Twelve Rules for Life | Jordan Peterson | RSA Replay

good afternoon everyone my name is Jonathan Ryerson I am an associate of the RSA which means I used to work here and we still like each other it's a real great pleasure to be here thanks for coming in a moment I'm gonna speak about our distinguished guests but I'd want to say that this morning I woke up and I made my beds I I realized it was a day to take the rubbish out so I went and attended to the rubbish and then I thought our worst suit and most of those things were because of the influence of this man Jordan Peterson has been called the father of the Internet which is a a mixer yeah you have your area and many other things he's by training a scholar and a psychologist widely cited academically and his previous book maps of meaning would for those who know it is extraordinarily deep have completely revitalized the psychology of religion he is now a professor at the University of Toronto previously has taught at Harvard and we're here today to talk about his book the 12 rules for life and on an antidote to chaos and we'll come on to that in a moment before anything else I have to say please keep your phones on silence we are tweeting today I think I don't think I've been given a hashtag but I really do have we have hash RSA 12 rules hash RSA 12 rules so please tweet if you feel so inclined and otherwise that we'll have a transfer questions later I'm gonna speak to Jordan for about half an hour and then we'll have a look up to everyone else but before we begin please welcome Jordan Peterson so we have a wonderful golden hour and we want to speak about the boot but I want to first of all get a little bit for those who are not so familiar with your work you know what brought you here first of all what what what was the story behind the book and what kind of context does that book land in now in this year and this time in this place I probably really only figured out how to say that really succinctly in the last two weeks you know you don't always know what you're up to in fact you often don't know what you're up to that's for sure it isn't until you have some time to look at things retrospectively that you realize it and when I wrote my first book maps of meaning I was actually trying to solve the postmodern conundrum but I didn't know that at the time because I wasn't particularly well post-modernism didn't have the tremendous what would you say widespread impact it has now but I also wasn't that familiar with it but I was trying to understand the Cold War and I was trying to understand two things one was why was it that belief systems were so important to people that they would risk putting being itself at risk to to maintain their their their the dominance of their particular belief system so that was the first thing and I'd already understood by that point that that was a psychological problem not a political or an economic problem and the second was well we had these two armed camps in the world roughly the Communist world and let's say the free world and each of those societies were organized according to a set of axioms and the postmodern idea would be those axioms are arbitrary in any in any real sense they're arbitrary and it's only a matter only power in some sense can discriminate between the two and I thought well that better not be the case because we're really in trouble if that's the case but I started looking into the axiomatic structures that underlay the Communist worldview and the Western worldview and I came to realize over a period of what took me 15 years to write that first book I came to realize that the axiomatic structures of the West were not merely arbitrary nor were they rational precisely they were they were they were more than rational and that led me down to really distinct pathways one religious and that would be associated with the world of narrative and fiction and mythology and drama and all of that and the other evolutionary biology and neuroscience which are strange bedfellows but and I laid out my argument in maps of meaning that the axiomatic structure of Western civilization is not arbitrary and and I developed those ideas and twelve rules for life I'm trying to call attention to our fundamental axiomatic principles and to say these are these are so true that we don't have a conception of truth that even characterizes them properly because they are literally true and metaphorically true at the same time and so well it means that there you can derive them as first principles from evolutionary biology and they're the primary statements of Western theology simultaneously somehow I don't that's a good question I don't know the answer to that I mean a scientific answer the scientific answer would be that we extracted our theological presuppositions by observing the behavioral patterns that characterized us as a consequence of evolutionary processes that's the reductionist answer but I don't find that answer entirely satisfied because I don't think that we understand I'm unwilling even though I can in some sense reduce theological presuppositions to evolutionary biology I don't think that we understand the mechanisms that drive evolution enough to make that reduction I wouldn't dare make that reduction let's put it that way so the reason for that is that as I've delved into religious stories they don't have a bottom the more you dig into them the more profound they become and and like so I'm willing to take that at face value now I don't know what it means I don't know I don't know what that ultimately means but none of us know what anything ultimately means but the next question might help push that along a bit so the book contains twelve rules we'll come to the few of them in a moment but it's also sandwiched by two very interesting things horses a kind of introduction and then there's a story about the European of Lights at the end now I want to speak about the beginning where you speak about a dream you had and you're saying as a clinical psychologist you reflect upon your dreams you tell us a bit about this defining dream where you're you're sort of hanging from the ceiling a church and what it meant to you and and what follows for your your understanding of your work oh you can ask an easy question all right well so back in about 1988 I'd been working on maps of meaning I worked on it about three hours a day writing for 15 years and but I was obsessed by it I was thinking about it all the time like 16 hours a day I could lift weights and that would shut my mind up to some degree but that was about all I had found and some of my more prosaic scientific work was also a bit of an escape but I was deeply into this material and I was I was driven by the a priori presupposition that if you understood a problem you could solve it and that but might even be an indicator of understanding my hands Isaac has pointed out for example famous psychologists that formulating a problem is often more difficult than solving it right to specify the problem so I thought if I could specify this damn problem clearly enough then I could solve it but I came to a problem specification and this was how it turned out is that well belief systems regulate your emotions and and and organize your groups so you have to have belief systems because in in the absence of them your nihilistic and chaotic but if you have belief systems and other people have them then there's going to be conflict and we're now too powerful to engage in that sort of conflict so for me it was you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't and that was terrible realization because I didn't see any way I couldn't see any way out of having belief systems are not having them and when both led to catastrophe then while it was hopeless and so I was deeply desperate about that because I couldn't I couldn't see a way through that and that's when I have this that dream and the dream was essentially I was laying on my bed at home in this little apartment I had in Montreal this is all part of the dream and this wind descended upon me and dissolved me into particles and then the next thing I knew I was in this massive Cathedral and in the dome there was a chandelier that was just it was suspended from the ceiling and I was in the chandelier and I could hardly see the walls of the dome not that's how it wasn't I could see people down below and they were like they were just tiny you know and I thought what what the hell like I don't want to be up in this Cathedral chandeliers like what the hell am I doing here ma'am this isn't good I gotta get down from here and so like then I kind of realized that I was asleep and I thought I was good I'll just shake my I was experimenting with lucid dreaming at the time I thought that's good I'll just shake myself awake so I shook myself awake and then when I woke up I was still in the damn chandelier I thought well that's not good that's definitely not good and so I got down and I don't know how and I and there were people giving me hell on that Cathedral floor for being up there and I thought oh my god yeah well I didn't want to be there and so like go away so then I went back home and when I went home I didn't want to be anywhere a wind could get me so I went into the furnace room and of course that's a place of transformation I went into the furnace room and there's a little cart there and I laid down there and you know covered my eyes and all of that and prepared to go to sleep and then the wind came back and I knew it was going to put me right back there and I woke up like I was terrified at that point I woke up and the curtains were blowing in behind me on my bed I was actually awake at this point and I can see the cathedral doors in front of me when I woke up and then I sucked myself again and I completely woke up and that dream just bothered me to death because there's an element of inflationary schizophrenic paranoia about it you know and that's that's the being placed in the cathedral at the center of things a and so that worried me and then it I knew what the wind meant because that's Numa that's spirit right that's the spirit that descends upon you and it was insistent that I was going to be put back there and I thought yeah what the hell to make of this I don't know what to make of this I don't know who to talk to about this goddamn dream like what am I gonna do about this and but I thought about it for a long time and luckily I was reading two things at the same time I read you Carl Jung's relations between the Eagle and the unconscious which is actually a field manual about how to respond to a dream like that well thank God and it's the only thing like that that's ever been written and you can't understand it unless you've had a dream like that and then the other thing I was reading Jung basically said don't confuse yourself with archetypal realities but right do not confuse the ego in the self that's one way of thinking about it and so I was being placed in this central position but the eye that was being placed there wasn't the ego right and I thought oh god okay I see what that is i said and then i was reading Solzhenitsyn at the same time and Solzhenitsyn pointed out quite wisely that every person is the center of the cosmos from a metaphysical perspective and that there's a big difference between being a center and the center but right and that's actually the difference between sanity and insanity right and so then it was out of that dream that I started to understand it's too complicated to explain here but I started to understand that part of the dream message was that the individual was at the center of reality right and that's what a cathedral represents it's a cross with the dome of infinity on top of it and and through that your work on the hero myth and the ya-ya emerge and then all the mythology and the religion and and bringing it to the rules yeah well I started to understand that the alternative to group belief and nihilism was something like the continual transformation of belief and the continual quest for enlightenment and learning that it was the quest itself rather than the consequences of the quest that were of fundamental importance and that you could like you might say well here's what I believe firmly with boundaries and or I don't believe anything it's like what those are the options it's no those aren't the options that's order that's chaos you don't have to be either of those things you can be the thing that's in the middle of those things mediating between them right and that's also when I started to untangle what the Daoists meant by the Taoist symbol and all that so come to chaos in order in a second but you're suspended from the ceiling under there what what figuratively speaking is the optimal outcome when you're suspended from a chandelier I mean what what what do you want there do you want to become brought back down in amongst everyone else well yes yeah definitely that no but I would say also then to go up like what how do we understand that well it's dangerous to be suspended like that it means that you're too much in your head but right so there's a gap that has to be bridged and and but they but they are the other danger is that it's it's it's an Icarus dangerous in some sense as well it's the danger of flying too close to the Sun but the optimal the optimal response to that dream and it was inevitable anyways given that the nature of the dream was to accept that to accept that stay well I'm I am at the center of the Cathedral well what does that mean well I'm at the center of the cross what does that mean well that means that you're crucified what does that mean it means that life is suffering what do you do about that accept it bear the weight of it play the drama out that's what the dream meant yeah so man so what something so yeah I mean so that I begin there because I mean people you've been called many things you know for some many and not not all of them you know it can be repeated but you know conservative comes up sometimes Christian certainly comes up that psychologist comes up and many others you know maybe yeah but but but I think individualist might be one of the most pertinent if I'm not wrong I think there's something about the way you carry yourself and what you argue that you see something quite sacred about individual autonomy and there's something about the individual sorting him or herself I there's something sacred about it that is what's sacred and that's different because you know sacred would be a category you could apply to anything and you could pick that it's like no no the the source of what's sacred is that idea okay now that's not the only sacred idea but that's one of them and there's a deep reason for that and it's and this is where it's tied into our book and to our biology itself is that we live in groups obviously and we're deeply evolved to live in groups so that's chapter one I talked about the comparison between our nervous system and the nervous system of of the lobster right diverging three hundred and fifty million years but still adapted to the group and still using the same neural chemical systems to mediate that adaptation it's mine it's mind-boggling so we're adapted to the group in the deepest possible sense but we are simultaneously and this is the thing that's unique about people we are the revitalizes of the group you know even complex animals aren't that you know like people say well the chimpanzees have culture right well the answer that is no when here's why because let's say the chimps managed to produce a cultural increment of one-tenth of one percent per year well if you allow that to compound over two million years you'd have us and they're not us and so that didn't happen so they don't have culture now human beings we're both members of a species and member of a group but we're also the force that transforms and revitalizes the group and that's our that's our essential nature that's what we manifest in the world if if the group is to be sustained and as if the as and if the individual is to be sustained and so it's necessary for our social structures to reflect that and then it's necessary for our tick are articulated morality to reflect that or we get confused and we start doing the wrong thing like we put the group before the individual okay which brings me to rule six so you have many many rules in the book twelve exactly including the last ones very CUTE it's about if you see a cat on the street you should pass it but there's some of them are so it's you know standing up straight and walking your posture and things like this so many rules but one that sort of grabbed my attention I'm guessing others as well as rule 6 says make sure your own house is in perfect order before you criticize the world yeah and challenging and controversial and I I didn't agree with most of it you know much of admire what most of the book and the ideas in it I had challenges here so I'll try and explain what I think they are and so apparently Mahatma Gandhi did not say be the change you want to see in the world which is sad for lots of people because we all love that saying although he did live the message right so Gandhi did work hard on his own physical Constitution he was careful of what he ate he made sure he managed his ashram carefully he also was an activist he went on salt marches he petitioned the British government at the time so he did swore his own life I but it by no means ended there he was embedded in this wider social and political conflict that he had to work on in the same way when you say to a whole new generation take responsibility they were like well yeah but my my fear is there were going to be inundated with climate change my fear is the private actors like Google and Facebook now control the public realm my fear is that artificial intelligence is getting way too intelligent and is actually for you here's our fear but your attempts to fix that will make it worse well okay that's this is the question the heart of the matter so on the one hand you say look you don't know what kind of clue what you're doing stay out of it right but we live in democratic systems where it's our responsibility not to stay out of it so how do you manage that because you seem to be saying really humility humility right but humility doesn't preclude activism generally it does yes Wow but what doesn't mean that doesn't mean that I'm saying that there is no situations under which political action or activism is justified because there are clearly situations under which it's justified but it's not the first thing that you should be taught how to do when you're an 18 year old person going to university and I don't know a damn thing so I don't die there's callow youth I don't doubt that people have a lot to learn and they're and they're not learning it from their professors ii that may be true that may be true but you're clearly I mean a big part of your narrative comes from that energy of resisting that kind of you know circumventing you're also saying you know these people who complain about the world they should just focus on their own they're all what they can control themselves and work within that space to begin with to begin with but but equally there is a slight division in the tone about people who actually care about bigger than self it's like okay it's bigger so bigger than self problems which are they don't care about them they just act like they just you seem to be called watch activists the activists at the universities I know what they're like and we've seen the videos and we know that kind of confrontation and I see wilfred laurier for many but i don't doubt that there are those who who are like that but there are many millions more and I mentioned Gandhi but you know arguably you can't use him as an example okay oh Buddha for example or Buddha left is what would have left his wife and child you can use them as examples okay there's the ball like Buddha's like Christ it's like well there's Christ it's yeah yeah yeah what do you mean no it was crazy not in university I know but there are no well there's um so Martin Luther King can I use him Yeah right some more than through King had an affair it was quite one known you know his personal life was a bit complex yeah but you wouldn't say that you know you had to sort that out before he went to Sir I was trying to deal with civil rights in the u.s. so I'm just trying to get at the core of the tension his own personal faults didn't preclude his social responsibility and it really is important to get that straight but I would say that his own personal faults served as a detriment to his overall mission and then I'm not believe me believe me I'm not saying that if I was in Martin Luther King's position I would have done a better job it's like I not saying that man not in the least but back to the idea of sorting yourself out it's like well first of all it's a lot harder to do than you think I mean I've run students through this experiment we used to do existential experiments in my maps of meaning class and so the existential experiment was identify one thing that you think that that isn't going well that you could fix and then go try to fix it and then just document what happens it's like well you know it's really hard so let me tell you a brief story on one student whose mother had died and the house was chaotic and no one had picked up the necessary domestic responsibilities and so he decided and that wasn't good for anyone and so he decided that he was going to step into the shoes of his mother well god I mean it just provoked a complete bloody war in the household you know because who the hell did he think he is and why do we need that why are you doing that and aren't you making us lonesome for Mom and you know why do you think that you're better than us by taking up this responsibility and so it's like that I'm gonna go buy groceries that was his plan it's like well you know that's a hell of a lot harder than you think and so number one cleaning up your room is proper because maybe you can manage it although probably you can't because you could also extend that by beautifying it but number two it involves way more forces than you think and so because to get your house in order is very very difficult but if it's so difficult and I need to spend most of my energy and time dealing with that who are the people who are going to be doing the other work that needs to be done socially and culturally and politically well hopefully competent people like people who've already done okay that's interesting so you're saying it's a necessary transition you're saying there's something about the life saying something simple if you can't make your damn bed quit waving black cards at corporations it's like Jesus like so serious like what the hell what makes you you can't get this tiny little part of the world that's actually right at your feet functionally you have contempt for it it's just my seems like gratuitous caricature of people I mean look who it is well they're they're flipping that is Luke why should I waste my time making my bed when we got to deal with his problems in the world you know what does you risk inflating your own ego by dealing with the problems of the world it's like that it's the Cathedral problem again it's like oh I should be at the center of the universe right so it's like yeah yeah well maybe so maybe not I'm trying to find a resolution of this that goes beyond the existing cultural conflict around it because no doubt people need to attend to their own projection and their own limitations and have humility and some psychological insight and work harder and what they're directly responsible for I don't doubt that but I am concerned with a message that says that's all you should be doing and until you figure that I don't know anything else your thing you have to do it first or you can do that you should be very leery of assuming that when you try to do something else you won't just make it worse and you will look I've dealt with people who've dealt with complex systems for a very long period of time and I know the difference between someone who can make a complex system better and someone who will make a complex system worse and with most people who make a complex system worse okay yeah that's for sure of that that's okay that's good because that's coming to the question of development and the question of human maturation and the question of what it means to unfold throughout the lifespan so just to try and distill that last point you're sort of saying don't begin an end with your own responsibility of cleaning your room and sorting your personal and immediate affairs out but realize that until you can do that you may be lacking certain forms of competence that might make you doubt whether you should be quite so visceral and and adamant about your political views precisely that yes and it's exactly the opposite of what students are taught in universities but you're not saying don't care about those things or don't act on them but just while you're doing them attend to your own limitations and competencies well I'm saying you should be aware of you should be aware of your own competence and your limits and and that that's especially true if you're very young because like what the hell do you know you haven't done anything you're like I tell 18-year olds six years ago you were 12 it's like what the hell do you know you you haven't you you're you're you're you're under the care of your family or the state you haven't established an independent existence you haven't had children you haven't started a business you haven't taken responsibility for anything you don't have a degree you haven't finished your courses you don't know how to read you can't think you can't speak your your yeah you don't know how to present yourself well Jesus you know and it's just not right to tell people in that situation that they should go out and change the socio-economic dream of what culture what those children what those children are young people observe or why's adults managing complex systems at that play they see people giving subsidies to fossil fuel companies they see people teaching university or tomato you're so hung up on the university experience like I keep coming back to this issue of the activist at the University which is clearly very salient for you but for those who are not there it's frankly alienating because your other work is so fantastic but it keeps coming back to this narrative of these slightly Kalos students who are maybe a bit over enthusiastic about political issues I'm more concerned with their professors than with okay also the professors because they've completely corrupted the humanities and the humanities are the core of the University and by corrupting the humanities they're corrupting the fundamental structure of our civilization and they're spreading that out into the general culture right but there's no excuse for that they may be doing that but simultaneously others are corrupting the ecological foundations the social foundations democracy is arguably dying there are real problems that are existential threats at a different level there's multiple large variety bias and I don't think that's happening principally because some people are being taught feminist theory and the University of Toronto it's not that it's something else much bigger and broader and deeper that when people raise these issues you focus on that small issue not the big ones that they're worried about well it depends on the issue I suppose um I would say that MIT chains for example just for argument's sake well what what should I say about climate change what should you do the drive here if you're no I didn't I didn't what did you do I took public transport okay but that's not really but again that's hardly the point well no it is the point well it's the point because it's it's part of the problem with climate change is irreducible complexity right it's like you know we we there's a cost to our existence and the cost is externalize Asia right externalization of costs and we don't know how to manage that and I would say should we be concerned about it's like yeah absolutely do we know how to be concerned about it not really really right so then how do we learn that becomes the question right so the younger generation who might give you an example or directly affected the kinds of people in you know developing countries and younger people who feel the pinch of this all the more because they can see for example New York the Chancellor being underwater by by the end of the century is not negligible and therefore they're looking for a response that really matters to them and you think about responsibility I think no but their view is don't patronize me about my bedroom when I've got the planet to say I'm not patronizing you I think I'm boring that there is no no I do I understand I think your bedroom is important area so they think the whole planet is more important they're more concerned about that and one was your bedroom is a microcosm of the planet right well well let's let's go back to the climate issue here first because there's this guy that I'm aware of his name is Boyan slat and i'm going to talk to him in the relatively near future I think and he's a model for young people he went out scuba diving when he was 17 and there was a lot of plastic you know and that sort of bothered him and then he started thinking about manta rays and how they moved through the water and then he noticed that most of the plastic was in the top six inches and then he thought I wonder if I could build a machine that was like a manta ray that would float on top of the water and anyways to make a long story short he's devised a way to rid 50% of the plastic in the world's oceans within five years and has spent the last six years developing that and is well on the way to implementing it and it looks like it might work and he's going to be able to make a profit from it just to add that extra bit of punch and so by onslaught I would say it's like I don't know if his room was clean or not but there was something about him that was dead-on because when he looked at a problem like that he thought I'm not going to go out there and tell a bunch of other people what they're doing wrong so that they can solve it I'm gonna bloody well fix it and and that's what I'm telling young men in particular to do although you know I'm women want to do that's like great more power to them but you know people say well I'm taking climate change seriously you got going out to protests like you're not taking it seriously that's not serious serious is you're gonna devote 80 hours of your life to it for the rest of your life right you're gonna work on that so intently that you're not even going to think about anything else so that's what you care about is clarity of intent and and real purpose the real sort of what the underlying motivation of these activists it's not that they have the wrong concern as such even have the wrong concern there's error at all dimensions okay you're not taking anything but my point is they can't wait for the grown-ups to fix it nor do they really feel they have the time to become sufficient sufficiently mature and complex to deal with the adapt dealing with a complex system that none of us really know how to deal with for that because we can't fix a military helicopter unless you're a mechanic right but no but there's no simple about is you cannot fix a complex system unless you understand it you can't even if the thing is spiraling out of control it's like well we need to fix this right now well the language of fixing isn't helpful here because it's not a mechanical problem it's a social cultural ecological political problem but in that context there's a whole generation of people who yeah on the one hand they get the idea that they have to sort themselves out and you have to learn and they have to become expert and they need to really understand what they're working on many of them do and those are you know and that's great but to disparage those who are actually caring about the issue are you seeing that look they're basically showboating they're just kind of showing off yeah it's kind of empty rhetoric okay yeah they're definitely it's worse than that right it's it's it's it's it's compassion masking uselessness most of the time so okay so let's stay with that for one second because the critique of you from not the left because that doesn't really help us from sociologists let's say is that look you have enormous psychological depth you're a charismatic brilliant teacher no one doubts any of those things but you don't have any sociological imagination you don't have any vision of how the world ought to be or any sense of how we get there you just want people to go and tie to the room how do you answer that they should read the book because it's just not true well I mean I'm it's an imagined audience here but I've read the brew and for some extent I think that is true I mean I I sense enormous depth and insight I mean hugely admire your work but I do feel what well I notice two things one is that you know if I may you have wonderful folks a charm and a lot of composure when you're speaking about matters of the psyche matters of religion and when you're speaking about your own experience then then I'm all in then there's often moments where you flip into the social and political domain and then you feel this enormous latent rage and anger that doesn't feel in keeping with the rest of your character and I wonder if that's because you don't know the material as well that's how it feels which material the political cultural sociological issues that are not not as close to your core of expertise as the rest so something like climate change may be artificial intelligence why I don't know I understand that appreciate and humanitarian which is a huge part of the challenge I'm also very skeptical over the models that are usually a dick time at you that's also fine but and you mentioned you mentioned humility as a key part of what we need to acquire and I accept that but it but it does rank her with many people that the this sort of rage and anger you feel feels a bit misdirected it's like if that could be channeled towards actually dealing with the complex problems we face rather than attacking the people who trying trying in their own feeling with the academics in Canada quit comporting themselves like they did in the Lindsay Sheppard case then I'll stop being irritated at their existence that was absolutely unacceptable it was the biggest scandal that ever hit a Canadian university it was a Maoist Inquisition you're not as no excuse you're not a global thinker with millions of followers what happened to the universities Ron so it was a formative no diet but I don't even know who you're talking about you know I don't know those experiences I can't relate to them what I do know is that like many other people I care about the challenges in the world I realized that you know I'm huge limitations and trying to deal with them and there's a bit absurd even sometimes to try and deal with them nonetheless I think Detroit's you know their democratic system is your power is with the people you have to try and somehow to do your best right right exactly so on that point yeah MZ and this will ask the last point from even Carrie over now because it's a big point yeah I hope you can deal with it you mentioned the postmodern conundrum and you mentioned that a way out of that might be in one of your lectures that sort of developmental view of life but piagetian view of life perhaps is a way of understanding how people grow and learn and complexify because of your last conversation what is it about that complexification process we need to understand better and I might help us resolve some of those conflicts well one of the things and this is an idea that I've been trying to articulate more precisely more recently is I suppose is that as I mentioned before I don't think that the axioms of Western civilization our Western axioms I think they are accurate articulations of universal axioms and I would say technically the axioms that we have learned to elucidate first let's say for better or worse are the axioms of their that they're the description they're the philosophical description of the rules of games that can believe be played iteratively and that self improved so imagine imagine society is a sort of game which it is it's a it's a it's a voluntary agreement to comport ourselves in a particular way and that there could be many such voluntary agreements but the voluntary agreements have to be bounded in a way that the post modernists have failed to appreciate which is why I like Piaget because a game a game can't just be any old game as you know if you're if you're look man if you're four years old you learn that it can't be any old game you know if you want to be a popular four-year-old what you do is especially when you're setting up the stage for dramatic play is you gather your friends around and you say look like we're gonna play out this alternative reality that's the pretend space and you're gonna be this character and you're gonna be this character and you're gonna be this character and is that okay with you because everybody has to want to play otherwise it's not a good game and so everybody says yeah okay you know I'll take you I don't want to be housecat you know I want a better role and all the kids get together and then they play out there the reality and say and you could say well there's very large number of games like that that children can play and that's true but they have to be playable and that means that the participants have to want to play okay so we have to organize our society in ways that people want to maintain and that restricts the number of viable options but then we also have to organize them and this is also part of you might say game theory I suppose but part of evolutionary biology as well is that well the game you play can't degenerate like you know you want to play a game with your wife let's say well it can't be just a game for today it has to be a game for today that also you can play tomorrow and next week and that doesn't interfere with those games and then all you can also play in a year and five years and ten years and that you can play with your kids and with your father-in-law and all of that and man that's starting to constrain the game like mad and then you might add another criteria which is well not only does the game have to maintain itself as playable but it has to get slightly better as we continue to play it it's like so what it's not they better look like today what is what is the iteration on the apparent cultural conflict we have between those who are saying inclusive I have my rights you have to respect this pronoun you're saying that this is all nonsense no not quite you're not quite what but but how do you move on from that kind of fractious on enlightening discussion you lay out a better game which is well that's partly what we're doing in this discussion but it's like because let's say let's say that you're a player in the game that I just described well you want to be a good sport about it that's a good way of thinking mom this is all based in Piaget Ian's ideas in some sense because he was so interested in games it's like you have to learn to be the master of the game of the set of iterable games that repeat the set of iterable games that have improved across time you could say well that's the basis for morality and that was a PhD an idea which is a bloody brilliant idea and then there's more to it because you could say also that iterable games eventually become not a social construct but part of the biological fabric so for example dominance hierarchies that's a good example a dominance hierarchy is an iterable game it's not an optimal game I would say but it's an iterable game and it's been iterated for a third of a billion years and although it was a emergent property to begin with because it was so stable it became part of the evolutionary landscape and now we're adapted to it and so some of the etre some of the iterable games become part of the environment themselves and we need to conduct ourselves in concordance with that who would say and then I would also say that the the ideals of the West and that particularly is encapsulated in the notion of the logos the logos is the manner in which you conduct yourself if you're the best player of the set of iterable improvable games that's basically what it is now it's not just that and it's it's it's a broad concept because if you're that player there's a bunch of other things that you do for example you tell the truth when you lay out the rules you know when you're honest and people can rely on you etcetera etcetera so so that's the so that the postmodern notion of course is that a finite number of entities has an infinite number of interpretations that's true it's technically true it's what brought a eye to a halt for like 30 years while people were trying to sort out how to make machines perceive reality because perceiving reality turned out to be way more complicated than people thought so it is true that there's an infinite number of potential interpretations what is not true is that there's an infinite set of viable interpretations and you can actually parameterize viable and that's actually what you do with your emotions right if you're like in agony that's an indication that you're not playing a viable game right and you might say well that doesn't have anything to do with objective truth but that that's it that's beside the point when you're in agony right I mean it's just beside the point there there isn't an infinite set of iterable games that improve themselves across time there might only be one game like that well it's just well it's no it's more because of situational constraints it's just so it's just so hard to conduct yourself right now in a way that improves how you're gonna be in a week or a year right it's just there aren't that many pathways that allow for that I'll try one which is to involve the audience okay because I'm sorry I've subtly overused my time but now I'd like to invite you to give me some questions when you I'll take a few a time because the time issue try and keep it as succinct as you can please and we'll begin with where's the mic just about if you come right here please yeah we have one in the front here and then if after that if we can pass it back and we'll take this these three questions first please I'm interested in how much of your of what you have to say is more aimed at young men and how much aimed at women I occasionally get little flickers of a sort of kinder thing which I hope isn't the kinder cuca Kiera women you know the children katechon yep Church yeah and I like a lot of what you say and I hope very much hold the gender that's a big question for what we'll come back to that yes mind you please you talk about a system of beliefs does these beliefs need to be religious or somebody being humanistic for example can play a game okay great thank you and then there's one one behind you we'll take that how is it that if Western society is the the optimal state of biological and metaphorical existence for human beings that in Western society we've constantly evolved to a point of university education which stands behind the principles of challenging the outside world and actually engaging in activism because it's not really you that you critique because you've already given you example of the great issue and cleanup project made by a young person it is literally those elements of activism things they do things that goes on but that has been integral in development for young people in Western society okay great so those three rich questions I want to begin with the gender one because for those who heard it was a radio 5 live interview that you had I believe yesterday where you ended on a very emotional note about this question about the fact that people coming to your lectures are a roughly 80% man and often man under sort of 35 or so seeing how thanking you deeply for a sort of recognising rate at them and the challenges they're facing but there are also those who feel the mood music is somehow wrong that somehow this is and hasn't caught up with the last 50 years of gender emancipation and so forth and there's a slightly too much fixation on men and and women being somehow their their their modern life is to attract the suitable mate and that comes up a lot on the book by the way so how do you feel about the gender question why why are men particularly drawn through work and to what extent can you maybe redress the balance a little bit in terms of what people are hearing well it isn't obvious to me why men particularly are drawn to my work it might just be a side effect of you too for all I know because YouTube is where I put my lectures and YouTube is primarily men now why that is I don't know any more than I know why tumblr is primarily women so it could be just a sample bias as far as I can tell but maybe it's not maybe there's something that men are more desperate for at the moment than women and I think that's probably true because I think that men are in a more existential more in a state of existential crisis than women are and it's partly because it's kind of obvious what women should do you know it's like well yeah they should have a career and have a family it's like well I would keep you busy especially between the ages of 20 and 35 it's like that's enough man to try to get those two things right and you have to do it before you're 35 what men don't have to do it before they're 35 so just age wise yeah but it's not just I mean age kills you it's a big deal you know and like you can have a family when you're 60 if you're a man so you can sit around in your mother's basement till you're 40 and you still have a chance of flourishing not much of one but still some you know it's so women or women are in a much tighter timeframe and and and so I think that they're they're quite oriented towards action in the world and quite and quite desperately oriented and you know that's a catastrophe because it's desperation but it also gives them purpose that's for sure and then with regards to the gender question more broadly it's like there seems to be this idea that if I'm concentrating on strengthening masculinity I would say rather than man by the way just to be properly postmodern about it well that in some sense I would be doing women a disservice it's like what what the hell is that supposed to know I don't think the service it's something about people's perception of torna you're just saying that's just the way it is that actually that's more issue with a heater than the speaker because I've heard a lot of people say the same thing which is that you speak very forthrightly and clearly about masculinity you connected to the logos you speak about order and chaos and the masculine principle being the kind of ordering and the chaos being feminine and you know people read that today and go are you sure that's okay well I think part of it too is this that we don't have a good mythological pattern for for modern femininity right because modern females aren't like females 200 years ago because they got control of the reproductive function and so there isn't a deep mythos for a modern woman because there have been no women in history that got control of the reproductive function you might say well what is a one who has control of her reproductive function like and the answer to that is we don't have a clue it's only been around for 50 years so so what's the ideal for femininity well you know that's part of the culture wars we don't know I'm sure there's someone who could be on stage you could ask you a brilliant rejoinder to that comment but it's not me alas and the question about belief systems this is interesting about religion because on the one hand you're fearless they're going back into the Christian mythology and Bible stories on the other hand there's a little bit of equivocation about are you simply saying God exists jesus was son of God and we should follow the Bible but it can sound a little bit you can't simply say I correct myself you but you there are moments where it feels like that is the good old religion that you're offering but it's a I don't think that's the whole story either so other belief systems if you want to construct a sort of humanistic belief system or even create a new religion what's the challenge generally the results aren't good you know but you've this thing which between ideology and religion before maybe that's a good way of yeah well the ideologies are fragmented religions essentially they use the same symbolic under structure but they only tell part of the story I could give you a quick example of that I do it very quickly so when the American West was settled it was settled on the on the wave of an ideological story and here's the story heroic individual that's positive bringing positive culture that's the wise King into virgin or into chaotic territory that's the negative mother essentially so that's positive individual positive culture negative nature right and that's that's a motivating story man to bring heroically bring order into the untamed wilderness it's like a million people a year from Europe come driven by that narrative it's okay well here's the counter narrative raping and pillaging individual bringing the desolations of tyrannical culture into the virginal wonderful environmental what would you call it yes of nature it's like yeah man you can get a long way for that story too but they're both half the story so you just put those two things together and you have a religious story it's like quality in is heroic but also is an adversary and a cruel adversary at that culture is the wise king but it's also the evil tyrant and nature is beautiful and wonderful French impressionistic landscape and cancer and Anopheles mosquitoes and the elephantiasis and so if you are properly oriented in the world you tell yourself both those stories and you say oh my god they conflict it's like yeah they do man that's exactly right okay so an ideology just pulls out a subset of the religious characters and says this is the entire reality it's like no it's not it's a parasitical it's a parasitical meme right essentially an ideologies a parasitical meme on a religious substructure and then there was a question about religion you know can people from other religions play the game well it might depend on the specifics of the religion I would say but they're there there's there's there's no reason that people can't play the iterable improving game yeah I mean I've spent a lot of time looking at Taoism for example and you know it seems it's fundamental presuppositions seem very much commensurate with some of the basic conceptions of Western Christianity say there are important differences between religions and so they have to be taken into account as well the third question was good because it tied in a lot of themes so as I understood it he was sort of saying look here you you often speak about how we should be grateful for the civilization we have and how far we've come in many ways and we shouldn't sort of attacks and many of the main tenants of our know world attitude not without gratitude yeah but equally a lot of that achievement a lot of the kind of world we enjoy and you mentioned female emancipation in various ways a lot of that has come about through enormous strife so the comeback male emancipation came about because of the birth control pill okay well really not not just okay it's like this is the narrative the sixties rebel rose up and emancipated we don't know can the birth control you know in advance and there was a medical question was a little different which was about the role the activism and protest had played in creating that civilization as I understood it so to take for example the suffragettes yeah you know suffragettes seeking the right to vote may well have had big personal problems in her household you know the injunction to her is surely not get along with your husband see what he needs and attend to it or tie to your room the the injunction there is find a way to fight chain yourself to railings if you have to but find a way to get the vote yeah well what I would have to do situation like that is take a look at the people who were the ones that were there the real foremothers of the of the movement let's say and understand what gave them the characterological strength to prevail and my suspicions are that the ones that were successful had a very powerful personal ethic and that that's what made them successful so and I mean I've seen this in all sorts of realms of competence let's say it's it isn't their desire to engage in activism per se that makes them effective it's the fact that they bring their character logical strength to that movement and can prevail as a consequence great that's and I'm certainly not saying that people shouldn't engage in social criticism it's like I've been engaging in social criticism much to my chagrin but it was you know the government decided that it could tell me what I had to say yes like that's not happening that's the beautiful clarification so we have about five minutes and I want to think of humor questions and then one rounding off answer so we're gonna have to be brief and to the point please yes one gentleman here in the Roman Austrian economics we talk a lot about time preference and one thing that I think it's a theory of like hansom and hopper or something like that and recently I was thinking you're talking about the sexual revolution and the birth control pill and everything do you think that with this new technology you know that's kind of been more like a maybe an endogenous shock you know to the economy you know to the dating market whatever we of time preferences like you know you'd have a high type reference if you want something now quickly you know like a wage or if you're a lot of load time preference if you want investment what I'm trying to say is like how do you how would we actually get Laura time preferences a lot more like men and women like everything with all this hookup culture and all that that goes on these days I don't understand the question I don't think okay well I think I think what you're making reference to is the conundrum that time preference poses it's like how much is for now and how much is for later is it something like that okay well the way that you deal with that is through dialogue essentially because it's none it's an untenable problem you can't tell you're always approximating you know and and it also the optimal answer to that question also varies with the situation like an emergency now it takes preference over later in fact that's how you're wired biologically right so in in order to get the balance between what is now and what is later proper we engage in we we use free speech to elucidate the problems and then we engage in dialogue about the range of possible solutions and it's like a market answer to the problem essentially it's something like that Thank You Jordan there was a few more hands there can I just have them up again yes one at the back and one okay we have two more questions and that's it so gentlemen the blue and then ladies sorry the third one came in a little too late and and there's two there if we can get them but please be to the point thank you I'm probably doing it what grave disservice posthumously to Marcel Proust but I remember him saying that it's important that we should always a part of our world chaotic of our room our study our bedroom perhaps because the world itself is ultimately chaotic and we need to be reminded of that so should we learn to love the chaos yeah okay well hold that question and then two more here you mentioned the word democracy early on so many regimes countries have corruption others that are in theory democratic lots of people don't vote how would you cure the issue of democracy okay what was what's the one there as well I don't think so yes just take it because we did say yes are there thank you you mentioned crisis in the universities in humanities I just wondered if you could clarify what you meant by that okay these papers go uncited right good answer and then the other two questions are big so first of all on well first of all in chaos and order that's a big area but we have to deal with it briefly yeah well there's always a snake in the garden so then the question is do you get obsessive about chasing out the snakes or do you learn how to engage in combat with them and that's the right answer it's like it's better to you can't eradicate the last element of chaos you can try to make things orderly and tidy and safe as safe as you can but you know you don't make your children safe you make them strong and you do that even by setting them and optimal challenge because you can't if you're going to have a bounded place there's going to be snakes in it and so you can try to minimize them but there's an errata Keable element of chaos and the way that you deal with that is to strengthen the individual essentially and if there was a defining theme of the book I'd say it's the interplay of chaos and order personally democracy last moment now strengthen the citizens okay that's the right answer to that as far as I can tell it's like and I make better citizens well first of all you could tell them a story about why responsibility is not only necessary but desirable this is one of the things that's so interesting about about the response of young men in particular it's like I'm selling the most unsaleable possible package of messages right it's like there's something true about Christianity it's like yeah ha sure right I'm gonna sell that to young men no that's not gonna happen I'm gonna tell them that they should adopt more responsibility and stop being so damn impulsive and tell the truth and they're all gonna be like really happy about that well that's what's happening so I don't know why it is but it's partly because I can actually tell a story about responsibility you know people have been told for 50 years that the meaning in your life comes from freedom and rights it's like no that's not right I mean sometimes it's right because you're so goddamn oppressed that you know the system has to be fractured to give you a little bit of freedom but at the moment that's not the case the case is that you're gonna find most of your meaning by picking up your damn load and stumbling forward and it's like that's how you respect yourself and that's a huge part of what the book is about it's like there's a lot wrong with you you're fragile you crumble you age you die you're weak you're ignorant and you're touched by malevolence and a lot of it is willful it's like what the hell man how can you look at yourself in the mirror you're such a miserable mess and the answer to that is pick up something heavy write something that's a benefit to you in the rest of the world and stumble forward mightily with it and then maybe you can tolerate your miserable existence without becoming up blight on reality okay so and people find that funny lovely sort of tragic comic moment to end on we there is a book signing outside it's a wonderful book I strongly suggest you you purchase it on Jordan will sign it and we also have a mirror and a heavy load to carry just belonging on screen so I'm really that that's been a wonderful discussion thank you so much for coming for sharing so widely [Applause] you

Channel: RSA

Views: 269,186

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, myths, stories, Jordan Peterson, relationships, ancient mythology, individual responsibility, how to live a meaningful life, meaning, Happiness, royal society of arts, rsa, rsa events, rsa shorts, talk, debate, lecture, event, the rsa, Twelve Rules for Life, Twelve Rules

Id: OD-VCRNIp-U

Length: 54min 54sec (3294 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2018