whack the the belief that for instance philosophy can make you good that art or culture makes you good in fact it's just had the biggest flow and you know the answer in the 20 late 20th century to how did the most civilized societies on earth end up doing the worst thing one answer is maybe the civilization was the problem and a lot of people took that that idea away or haven't had the discipline just made the evil more efficient absolutely I mean it didn't have the discipline to disentangle accurately what what could have happened and what did happen and what didn't but I think a lot I think I I've always been sure that the games that philosophy plays in our day are games of deliberate distraction because people aren't sure they can cope with the questions that they should be asking and that's a shame but it is very difficult well you know I I it is very difficult to cope with that I mean I spent my whole life I I would say probably since I was about 13 really trying to solve the Auschwitz puzzle in all other Auschwitz puzzle is how could you enjoy life as an Auschwitz Garden for me that was an attempt to understand what happened in Nazi Germany at the level of the personal it's like well what sort of person Did you house to be like in order to do the terrible things that were done and the answer is well now and then you were now and then you were a psychopath but otherwise yeah you were like you and me right which means that we're not the creatures that we think we are right and that's a very terrifying so tell me what you think about this so I've I've been spending a lot of time walking through the biblical stories recently because I'm writing a new book which is called we who wrestle with God and it should be out in February and I've I've thought a lot about um the crucifixion story and uh so one of the things you can say about the crucifixion story and and Jung said this was that um it was it was an archetypal tragedy and he had a technical reason for that and and the technical reason for that was that it's kind of like an AI idea like a large language model idea imagine you took all the Corpus of all tragedies and then you extracted out from that a meta tragedy which would be like the essence of tragedy the tragedy of all tragedy okay and so the the essence of tragedy is something like the most unjust possible thing happens to the the most virtuous person exactly exactly okay so that's pretty clear right it's pretty clear that that is the passion story in essence right and and there's decorations on it like you're betrayed by your best friend and not only are you a good person but even the people who put you to death know it and your mother has to see it and you yes exactly your mother has to see it so like all the details are in there but you know what's very interesting about that story is that it actually doesn't end there right because there's a mythological Corpus that's Arisen around the crucifixion story per se that after Christ was crucified he had to descend into hell and hero it and so and the way I read that psychologically is that you are called upon if you want to get to the very bottom of things not only to face the ultimate tragedy of existence right to face that full on but that that's not enough that you actually have to face the problem of hellish malevolence itself and that that actually that's a worse problem than death and that and I think maybe the reason that philosophy degenerated into triviality following up on your logic was that it was a lot easier to avoid the problem than to take on both of those burdens because I don't think you can understand Nazism how can you understand Nazism without journeying to the Heart of Darkness some by the way even if you Journey there you may learn nothing I mean that's that's as you know is the worst possible I mean we in our age we hear people all the time saying things like the lessons of the Holocaust yeah so what are you talking about which lessons and generally right it generally it devolves into kind of banality of like be nice to people like don't don't mass murder people sure okay right beyond that right uh the devil's in the details unfortunately details on this one in fact by the way it is very hard to say anything new about Auschwitz and um you sort of feel everything is being said that could be said in a way and at the same time we know nothing about it but I was very struck Martin Amos who died recently wrote a novel in the 90s it was very very controversial at the time called times Arrow uh everything goes backwards the whole plot of the novel goes time is reversed uh so um if somebody is sick they go to a pile of sick and inhale it and then walk happily around their day so it's anyhow it's a device that that works well at times as an abusive uh parent the child is crying the the parents smacks the child and he stops crying it's a device that makes you able to look at things in an interesting way he but he was much criticized for Demos in the 90s because he does the Holocaust he addresses the Holocaust in the book and everyone said oh you're using it as a literary device I actually think by doing what he did he actually showed one of the very few new insights I've ever seen about the Holocaust which is that the people whose job it is to take the bodies out of the others would give birth to these people from the ovens late in the novel one of them confines to one of his colleagues that he's getting nervous because the people that are there bringing out of the ovens now don't seem right they're more and more disabled they're more and more ill is it worth even taking them out of the ovens so strangely enough by doing it in reverse you get an idea of how it started right you get an idea of how it started yeah well the thing is the reasonable things start have start one thing at a time and in this case Again by a desire on par for some people to alleviate suffering or to um to to view some lives as less valued than others perhaps hardly worth living goes back to what we're saying about Canada today to view I I urge people to think of it this way around because if you think about it this way around it's much easier to see how you how you start but um but the other one that is how things started in in Nazi Germany too right is that because the progression towards the death camps was a progression through euthanasia and I've looked at a fair number of the propaganda films from the mid-30s where the the Nazis were starting to clean up the asylums you know and they would go in and like I've been in backward asylums when I worked at the Douglas Hospital in the 1980s there were still people there who had been on the wards who hadn't been de-institutionalized who had been on the wards for like four decades and they would kind of lurk in the corridors that were underground at the Douglas hospital because it was like a University campus that was connected by underground passageways and it was like Dante's Inferno down there I mean and you could easily you could easily go there and make the case that you know oh my God is is the life of being on a backward in a psychiatric hospital you know wrapped up in a in a straight jacket for three decades worth living and foreign well that brings that brings that whole terrible conundrum up in front of you and and I there's no there's no like there's no simple answer you can jump to there but one of the answers the answer that that is something that should therefore be handed to the state to deal with in some efficient manner that's definitely not a good but the idea that it's a question that the individual should wrestle with is is naturally the case I mean the the that this is something people should think about and we'll always think about as long as people think it seems to me very obvious I was I've always been struck by um one of Elie wiesel's Works uh who is of course in Auschwitz I don't even know the trial of God did you ever read that one no it's it's worth reading and there's a version of it he replays in another of his books I think the gates of the forests called there's anyhow it was something that I think Brazil saw in ashes but there was a night where um in the in the camp they have the the some rabbis decide that they will put God on trial and they visel describes it in extraordinary detail and it's riveting the silence in the room and um uh eventually the case of the prosecution the case for the uh defense be given by very very learned rabbis from Poland and uh nobody could know more than these men routinely knew which is a reminder of what was lost but uh in the end they find God guilty see the Jews never did that in the Old Testament well no but then something very important happened okay okay which is they find God guilty and there's a silence in the heart when they realize what they've done and then somebody says one of the rabbis says okay it's Friday night we need to go and do our prayers that's kind of reminiscent of what happens in the uh in the grand Inquisitor yes when when The Inquisitor leaves the door open for Christ right even though he's doomed him to hypothetically to death because he's no longer necessary well you know in the story of Cain and Abel Cain puts God on trial because Kane is making these sacrifices which are second rate able sacrifices are lauded in the stories but canes aren't and there's an intimation that they're not of the highest quality now Abel offers up animal uh material to God and and Cain vegetative material and that plays into it as well but Cain calls out God and says essentially something like you know I'm breaking myself in half here working on my life and nothing's going my way and your favorite son Abel for reasons that I can't really understand is thriving on all fronts what the hell is the problem with the cosmos you created and God says and I got this from Reading multiple translations God says first of all he says if if you do well will you not be rewarded that's the first rejoinder and the second rejoinder is something like sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal and you've invited it in to have its way with you and so and I've read a lot of the Diary materials serial killers and sexual Slayers and that sort of people and you can be rest absolutely assured that they invited that Spirit of resentment in and have been creatively interacting with it so I was thinking too you know this issue of suffering and death you know imagine that you have a parent let's particularize it because maybe the question isn't what should the state do about exceptional suffering maybe that's the wrong level of analysis maybe the right level of analysis is something like what would you do if your father was dying in terrible death and I would say what you should have done was live the life that you should have lived so that at that point of unbelievable complexity you'd be wise enough to make the appropriate decision and to see your way through but that there would be no way that you could generalize that decision it would only have to be made in a particularized manner absolutely and you wouldn't have the wisdom to make that decision properly if you hadn't conducted your life with exceptional care uh nobody can make it for you that's for sure no function that's so one one of the things that frightened me again as a clinician was that especially when I saw people deceiving themselves I thought well why not deceive yourself if you can escape from responsibility and pain and anxiety and if you can gain things through minimal effort why not deceive yourself in other people and one reason to not deceive yourself is that there will come a time when you're called upon to make a judgment of Exquisite delicacy and if you're fuzzy minded and demented enough because of your own lies that you're incapable of such judgment you'll make the wrong decision and you'll regret being alive as a consequence well that's that's that's one good reason not to not to do something that you're going to regret I mean um I I've said for a long time that there should be a category perhaps there is one somebody watching can describe it to me but I've thought for a long time there should be a category of argument which is recognized cannot be solved because somebody involved in the argument has done the thing and regrets it deeply but at such a deep level that they could never face up to it so and the example I've always had in my mind is if you have an argument like the ethics of abortion if there's one person in the room who's had an abortion you're very unlikely to get anywhere in the discussion because there is somebody who has everything on the the line everything at stake and either they regret it in which case nothing you can't get anywhere in the discussion because you don't want to open up that pit or they have to pretend not to care in which case you have another glimpse into a pit now actually again you and I were talking about this last night Helen Joyce made This brilliant observation about the trans issue recently which was um that we for the rest of our lives will all be facing a certain type of person who cares more about that issue than anyone else in the world because they've done the worst possible thing to their child and they will never concede itself and or to themselves they will never concede it [Music] um but moving away from that negative if I may I mean we get back to this thing of people deceive themselves uh um uh very often unless somebody comes along and says exactly there that's one of the things I'm fond of of Nietzsche about the person of resentment is Nature's observation that the secular priests would be required to stand over the person's life and say you are right there is somebody who has destroyed your life in this world the person is you now our mutual friend Anthony Daniels said that when he was a prison doctor he was one of the few people actually used to do this with his yeah yeah he's a remarkable person he's a wonderful man and um that's Theodore Dell rimple for those of you know listening he's written great books and he had the observation he told me once that his um he quite often imprisoned would have people coming to him saying oh doctor I think I'm uh I think I need some pills some antidepressants why would you why do you want antidepressants I go uh I think I'm depressed why do you think you're depressed I'm I think I'm suffering from low self-esteem he said he would reply well there's one thing you've got right almost without exception whenever he did this the patient laughed yeah because they've been caught out right the point is you're in prison for doing a terrible crime you ought to be depressed that's why it's a Penitentiary that's why it's a Penitentiary you ought you ought to be suffering you you ought to be questioning your self-esteem at this point this is a very good time to do it and you want it for like a decade yeah and you wouldn't like medicalize it away and the state maybe shouldn't help you too easily medicalize away whatever you're feeling in that situation but I was always struck by that story because I thought how few adults I always say that there are so few adults in the room these days but there are so few adults who will stand over the life of anyone and say I'm sorry buckho but it's you and I I had this you know it's so funny because one of the reasons that my lectures have become popular is because I have done that for young men yeah right and I and suggest to them well if you're miserable it's possible it's because you're useless and you're not doing what you should be doing and you you you could think perversely and should think likely that why in the world would that possibly be a salable message you know and the answer is well if the person that you're addressing is genuine genuinely miserable and hopeless and you say well maybe there's something that you're not doing quite right then they now have an Avenue of movement forward right and if you say instead well it's no wonder you're miserable because the cosmos and the patriarchy yeah are structured such that you're you're and you're a victim of circumstance without recourse I I had this reason I was on a program the other day where um there was a a black British woman on who claimed to have suffered Hurt From Slavery and I I I'm fed up with that claim now I said you've not suffered anything you haven't suffered any hurt and no one alive has caused you the hurt now of course a lot of people will say who are you to say that you're just a another privileged white guy or something but I actually think it's necessary to say that to people because uh actually it's Clarence Thomas points out in his recent supreme court judgment on affirmative action um if you don't get that out of the way the rest of history is going to be a competitive grievance competition and so you actually need people to say no I I'm not I'm not falling for this you may have fallen for it you may have decided that everything in your life would be sorted out if reparations were paid to you by the state of California I'm not convinced that would help you I think you'd have a fantastic shopping binge for a few days and be as un unpleasant and unhappy a week from Tuesday as you are today and um but but it's it's very striking that there's something missing in in our societies of people saying that of just saying you know we're not going along with your self-perception and that's on so many things we're not going along with your with your self-perception and agreeing to it not just because it's bad for you but it's bad for all of us it's about yeah it's bad for them and for all of us simultaneously yeah and you know that one of the things I've been really shocked by I would say with regard to my fellow therapists is there absolute cowardice and almost universally so um yeah I assume how it is on behalf of almost everybody so I I don't expect heroism in our ages it's wonderful when it happens but you should I think I think it's particularly egregious on the therapeutic front with regard to self-identity yeah because every so here's here's two things that every psychologist who's actually trained knows if if they are worthy of the name the first is identity is negotiated by anyone who isn't to like literally by three you negotiate your identity and if the whole the definition of being a civilized person is that you negotiate your identity and you do it constantly I mean you and I sitting here in open dialogue are negotiating our identities right because we're attempting to modify the manner in which we perceive ourselves and present ourselves as a consequence of exchanging information we couldn't even talk well of course the people who pushed the self-identity Mantra also claim that there's no such thing as free speech right there's there's no honest exchange of ideas between men of of good faith let's say or Goodwill so so that's one thing psychologists know and they absolutely know this and part of what you do as a psychologist if you have any sense at all is you teach people how to negotiate their identity more effectively and so the second thing that psychologists know is that you expose people voluntarily to the things that frighten them yes instead of protecting them you know in this trigger warning fashion and all psychologists know that that that kind of over what that overprotective attitude is definitely a pathway to Psychopathology and yet no one will stand up and say that it's it's I I have a habit which I learned from a late friend was a journalist which I've tried to stick with throughout my adult life of always going to one dangerous country a year and um I I do it for lots of reasons one is just curiosity in the world uh another I suppose is that it is one of to go about what we're saying earlier one of the best ways to actually feel a sense of gratitude about where you're from and what the good things are in your success yeah because unless you've seen a society at War um you don't understand quite how blessed State pieces I mean um uh and how easily what happens to other people could happen to you um but there are other reasons to do it and what a miracle it is that that isn't happening all the time everywhere absolutely it has it because that's that's the state of nature that was right yes absolutely I mean um that's one of the things that pink is right on in the blank slate is uh deaths in tribal societies pre-modernity way higher the the violent deaths way higher even than the average violent deaths of a European male in the 20th century so right right um so yes to some extent this is this is a natural state but I I also do it just partly because I I learned so much about about how societies deteriorate um and uh and as a as a sort of very very minimal final thing you always find out something about yourself it's it's never the purpose of doing it but there is well somewhere well okay so so here's here's a very interesting clinical finding um it was a revolutionary Discovery in the 50s 50s that's about right so do psychoanalysts following Freud would walk people through what they wanted to avoid and they did that autobiographically right by going back into the past and there's some utility in that the behaviors came along and what they did instead was expose people to what they were afraid of Here and Now so for example if you were afraid of balloons which is rare but does happen upon occasion um a therapist would sit you down have you relax run you through a relaxation exercise maybe show you a picture of balloon ask you to imagine it then put a balloon you know 15 feet away and then took 10 feet away and eight feet away and then a balloon on your lap and maybe that takes a number of sessions and then the fear would disappear now the theory was the reason the fear disappeared was because you paired the exposure with relaxation right okay but then it was discovered that you didn't have to pair it with relaxation and it still worked okay you could be in a hyper you could be in a sort of hyper as long as you're the way I stay as long as you're doing it voluntarily interesting you have to do it voluntarily right okay so then the psychoanalysts rejoined her to the behaviorists was um you know the the person isn't really afraid of a balloon or an elevator they're really afraid of death and if you eradicate the specific fear it will just move Locale because you're not dealing with the root cause okay now that also turned out to be wrong because what happened is if you exposed people to say three things they were afraid of they would go out voluntarily voluntarily and expose themselves to all sorts of other things that they were afraid of so you didn't make them less afraid you made them braver which is very different yeah right and so what you did with exposure therapy was what it was that you transformed people's conceptualizations of themselves you transformed their conceptualization of themselves from passive victim of malevolent circumstances to active Contender with challenge seriously maybe I've been doing maybe I've been um on wittingly doing this to myself all my life um I remember the first time I I was covering a conflict uh there were Rockets landing and it was as it actually is it's quite exhilarating if if you if you're in a it isn't if you have no choice to be there a war correspondence I think it's frame to see a problem of the job that you can find it existing well that's that distinction between voluntary and involuntary too and the Winston Churchill famously said there's no greater feeling than the feeling of being shot at without resolved um it's an enormously uh uh enlivening uh thing that you feel you think not today death not today um and um but the first time I was ever in a in a conflict where there were Rockets Landing I funnily enough when I got back from the area where it was happening it got back on the first evening my immediate Instinct was this very strange one to me which I thought about a lot afterwards which was that I thought I could look my grandparents in the face now what I mean by that is I'm all my grandparents are long dead by then but what I meant was they'd all gone through the blitz or the second world war right um and I'd always wondered how on Earth you coped with that and I suddenly sort of thought oh I see it's like that so I would say what you did okay so there's a mythological tone to all of the things that you just related so the first thing you said was that perhaps you had been doing this unwittingly in some sense your whole life well one of the things that psychologists eventually figured out was that well people are unwittingly doing this their whole life because that's how you learn yes the way you learn is by facing an optimized challenge yes voluntarily and that pushes you slightly beyond your current limits now that's that's where meaning emerges right right that's so meaning is the Instinct that puts you on the edge of transformation yeah so you think I'm going to learn something from this yes you're gonna and you may learn something about the world or where you are in the world but you may also learn something about yourself or change as a consequence right and so the Instinct of meaning actually puts you on that it puts you on the edge of chaos okay but the grandfather so so that's the heroic path by the way but the grandfather comments extremely interesting too the grandparent because one of the tropes mythological Trope is that if you go into the belly of the Beast you can rescue your forefathers from the belly of the beast that's Pinocchio in the whale well that's what you did in some ways when you I think I just wanted to know if I would if I could sort of stand uh I I just always thought that that generation the heroism what they went through right I just thought you know you always have that thing of what would one do in that situation how would one behave you know um and and even just getting the smallest glimpse of okay I think I could hold it together that means that you you Kindle that inside you the spirit that you saw in your grandparents that you admired you kindled inside by that exposure and you said that brought you to a position of you know not full equivalence but at least partial equivalence right well so here's part of what happens so if you expose yourself to optimize challenge well first of all you gather more information so these countries you went to eh I mean you're learning about the countries you're learning about yourself that's pure information but here's something else that happens this is so cool so if you put yourself in a new situation new genes turn on inside you and they activate parts of you that have not yet come alive yes right right no kidding so then you might say so there's there's a there's a maze at shark Cathedral I think it's a chart and the there's an idea in the Maze so you enter one side of the maze it's about 40 feet across and then you have to walk every quadrant Northwest south and north east south and west every quadrant and if you've walked every quadrant you get to the center the center is also the center of the Cross right so that's the place of maximal suffering but there's an idea there and and Redemption there's an idea there and the idea is that if you go absolutely everywhere every bit of you will turn on right and so and a fair bit of that is right right exactly and well and you know this we know this is true and you think well how could it be any other way right because and you know too these experiences that you had where you're voluntarily confronting what's dangerous that changes you in a way that can't be attained by anyone who hasn't had that experience right right if you haven't pushed yourself to your limit yeah especially I would say with regard to the fear of death then you there's a change that hasn't occurred within you and I would say it's a fundamental change of maturation so it's definitely I mean it's definitely an enormous enlivening feeling uh I would say um and uh so what what do you think was at the core of the enlivening element of it I mean you said it was hardly having cheated death but that is but that's not all it is right because you also I I had a client who was terrified of death enough to dose herself with sleeping pills constantly to be unconscious and she had a dream and in Her Dream the figure she saw was a dwarf in a forest told her that unless she could learn to work in a slaughterhouse she wouldn't be able to graduate from University wow and so so we we talked to stream through and I said well I don't think I can arrange to have you visit a slaughterhouse she wouldn't eat meat by the way and she couldn't go into a butcher store wow so I said I don't I can't get you into a slaughterhouse but maybe you could think of something that you could do that um would be equivalent why don't you think about it for a week and so she came back and said I think I'd like to see an embalming so I called up some furniture Funeral Parlor directors like right then and there and I said I have this client who's terrified of death you guys deal with death all the time she has this sense that if she came and saw embalming that it might be helpful to her and we'd also like to talk to you about how the hell you do this because you face death every day and like she can't face it at all and so and they were very very understanding and just said yes and so we went there two weeks later and I'm very squeamish about that sort of thing as well you know about about that kind of gross physicality let's say and so it wasn't something that you know I would just wrap off as if it was nothing but she my client was absolutely terrified but it was so interesting and this is part of the enlivening elemental so we're in the hallway separated from the surgical room so to speak where the embalming was taking place which is a very visceral occurrence as you all the bodily fluids train for example and yeah and for the first first of all she went to the funeral parlor second she sat in the hallway third when this first started she was looking to decide hey but she do this and then every time she did that she'd look a little longer until finally she was watching it completely and then she said you know can I go in the room can I put my hand on the body they put her on a glove and she did that you know and now what happened to her and this was so interesting because she had a lot of neurotic concerns and part of them reflected her own sense of her own weakness she came out of that knowing that she was a lot less weak than she thought because she could do it right she didn't think she was that sort of creature and it turned out that she was that sort of creature and quite quickly this the learning that about yourself yeah I mean is so to be encouraged so to be encouraged because the first thing that happens I'm struck by your example the first thing that happens is looking away that's that's the most natural of instincts and we all have it I mean you'd have to be have something slightly wrong not to uh but to train yourself to be able to look at the thing that that terrifies you whether it's death or something ugly um is uh it seems to me at any rate that it's it's one of the one of the things that drives me is that if you look at enough and as long as you don't tip over into the void if you look at enough you can get to that place of Stillness um there's an uh a metaphor that's always on my mind from the end of evil and War's Decline and fall where a very curious man who's uh an architect in the book and a rather minor figure is at the very end when it's the whole plot but at the very end after all the terrible things have happened to various people and the human comedy of the whole disaster of the novel uh the one the main characters sees this architect there's some serious figure sitting um uh watching this Fairground ride and the fairground ride is one where uh uh this this thing spins round and there's a net around the outside and people pay a shilling and they go on they try to climb up the side and they're flung to the sides all the time and I think his name is Miss Dr Salinas is just watching this there's all the people and he says how how um how how loud they laugh and how they cackle and how they get flung around and how they and they all try to get to the top and he says occasionally the circus pays for somebody who knows how to do it to get to the top and sit there and he says that's where you want to be because at the top in the center you totally still that's there's no centrifugal force there okay so I have I have a I'm curious about something you you made a comment earlier about the fact that your more natural presumption now is to assume that cowardice will be the order of the day yes okay so there's something about you that's always struck me and like I've met a lot of people over the last six years particularly and I've met a lot of people who have remained silent when they shouldn't and I've met a few people who will speak but they're rare you know I've probably met 50 or 100 now who will speak and you're one of them and I and hersley is another one right and there are these people who Jonathan height is another one right they don't remain silent no and so now you talked about a pattern through your life of going farther and going places that challenged you like and you talked about the fact that you have seen cowardice as the order of the day especially that willingness to stay silent okay you're not one of those people do you as far as I can tell do you know do you know why and does it is it tied into that proclivity is it tied somehow into that proclivity to push um well naturally I didn't think of myself as a particularly Brave person there's a lot of people I know who I do think of as brave but um uh I I I've always wanted to make sure I didn't uh not say what I saw I mean that's why it would be so embarrassing humiliating self-umiliating I I couldn't live with myself if I if I yeah but I don't think anybody can live with himself if they do if they fail to do that um well so so the fact the fact that you observe well maybe you it may be that people don't know that so explicitly like my experience has been that everyone who remains silent when they have something to say pays for it oh right well he so I I somebody said to me years ago uh that they thought that what motivated me with the head of a very I have a very low tolerance threshold for lies I just don't like them I I hate being told um and the particularly big big lies on the you know sort of let's all pretend that we now agree to this thing today that we didn't agree to yesterday I I can't do it I just won't do it and I suppose one of the things that also motivates that is that the people I liked and the people I admire are like that I mean Ayan I've known ion for 20 years and I mean actually somebody somebody said something interesting I think it's my 40th birthday that said are you aware you've surrounded yourself with courageous people and I said I wasn't actually but actually it was true around the table there were some people like Ayan or a friend of mine was very brave in the conflict in Northern Ireland and and other people you know academics I know who I like who I think you know and I actually hadn't particularly noticed it but it's true um now there's two two lessons I took from that one is um I just like courageous people I like people who say what they think and they're much more fun of course and they're much better friends and you have the most time and you actually get somewhere because you don't have to all lie to each other yeah and all that sort of thing you actually get to somewhere in the discussion and that's that's a pretty good idea the second thing is probably I I thought actually maybe it is deliberate because I probably recognized rightly I think that if you uh surround yourself or near courageous people it's more likely you'll be courageous yourself so for instance um you know sometimes people say Well if you know you said this thing and everyone hates you for it and I genuinely I don't care now why do I not care because I only care about a small number of people who whose opinion I care for um and um and I I don't understand why why everyone cares about the opprobrium of millions if you have four people three people who you admire and who you know in my EU and you're fine I don't think it I I I I okay so so let me ask you about that admiration you know so I've thought a lot about about admiration because I think admiration is what it's a manifestation of the religious instinct yeah so so because to admire someone is if you admire them enough you're awestruck in their presence yeah that would be the ultimate manifestation of admiration and awe is a primarily a primary religious experience right it's the experience of seeing something that's beyond you in a manner that's compelling right yeah and so and you said you admire people who tell the truth yes and so what I would what I'm curious about if I said to you is there any difference between that and the religious Proclamation let's say that the truth will set you free right that's part of the doctrine of the word right and so I mean we and I have had discussions and and more more and more of them with people like Jonathan pajo about what um a moral system has to be grounded in right and the humanist types we sort of began our conversation today with this the humanist types think that you can ground morality in something like a system of facts and see I don't I don't think that's true and I think it's actually technically untrue I think that we ground morality in something like God it's something like the religious Instinct and and I I'm trying to figure that out technically like certainly one of the things that orients who morally is the sense of admiration yes well then you might ask yourself what provokes admiration appropriately and naturally and we can say well courage does courage does definitely encouraged us right should yes but but I think it almost invariably does like yes you have to work really hard as we are in our age to discourage people fire and courage right right well and you even see among bad guys let's say like if you look at mafioso movies I mean the the mafioso villain types are at least courageous yes right yes so they have their own system of ethics and they have their rights yes yes yes and so even though you might not say that that's the most profound set of orienting guidelines because it's criminal in this orientation it's not nothing and there is a certain amount of courage and you you could also point out and and this is sort of what would you say it comment on the necessity of integrating the shadow is that someone who's forthright enough to be a mafioso at least isn't terrified into dependent neuroticism yes right right right so there's kind of there's a hierarchy of virtue and the forthright bad guy isn't the lowest entity right so so so there are valid markers for admiration right courage um I think Brotherhood in some sense is also that's something you also alluded to you know you said that you noticed that you had aggregated around you um people who were willing to speak their minds and I think the reason for that likely is is that if you speak your mind and you pay the price and you reap the benefits of that pay the price for that reap the benefits other people who've done that notice yes and you find them and they find you I mean that certainly that's happened as I've risen to notoriety yeah so and that's also a huge reward yes right absolutely so is is it is the opportunity to meet people in different spheres you've done great things and that's I mean that's an enormous uh uh benefit of the life I live and I'm sure the life you live is is incalculable uh you know a gift of of meeting people who've done extraordinary things and from a bewildering array of backgrounds you know I mean it's like I don't know my last circle of people who we know and are friends with I think but I think there's nothing they have in common other than probably a similar desire to say the truth is they see it to do so in the face of whatever comes their way and that might be uh the only park or uh it might be there's no commonality of background experience and by the way then that's one of the things I would say is that we're to encourage people is the the in that case like you can do it too yeah right and you know I I one of the reasons I'm sort of rather actually optimistic about the Next Generation coming along in America and in the western democracies in general is that I think they've I think the smarter ones I'm sure you see this all the time the smarter ones have all seen through the the dogma of the day and they don't like it and although there are these sorts of Prim sensorious you know tittle tattle Telltale people in their 20s and some prophetic people in their 30s and 40s and so on nevertheless the people coming up in their teens and early 20s now have seen through those people they don't like them they're right not to like them um and so actually that's why they look to people like Joe Rogan right and and they're they're right to look they are they are because he's very successful very funny very smart very tough very tough lives the life he wants to live as you know if you go to Joe's Studios pretty much what I say what at the age of about 15 you thought you'd do yeah if you've got some cats yeah yeah that's that's really great I mean you know and um I think that the more that happens the more people see there's a way through the the more we'll have the sort of aggregated okay so so so let me ask you this that you know you said that you can't for one reason or another you can't or you have decided not to abide lies and so I would ask you to what degree has the adventure of your life that's good way of thinking about it being a consequence of exactly that so I've been here well let me let me I've started to understand you tell me what you think of this so you can use language two ways you can either decide what you want from someone before you talk to them and then you can craft every word that you utter in order to extract that that's instrumental use of language I've talked to lots of journalists who do that for sure or you can just sit down and you can say what you think and see what happens and those are very very now this is what Rogan does is in his interviews he just says what he thinks and he sees what happens now the advantage to the former strategy is that in principle you get what you want but the disadvantage is well you might have to manipulate people and they'll catch on to that and and the second in more profound disadvantage is what the hell do you know about what you want you know it's not like you're transparent to yourself yes and so you might have some bloody scheme that you think you're seeing through and you might manipulate to get it but that doesn't mean it'll be good for you when you get it and so you could contrast that instead with a different proposition which is and I think this is a correct proposition and I think it's the maybe the fundamental religious proposition possibly is that whatever happens if you are acting in accordance with the truth is the best thing that could have possibly happened regardless of how it seems to you at the time and and so that's you know that's a dubious proposition but here's one that's not so dubious I think although I do think it's true if you have to let go of the consequences of your words because you're just going to let the cards fall wherever they're going to fall you get to have an adventure because you don't know what the hell's going to happen absolutely yeah okay so you think absolutely okay absolutely why do you think that the the the of course it's the most exciting thing because you'll actually be often on an adventure which is predicated on an idea which I believe to be true which is that the point of Truth is not just the sort of it's not a game it's to get you somewhere you know um and it's like the search for meaning you either you either you either devolve I think I said this with you and Jonathan before you are you either devolve into the sort of idea that we're meaning seeking creatures but there's no meaning or you say we're meaning seeking creatures and there's a there's a reason for that and the reason is it's because we're hoping to get somewhere you hope that if you if you you know it sounds like that's life huffle but I mean if you trade in truth if you if you if if you if you follow your instinct towards truth you're bound to make some missteps you're bound to get some things wrong as everybody does but the orientation of where you're going to is correct it is correct and at the end of it whatever it was you were meant to be in your life is more likely to be what you'll be than if you set off in error and deliberately suppress what you believed and what you wanted so so here's a here's a corollary to that also I would say is that if you say what you think then it's you saying and you thinking and that means that whatever happens is your life but if you engage in falsehood yeah then I think you're the devil's puppet fundamentally but and the reason I think that is because if you're engaging in falsehood then whatever it is that you're saying and thinking it isn't You by definition because it's not it's not what you think and you you can you can you can you can tease that out of people rather like Philadelphia did without those prisoners you could tease it out with people we Supply people like Joe or something in comedy because my late friend Clive James had his beautiful saying he he wrote Somewhere he said uh he said common sense and humor are the same thing moving at different speeds humor is just common sense dancing huh now um I love this this quote and it one of the things that says gesture about it is a comedian or indeed anyone any of us who tell a joke if it's a good joke irrespective of whether or not it's offensive to some person people laugh and the laughter is the recognition that what has happened is is real it's reality dancing um it's reality riffing on itself at a highest transcending itself absolutely and one of the greatest things why I'm very confident that if you have enough comedians in our society who are good we might get out of yes because those are the 10 good men inside them by them right who dare to tell the truth exactly and and and they and the the fact that the RAS might need to rely on comedians will tell us something about our age but nevertheless uh uh if you make somebody laugh about the thing they recognize it and they laugh quite often there's a type of person who will then uh pull back because they've basically admitted that they also recognize this thing to be true because otherwise they wouldn't have found it funny they wouldn't be able to laugh about it because laughter wouldn't be the response the responsibility well it's interesting quite often they laugh and then yeah yeah yeah well it's interesting too there and this points to something like an instinct for the truth because one of the things I was really struck by when I had little kids was how early their sense of humor developed it's ridiculously early like it's there at nine months for sure yeah if you you can coax it out of them but certainly by the time kids are two they're doing ridiculously Clowny things all the time and that and it struck me because it's pre-linguistic even it's so deep that sense of humor and I I do think it's part of the orientation towards truth it's the it's the playful orientation towards truth well that's why according to my name is earlier but I mean he he famous he said well I said the reason you should be suspicious of people with no sense of humor isn't just they don't know what's funny they don't know what's serious either and um and that is yeah well the funniest comedians are the ones that can take the most serious thing and make it funny oh yeah absolutely and which is why I dare to do that the Monty Python troop was great at that yeah I mean that's why everything is also dangerous to be a comedian in this stage because everyone can take it out of context the other day um and pretend that you're doing something you weren't but if if in a good faith environment uh yes the these are the the people who can point to things we all know to be true we get to laugh at them and with them and this this reveals something very important in our ear it seems to me which is the people that you and I spend a certain amount of Our Lives railing against and we should get onto some positives but the the railing against is in part because they are censorious bullets they want to tell you and me and and everyone else what we should find funny what we should read what we should say what we should think how we should act and in my mind it's an invitation which I decline but in that case these people who are so primed so unfunny so tediously repressive in everything they do don't stand a chance in the long run yeah if 10 comedians can take down a million social justice activists and I reckon they can then I I bet long on the comedians we're gonna move very quickly to the Daily wire plus side and I'll ask you about this about the development of that sense of Truth um let me see here what else I'd like to ask you about okay so let's go back to what we discussed right at the beginning which is this this idea of purpose so you said that meaning gets you somewhere yeah right okay so that I think that's exactly right by the way my I called my first book maps of meaning because I understood I came to understand that meaning was actually a navigation guide right yes right and yeah yeah and and I actually I actually think that's technically true because meaning manifests itself is the Instinct that tells you that you're on the path to the proper goal yes as I say that it's um if you wreck you can Orient Yourself by seeing the flares on the path yes yes yes well that and that's part of the idea of of calling by by the way it's also part of the fact and this is an interesting fact that people are beset with their own particularized problems you know so um I learned in The Exodus seminar that I ran a while back you know when the Israelites were lost in the desert God Appears to them as a pillar of light during the day and a pillar of a pillar of Darkness during the day and a pillar of light at night and Jonathan pajo made the claim that that was the same idea as the yin and yang idea in taoism and that there's this tension of opposites that guides you um and here's a way of thinking about it is that you'll find a calling in your life and things will beckon to you as opportunities now not everything beckons to you as an opportunity no but some things do and that's the positive side that would be the light let's say in the darkness on the negative side there's going to be things that aggregate around you as your problems right in their things that bug you and God Only Knows Why those things bug you because there's a trillion things that could but some things really grip you and won't let you go right and you could think about the interaction between opportunity and problem as something like calling right and then the truthful grappling with that produces that not only that a sense of meaning because you're taking your responsibility seriously and and taking advantage of your opportunities but it also propels you down the appropriate developmental path because if you take on the problems that beset you that are yours you'll develop and if you exploit the opportunities that present themselves you'll develop as well yeah I am I mean Drive is something that fascinates me because there's a sort of presumption is it where people either have it or they don't and you know that that is the case to some degree I mean it's certainly a there's certainly very driven people and there are all sorts of reasons we know why some people have driven and from an early age and why that might be but and we're struck by this lack of talking about vocation in our era I don't know if it's because people are embarrassed about it some people undoubtedly are um or whether it's just that we don't particularly encourage it uh it's probably a combination of all of these things plus a sort of sense that there's no particular meaning yeah why bother you know um everything's been shown to be flawed so all ambition is pathological and destructive yes and and there's different ways of of of of passing it but I I I'm I've always been struck by something Alan Bloom said in one of the early parts of the closing the American mind he said and he said even then in the 80s it concerned him that he said we know what we know what a beautiful body would be like we don't any longer know what a beautiful soul would be like and although that's a rather High way of saying it um I would say we don't know what a we haven't agreed what a meaningful life would be really and I once asked a sociologist friend about this I said what what do you think in your life has been the biggest change and he said I think the biggest change in my life is that if you were a Man Who provided for your family and your dependence whatever your jaw you were a man of deepness and that isn't the case anymore you know you could you can work very hard for people who are your dependents or someone else's dependence but you're the mark you know so there's a lot of there's a lot of sort of demoralization around that I think and I I I'm very keen that we as it were we rectify the demoralization you know we we did a series of studies on Vision development um I built this program with some colleagues of mine to help people develop a vision and the first part of the exercise is that you contemplate yourself five years in the future yes and then you adopt an attitude of appropriate respect for yourself so you try to put yourself people don't necessarily want the best for themselves or think they deserve it and so it's useful to uh entice people into giving themselves the benefit of the doubt for a moment and letting them contemplate the notion that it might be okay if they were successful yeah and then the next part of the exercise is well right for 15 minutes about what you could have and who you would be if you could have what you needed if you were treating yourself properly and if you were the person you want to be just write it down just get it out and then we have them do the reverse which is imagine that your idiocy took the upper hand and that you created your own particularized hell out of your stupidity what would that look like or now you've got polls right it's like not there that would be better then we have them break the pause division down into seven sub elements family friendships career Etc and say just make a plan yeah all right so we gave this to college students in three different campuses 50 decrease in Dropout this is with a 90-minute exercise particularly effective for young minority men who had poor academic backgrounds wow yeah no kidding and a 35 increment in grade point average wow right yeah yeah well so that's that's part of that that Conjuring up a vision and we're trying to do that you know this because you're involved in this art project in in the UK we're trying to do that on a more International scale even though there's perils to that and that's partly well how could we formulate a vision of the future that was positive and Invitational instead of fear-based and and and what serving the demented interests of power mongers how about how about that yeah or the or the one I I dislike the most which is I think you and I have talked about it before when the last time Roger scrutin appeared in public we did a discussion together just a few months before he died and and we we got talking about this strange way in which the era wishes you just to be harmless right to come in and out and not be noticed yeah if all ambition is pathological then harmless yeah all you're doing is emitting carbon yeah if it weren't for you the damn moss and trees would be getting on just fine and yeah yeah you just pull everyone's teeth out and wrap them up in styrofoam and set them in a corner and the planet would get along just fine exactly human beings are the problem when in fact in fact we're the point well you know Douglas that's probably a good that's a good that's probably a good place to end oh there was one other thing we were going to talk about this is relevant to vocation as well Barry Weiss invited you to contribute to her new Enterprise and you decided to do that in a particular way you're already writing columns and so you weren't particularly interested in doing more of that having been doing enough of it what are you doing with Barry it was a brilliant idea of hers she wanted me to do a column for the Free Press and I said well I'm sort of columned up uh I wrote about three or four columns a week and uh on various issues of the day and uh and she said well I want you to write about something else and I particularly and I said well look I've always tried to have a deal with my editors and I write about something I love for every piece about something or someone I hate and actually the the uh the um the equilibrium has never been quite right on there though there's much more news coverage in the things that annoy you uh um but nevertheless I do try to write about things I love and it was Barry's idea she said well look whenever I want to stage with you you always sort of seem to have things you can pluck out of their quotes you know from things why don't you just explain why you got them in your head and where they're from and why you think they're worth having there and so we came up with this idea is and every week I write a column about a poem I have by heart sometimes it's a long-ish poem sometimes it's a few lines and really it's about about why it's why it's up there how much poetry do you know by heart well I'm doing 50 poems by for for this year um ranging from well I mean it's it's mainly within what you'd think of as the can the classical Canon yeah Western so why did you why did you start doing that well there's several reasons um one is if if there's something I read which hits me uh in the solar plexus yeah yeah I want it up there yeah that's a very strong I I think oh I need I need that and do you know why you need it well then there's that the answer to that is and I actually addressed this in one of the opening columns uh there are several people who made a great impression on me when I was growing up one was a sermon I heard from Terry wait who was a captive in uh Lebanon in the 80s because he was taking hostage uh um uh after being the Emissary of the Archbishop of Canterbury and I heard him give a a sermon as a Schoolboy where he talked about when he was chained to a Beirut radiator for about five years right um he um he one of the things that made it uh bearable was that he had four quartets by T.S Eliot in his head and he he recited the opening uh time present and time passed both perhaps contained in time future and he did that whole opening which culminates in that great footfall Deco in the memory down the passage which we did not take through the door we never opened into the Rose Garden and when he uh there was something immediately struck me I immediately went back to my room and got my Elliot off the the shelf and finally understood Elliot or began to understand Elliott for the first time but the other thing was and I wrote this recently in a in a column about an extraordinary Russian woman who who should be who should be better known called Tatiana grenadich now she was a woman I tell the story in the piece and his I've only seen it in one other English uh uh um version she was a woman who was uh studied English literature in Saint Petersburg uh in the 1930s and 40s the height of the Terrors she uh was actually denounced at her University because one of her forebears had translated uh I think it was uh Ovid into Russian and she was very proud of this forebear but somebody denounced her as having Noble lineage oh yes so she was denouncing thrown out of the University she was eventually allowed back in and to cut a long story short but it's an amazing story she um uh ended up after she was at the siege of Saint Petersburg her house was burned down and her mother was killed in about 1944 so she handed herself into the authorities she'd got it into her head that wanting to go to England constituted activity against the state that was how bad it was the sense that you were doing wrong it's like trying to leave California right she uh she handed herself in and um she was given straight away 10 years in gulag and uh she on the night she was at the holding prison she was told by the guard um you know there are books in the prison before you're taken to Gulag and you could she you know and she said shut up I'm working and he said what are you working on she said I'm translating Don Juan of Lord Byron's in my head now the poem is 17 000 words well seventeen thousand lines law and he said okay I'll give you a piece of paper and a pen and I'll come back in the morning and when he came back in the morning she had translated into Russian all of the Kanto in which Don Juan goes to Moscow and he laughed at royalty the Brilliance of this translation the humor of law Bible that she had exactly done inverse in Russian in the same rhyme scheme that the very complicated rhyme scheme that Byron uses in it's original so he said if I keep giving you paper you can you can think you can finish it she said yes it took her two years and she was in a Cell on her own and they gave her the paper and at the end the the guard allowed three copies to be typed up and gave her one then sent her to Gulag for the next eight years and she completed her sentence and when she came out of the gulag uh she heard her pile of papers and she went to a friend's house and there was an apartment and five people were living in the room and she joined them and she stank of the gulag by all the cabs as did her manuscript but she then typed it up again with the revision she'd made in the gulag it was subsequently published and it is still to this day the standard translation of Byron in the Russian language some people man and some people yeah and it was actually put on stage with a massive hit within her lifetime so she went from she had a heart attack on the first night which she fortunately survived but I tell this story and I told it after the one on Byron on June because it's always been my belief and it's a to me it's an Insight it's not original but I've got it from various people which is what you have up here the bastards can never take um they can uh how much of how much of that so I have a friend in Canada Rex Murphy who knows who's extremely erudite and literate and charismatic and maybe Canada's most remarkable journalist um the sort of person that CBC actually produced because he was a CBC production so to speak um and what would have produced more of had they actually done their job and um instead of even setting themselves at odds against him which they eventually did um he has knowledge of a vast Corpus of poetry and it's evident in the manner in which he speaks because he has that lilt and Cadence and Rhythm that's part and parcel well and you're very very well spoken is how much of that do you think can can you tell how much of that is the consequence of of having internalized uh it's probably that and in my case the great Good Fortune of being brought up with the King James Bible and the Book of common prayer right which if you have them in your head and you recite them every Sunday gives you a pretty good idea of how to Cadence the English language right right so that's an extension of the same thing in some real sense yeah but I do I do think that I I think that and I don't know and I as I say I got it from various people when I was growing up but I think the sense that you have to furnish your mental furniture and you have to furnish that well with the best things um because you might need it someday yeah it's more like a tool house than Furnishing absolutely you bet you'll need it any day but there might be a day you really need it so far I've managed not to be changed to any radiator for years upon end but I like to think that I could try to get by right but you also do get by with these tools that you have oh yeah this is one of the things that's really struck me about how badly we educate young men because um it's harder to get young men interested in literary issues than young women but if you tell a young man well you want to be successful or not well they'll usually say well yeah I'd rather be successful it's like well you know you could hypothetically do that by being a manipulative bully which doesn't really work very well and is counterproductive and will turn your life and everyone around you the dirt life into hell so I wouldn't recommend that or you could you could Master a few things one of which might be language yes since you think in it yes and since everything you plan you'll plan using language and everything you communicate about and and bring people on board with will be linguistically mediated absolutely but the other thing is is that um if you choose right and you read right you you read well um that also will guide you in your life I mean in a few weeks time I'm doing a favorite a poem of mine which is uh by uh Constantine kavafi in the 20th century Greek poet whose most famous poem Ithaca which is really a description or of course like our great hero setting out to Isle of Ithaca but kavafi just describes in this beautiful poem really what an ideal life would look like um and he says towards the end he says then Ithaca gave you the marvelous Journey right and right and okay so we could we could sum up with that in some ways you know we started this conversation talking about purpose and we delved along the way into the domains of courage and truth and then into Beauty and language and I would say those are all manifestations you could think of those all as manifestations of the word right they're manifestations of the Divine word that's a good way of thinking about it too and it's very useful to know that there isn't anything more powerful or meaningful than that right and you said that's been your experience in your life right is that there there isn't a better pathway than to think and speak in truth you you have the most amazing possible Adventures doing that and you meet the highest possible caliber of people and weird and unexpected things happen to you all the time and they're often magical and then there's also an element of that and that's especially true on the poetic front that's allied with beauty and that's a good deal because why not add to truth and courage Beauty and one of the things that's the number of the great poets notice Keith's perhaps most famously um but uh rilka in the the his um a famous poem on the Torso an antique torso um he says that the poet that that the he says in the poem that the bust the end the beautiful antique bus the the torsa is telling him something right if you remember rilka is trying to work out what it is and same thing exactly and the and what the and this is my belief is this is a beautiful thing is not just beautiful it's telling you something and what the what the antique torso says to rilka is you must change your life right right right that's rilka yeah that's real okay okay yeah well that's well that's why people are terrified of beauty too yeah because you know and you might say you're terrified of Beauty in proportion to the distance your life is from what's beautiful absolutely because it's a judge right it's an ultimate judge it's like and for it to say nothing about you is this it's it's a terrible judgment that's why you used to say the great the great thing of modern uh the modern selfie culture was um isn't this work of art lucky enough to be in this photo with me yeah of course yeah that's exactly the wrong way around aren't I lucky to be standing in front of this beautiful thing right well that's that's the proper attitude of of gratitude as well yeah all right Mr Murray thank you everyone for watching and listening um and walking with us through these complicated and hopefully promising domains uh it's always a pleasure to talk to you we seem to get a little farther with each conversation and that's always useful I'm going to switch over to the Daily wire plus side um and talk to Douglas a little bit more about uh graphical issues and about the manner in which his calling you might say made itself manifest I'm very curious about that and so um if you're inclined to join us there do so otherwise thank you very much for your time and attention and to the dataware Plus for making this possible and for you sitting down and talking to me today um it's always much appreciated the film crew here in New York um told the policemen and firemen who have their Sirens going pretty much through the entire podcast which is one of the things that makes New York so exciting uh and apart from that until next time good to see you all thanks Douglas thank you [Music]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,914,166

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: 2FEvLaApGz8

Length: 107min 14sec (6434 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023