What’s the Most Effective Way of Overcoming Self-Deception? | Q&A 06-17-2021 | Jordan B. Peterson

hi everyone this is the fourth of my 2021 recordings answering questions submitted to and voted on on the alternative social media platform think spot we're also releasing these answers on thinkspot a few days prior to the release on youtube you can get an advanced view of the q and a's there if you so wish at the thinkspot.com front page the thinkspot platform is still in beta so your attention and consideration to this new venture would be much appreciated what's the most effective way of overcoming self-deception well that's a complicated problem but i suppose there's some relatively simple answers to it i mean i guess the reason i i commented on it being complicated is that you can ask a question like that in a very short period of time and that sort of implies that there's an equally short answer in some sense but the problem of self-deception is extremely thorny and it's tangled up with the issue of ignorance as well right how do you know when you just don't know something and how do you know when you're being willfully blind and how do you know when you're outright lying all of those things are especially to yourself all of those things are very complicated so to some degree the answer is well you have to develop a philosophy of life that's detailed that contains within it an assessment of your thoughts about the relationship between truth and deceit so for example do you believe that it's okay to lie is it okay to deceive other people to get what you want are there occasions when it's okay to deceive other people if that helps them get what they want so that would be an instance for example of what people perhaps call white lies right lies that are designed to be of benefit are they appropriate do you feel that it's okay to deceive yourself or or other people in the pursuit of things that you believe are valuable and none of those are trivial questions and and they can't be answered with trivial answers so to some degree you need a moral philosophy that privileges the truth above all else if you wish to cease engaging in self-deception and then you might ask well how would you develop such a philosophy and some of that might be well reading about moral philosophy reading literature because it often deals with questions of good and evil and deception thinking about it writing about it reading about it i said that um and and also contemplating how central an issue this is for your life how important is this and and why is it important if it's important have you lied and got into trouble do you believe that you can lie and get away with it if you don't believe that you can get away with it you still engage in it if so why all right so let's leave the complexity behind though but but that's a necessary part of the answer how do you stop deceiving yourself assuming that you want to stop doing so well i don't believe that you can tell unerringly when you're telling the truth i think that some of the time when you lie outright you know and so what i would recommend and have recommended in my writings in my books especially in 12 rules for life the first of my last two books said tell the truth or at least don't lie and i added that codicil to the phrase tell the truth because it became evident to me when i was writing that you know i don't know the truth certainly not in its fullness and so i can't say to someone tell the truth but i can say if you believe that the truth is valuable and if you believe that living your life according to the dictates of the truth is for the best for you and and everyone else let's say then you could at least stop lying and then i would say that as you pay attention to what you say so that you're attending to your deceptive statements and trying to stop making them some of them maybe you know outright they're not true some of them make you feel uneasy and weak that would be a less uh evident criteria of falsehood but still a a reasonable one you stop doing that and then your eye for such things or your ear for such things or your embodied capacity to evaluate such things develops just as everything develops with practice and your intent which is to maintain truth in your speech becomes sharper and more focused across time and perhaps you get as you eliminate the obvious untruths you get better and better at detecting the more subtle untruths and better and better and better and better at avoiding being entangled with those as well so the first issue i guess is the decision that it's best to live in truth and then you have to decide how far you're willing to take that if that becomes an absolute for example or if it's a you know an important guideline but you know perhaps to be superseded by other things you have to sort that out for yourself once having established that then i believe that you decide and practice not lying and then possibly if you're fortunate that the world smiles on you you'll engage in less self-deception i guess the last thing i would add to that is that there's another form of self-deception that i wrote about in my the second of my last two books so the last one beyond order there's a chapter in there called don't hide things in the fog that really deals with self-deception too so you might say well there's one form of self-deception that occurs when you say something that you know not to be true and pretend even to yourself that it's true or even act as if it's true or base other statements or actions on it as if it's true but there's a more subtle form of self-deception which i think is more pervasive which is the unwillingness to look at or the willingness to turn away from evidence that you know would undermine something that you want to believe or make things inconvenient for you you know i think i got cliched example is maybe someone runs a company and they have a chief financial officer and they know that person is not exactly straight but it's convenient not to look at the books so maybe when they're around that person they feel guilty and and uncomfortable and that's a sign that you know something's rotten in the state of denmark so to speak but then the self-deceptive act is to not look where you know you should look and you know that's the sort of thing that people refer to when they talk about the elephant under the carpet or the skeleton in the closet and sometimes to mix metaphors terribly it's better to let sleeping dogs lie but often you know if you have the sense that there's something more to the story it's painful and difficult to delve into it but to not do so which is the easy route is a form of of self-deception a very common self-deception and i don't think my experience as a clinician and my personal experience as well is that when you have a sense that something's up and you fail to act you almost inevitably pay a much higher price for it at some point deferred into the future so you have to think that through for yourself and ask yourself if you believe that's true and if it is true unless you want more trouble in the future then perhaps you investigate when your moral unease let's say makes alerts you to the fact that there's something to investigate as a woman and this is completely different topic as a woman i have fantasies about bad boys is this something i need to mature out of or realize in my sex life in different ways well i can't say for sure because i don't know anything about your sex life and i don't know anything about the fantasies i would say however that you know it's not that easy to maintain sexual interest on a continuously rewarding basis across long spans of time say with the same partner now maybe it's not that easy to maintain it period you know as we age say fantasy can can provide pointers to overcome that proclivity for the deterioration of sexual interest i remember reading i think it was in raymond carver who i love whose works i love a detective he wrote the greatest of detective novels uh private eye really um no it was raymond chandler sorry raymond chandler he talked about the beauty industry in the fashion industry and the hundreds of millions of dollars billions of dollars that people spend on that enhancing sexual interest and came to the conclusion that it was all worth it because it's difficult to do it's difficult to pull beauty into sexuality it's difficult for each of us to maintain our attractiveness to other people it it's difficult under many circumstances to maintain being attracted well so you have these fantasies and that's the part of you that has a proclivity towards sexual gratification bet your best bet and so those are fantasies that you could hypothetically talk about with your partner assuming that you have a partner that you could talk to about such things and maybe that would free him or her up to talk about such things with you and maybe your partner might be more interested in your fantasies and helping you along with them than you think it also now you also asked the question about immaturity i think i would look for the wheat instead of throwing it all out as chaff to begin with um take your cues from your fantasies now i'm assuming that you know you do that in a relatively intelligent way and that it doesn't hurt you it doesn't hurt the other person and that it's uh you know there's mutual consent involved in all of those things that a wise person would do but i wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater and the reason for that is that if you have fantasies about something that you need sexually say and those aren't satisfied in your life they're not realized in your life then when the opportunity to realize them comes up in the form of the possibility of an affair let's say or a betrayal you're much more likely to be tempted in that direction than you would be if you had incorporated that into a broader conception of what your sex life might be so you know one way of maintaining satisfaction with a monogamous partner is to vary what you do with that partner and if that variation is fueled by your mutual sexual fantasies and then those fantasies are gratified then one source of motivation to look elsewhere and potentially blow your whole life up and that of your partner as well while doing so is ameliorated so eric neumann famous student of carl jung said don't pretend to be better than you are now he didn't mean don't try to be a moral person don't try to improve yourself or any of that he meant don't lie about what you are and what you want and you know maybe you're ashamed of it well maybe you should be but maybe you shouldn't be and i think assuming that those basic moral preconditions that i described earlier are met then think about it as an elaborated sexual game and as something that you might play in a sophisticated and aware manner with a willing and able partner what did i teach my children about sex is there a healthy middle ground for them without being naively celibate or damagingly promiscuous and how did you communicate that you know i didn't teach them my kids much explicitly about sex i actually don't remember any conversations about sex per se and i can't even really remember how they found out about sex i'm certain that they knew the basic mechanics plenty early enough so it wasn't like it was a taboo subject it just in some sense never seemed necessary now that doesn't mean that there wasn't any instruction about sex in our household i mean the kids watched i mean what do you teach children about sex while you teach them how to be good people in the broadest possible sense and so one element of that would be don't casually use and hurt other people and you act that out as a parent to the degree that you're capable and your children observe that they also observe how you treat your wife or husband how they're observing that all the time you can be sure of that and then they also observe how you treat your son and your daughter and how you differentially treat them as well and so they're learning about sex in the broader context of human relationships all the time and most of that's implicit and so you know my wife and i my wife tammy and i have a strong monogamous relationship um that's what we explicitly committed to and what we both implicitly desire and physical affection and some of that demonstrative some of that the kids witnessed us hugging or kissing that sort of thing nothing more than that no but they certainly weren't strangers to the idea that we found each other attractive and and that we wanted to be with each other without them with some degree of frequency and all of that is instructive to children and but i think the most important lesson about the morality of sex was probably taught to them merely as a consequence of observing how we treated each other and and also by extension how we treated them i think that the expectation that they dealt with sex wisely was part of a broader expectation that they dealt with temptation wisely with drugs for example i thought about this a lot because and this has to do with your issue of you know is there a reasonable middle ground healthy middle ground i knew from the psychological literature that there was a healthy middle ground with regard to rule breaking in adolescence right so you see pathology at both ends of the normal distribution there's kids who break rules all the time the antisocial types and and they you know they're at risk for being arrested and for long-term criminal behavior they're at higher risk for that sort they've been getting in trouble at school getting in trouble with the police as teenagers all of that that's obvious right but then on the other end of the distribution there are kids who never break any rules and you might think well that's optimal you know they don't break laws they never shoplift and this is not a pro shoplifting uh message by the way but you know healthy teenagers push the limits they break some rules the ones who never do that sort of thing tend to have a proclivity towards internalizing disorders that's what they're called externalizing disorders are disorders of acting out and internalizing disorders are more like depression and anxiety so they tend to be over-inhibited and over-emotional in a negative sense and suffer more from depression and anxiety because they're terrified and that's partly why they don't break any rules they're too afraid and and that has a detrimental long term consequence for them so you know you you don't want your children to be unable to take risks because they're terrified of doing something wrong with breaking the rule and they need to test limits with drugs i told them i better not ever be able to tell that you've been using something because if i can tell then you can't handle it and that means that you're not doing it appropriately and that was about the best i could muster because it was complicated you know i mean i knew that they were going to smoke pot they went to alternative schools that was a given it's like well what's the rule exactly don't do drugs well you know they probably observed tammy alright taking the odd puff so and maybe having the odd drink and so you know that rule wasn't abided by rigidly by either of us that we certainly didn't abuse anything um or if we did it was only on very special occasions so i thought a lot about what the rule is and the rule is don't be an idiot you know if you're gonna smoke pot don't smoke so much that you're drooling and everyone can tell you're stoned from two blocks away because that's humiliating to you and to the observer as well it's degrading so and sex is like that too it's like who's got the upper hand you or this or the sex so and i think the kids just knew that and you know i watched their relationships they had serial monogamous relationships in team as teenagers which is par for the course and by and large they handled them as well as you could expect two reasonable people who were teenagers to handle them and i generally like their choice of partner thank god although not always and that was awful when that was the case but it didn't happen that frequently so i didn't have to teach them explicitly what they had already been taught implicitly and you probably can't teach things explicit people things explicitly if they haven't had the groundwork laid for that teaching implicitly so as it pertains to beauty standards do you think that progressive social pressure can overcome what appears to be our ingrained attraction to for example physical markers for biological health okay so this questionnaire is influenced by hypothetically by literature indicating that we value such things as physical markers of fecundity which is fertility and that's associated with health well of course we'd value that because obviously assuming that you give some credence to evolutionary theory a species that didn't find markers for reproductive success attractive wouldn't last very long so it's in some sense self-evident well what are some of those markers symmetry in face and body in gait uh more symmetrical people are more attractive they're and they are healthier because illnesses of various sort during the develop development produce asymmetries and so and that preference for symmetry is marked in many species uh even butterflies for example are vastly more attracted towards perfectly symmetrical mates physical strength in men particularly so shoulder width shoulder-to-width ratio in men is another marker height voice depth there's some markers associated with testosterone like jaw width in men in women like for men women men find younger women more attractive all things considered that's younger women who've reached puberty obviously in the vast majority of cases and in the vast in the in the reasonable case let's say um now and i think that attempts to push back too hard against that kind of proclivity are ill-advised all things considered but you know i would modify that to some degree because one of the things that we have decided in the last few generations let's say is that people should be older than mere post-pubescence before their reasonable targets of sexual seduction now if you go back 100 years ago or farther than that it wasn't particularly uncommon for girls who are very young by today's standards to be engaged or married or involved in the kind of relationship that might lead to those two states 14 13 15. um now girls of that age frequently date in our society but we've decided that sexual activity especially if there's an age gap of any substantive degree uh well can is statutory rape so progressive social pressure so to speak has produced it might not be precisely a decrement in the perceived attractiveness but it's definitely produced a change in behavior and expectation and so you know we have biological proclivities but we're also an extraordinarily malleable species and you can see too that different cultures specialize in different markers of beauty and some of those specialized markers of beauty don't translate well from one culture to another so there's a central human tendency associated with perceived attractiveness but any of the dimensions of variability that compose that central tendency can be altered substantially by social pressure and social expectation so it's complicated like any issue of nature and nurture my basic sense is is that you leave people the hell alone with regard to what they find attractive and you know we hear stories that there's a corporate construction of beauty that's fed to us and i think that's fundamentally rubbish in some sense because corporations who use sex to sell are much more likely to succeed if they merely provide um gratification for the instincts that are already there rather than trying to create them out of nothing for their own purposes now you might say despite that that the fact that stereotyped portrayals of beauty are put forward to us by powerful media organizations every day intensifies our focus on those attributes and that might be true but that's not the same argument as trying to make the case that you know that that's a construction and nothing else and i think the evidence for that is weak to the point of non-existence despite the variability that i described so yes i think that progressive social pressure can overcome certain ingrained attractions um and we've deemed that necessary in many cases i mean it's also the case at least we've we've stopped action on those attractions to a great degree and the same thing happens when you get involved in a monogamous relationship and does i decide to forsake all others you might again argue that well the attraction to others isn't ameliorated but i would say it is to some degree partly because people who are in a committed relationship just don't allow themselves to go there right so they might note attraction but they don't dwell on it and they don't pursue it and so that is some amelioration of the attraction by social pressure not necessarily progressive so i'm worried i will never find love what do i do well the first thing i would say that you should do is understand that you are not alone in that worry a more common worry could hardly be identified so and if you find love then you'll probably worry about whether you'll keep it or whether or not that's the right love for you so i guess part of the answer is you act in spite of your worry and that's actually the best treatment for your worry you know you might be so concerned that you're unwilling to put yourself out there and face rejection and i would say the best way to overcome fear of rejection is to put yourself in a situation where you're where you get rejected and have that happen to the point where you're not devastated by it i'm not saying that's easy and hopefully that will those attempts will also be punctuated by some success so i would say despite your worry get out there you know ask someone for his or her phone number uh put up a profile on a dating site or at least create a profile maybe you can wait a week or two to post it but put some effort into it and get a nice photograph taken um i think and then you could also ask yourself are you worried about being alone for the rest of your life too and that's a good thing to worry about so i you might say well that's the same as worried being worried i'll never find love but if you let that stop you then there's this alternative danger isn't there that you'll just be alone so accept the worry as part of the likely content of human existence and do what you can to make yourself attractive to the people that you wish to be attracted to you and then put yourself out there and the probability is quite high that you'll find someone who will love you about as much as you love them and maybe you'll and maybe that'll be good enough i'm having a hard time disciplining myself i particularly struggle to establish a schedule how did you make a schedule so that many of your highest goals could be attained i know that you've talked about making a schedule on many occasions but i would like to look inside your schedule from the time that you think was your prime well some people find it harder than other people to make a schedule you know one thing you might consider doing is doing the personality test at understandmyself.com and seeing what you're like you know maybe you're particularly low in conscientiousness in which case making a schedule and sticking to a routine an orderly routine is going to be quite difficult for you but that'll at least help you understand perhaps at least some of the problems maybe you're high in negative emotion or neuroticism and so you worry too much about making a schedule that just stops you from doing it um i would say well first thing to do is there's two things you could do first of all the first thing you might want to do is figure out why you want to make a schedule to begin with so you talked about goals well what is it that you want to accomplish the future authoring program at self authoring.com another one of our websites helps people make a detailed plan for the future and so you can't really have a schedule without having a plan because the activities you schedule should be intelligently related to goals you wish to achieve that are important to you and so you need to have goals that you wish to achieve that are important to you and you have to know what they are and that's complicated right that's like a plan for your life so it's very difficult and so that's why we produce this exercise which helps step you through the process of deciding what you want and need there's a present authoring program there too that helps you identify your virtues and your faults and part of your plan can involve capitalizing on those virtues and rectifying those faults and so that can be an interesting addition to this process but in any case you have to figure out what you want and then you have to figure out how to decompose what you want into actionable steps right and those would be the sorts of things that you could put into schedule now that would mean that your schedule would hypothetically consist of things that you maybe you don't exactly want to do although that would be good but at least you understand the importance of doing and are therefore somewhat motivated to do and then you need to break those steps down into small enough increments that you're highly likely to undertake them you know so for example this is a trivial example maybe you have to do a report on a given topic for school and you're not very good at that well you know maybe you could go to the library one day and just check out the library that might be enough and then maybe you could go to the library and take out a book and then maybe you could open the book and look through it those would be on different days and then maybe you could sit down and read the first page of the book and if you can't do that then the first paragraph you know you have to negotiate with yourself and figure out what the largest step you would take towards your goal is that you would take and if you don't do it then you make the steps smaller and smaller until you find something that you would do you the next thing you need to do potentially is to familiarize yourself with a scheduler like google calendar so the first thing to do is open it and then maybe to figure out how to put in a task and then a repeating task and it might be a pretty simple one to begin with it's like well why don't you list waking up and specify a time or going to bed and specifying a time an approximate time anyways or put in the schedule when you eat and those are things you do every day and so that's something you're pretty likely to do and so that's a success for you and then well then you can start by putting in something small maybe you need to read maybe you need to exercise maybe you need to uh have a social event with people um maybe you need to watch tv a movie whatever it doesn't matter what it is hopefully it's something you want to do put it in the schedule and you could start by scheduling the things that you would like to do so you can imagine well i like going out to movies i like going to the mall i like hanging around with my friends i like watching tv i like reading a book i like listening to music well then schedule those things and so then you think well that means i'm forcing myself to do them it's not that it's that now you're you're allowing yourself time to do them right so the schedule becomes a means of you getting what you want instead of an external jailer who punishes you every time you deviate from requirement so you have to make friends with the schedule and the schedule has to be your friend your ally i shouldn't use that word but you know what i mean it should work for you and not against you it's not you're not generating an external tyrant you know you are generating something that you could be held to you know and that's be responsible too and that's not necessarily a bad thing it can be somewhat burdensome but it's not necessarily a bad thing but generally you should approach it as if this is something that will help you get what you want and it's also a pretty good way of controlling anxiety you know because one of the most common sources of anxiety is just not knowing what to do and people often think about that as boredom and and it is bored to some degree it can be but it can also be very anxiety provoking it's like well what should i do i don't know what to do well i have to do something there's all these things i could do and i don't want to make that decision every hour so a schedule that you designed that you like can be an incredible relief and one thing we do know is that conscientious people tend to be lower in negative emotion and it looks like that's a causal consequence is that orderly people for example because they're they order their environment and make it more predictable then they're less likely to be anxious because we're often made anxious by what is unpredictable so generating a view of your life that consists of valued goals that you want to attain and then steps by which those might be attained and the future authoring program helps you figure all that out well then you can ally that with a schedule and then you know not only do you know what you're doing you know that what you're doing is moving you towards something you want and that's rewarding and having your time structured like that and and attaining those goals is pleasurable and anxiety reducing so you know that's pretty good deal all things considered and you can start stupid and slow like i said just throw some things in that you're pretty high pretty likely to do and fill in the schedule with broad strokes and then as you get familiar with it and comfortable with it and maybe even happy with it you can fill in the details and start to use it in a more sophisticated way but everyone i know who's accomplished almost everyone i know who's accomplished does structure their time explicitly in that manner they've learned to do that over the years now not everyone does that really really entrepreneurial people might have a harder time with it especially if they're low in conscientiousness but um and then with regard to the personality test you know maybe you do personality tests the personality test i mentioned say and you find out that you're agreeable but low in conscientiousness well so it's going to be harder for you to stick to a schedule but you do like to please other people so that's one of the things that you could schedule you'd be highly likely to do that if you're extroverted you could schedule time you know socializing with people if you're introverted you could schedule time by yourself walking in nature for example or doing whatever else it is that you might want to do by yourself if you're open you could schedule in creative time and then you'd be motivated to do those things so you have a you're having a hard time disciplining yourself that's that's par for the course you know i mean like i said really conscientious people are more inclined in that direction but it's hard to discipline yourself in relationship to a goal you know it's like it's it's like training a cart horse to pull a cart it's it's difficult and so start with little things and maybe little things that you want to do and then you can proceed to harder things that you don't want to do so much you know further extrinsic or intrinsic utility but you have to do them because they're related to something important you'll get disciplined across time if you do that and incremental improvement that's sustained is extremely powerful from the perspective of transformation how do i know if i'm a good or a bad person i struggle with viewing myself as a good human being who deserves good things in return even though i try my best to be decent and add light into this world in a multitude of ways what are some steps to take in order to become better than the person i was in the past okay well there's a question that you didn't answer that's a logical consequence of the question you did answer you said you struggle with viewing yourself as a good human who deserves good things in return so now you have two problems one is well how can you be a better person but the other problem is well how do you treat yourself as the good person you already are he said you have trouble with that so the other question might be how do i treat myself how do i reward myself for being good or how do i value the fact that i am good at least some of the time okay you struggle with knowing whether you're a good or a bad person well you're probably good and a bad person right just like everybody else and so the first thing to understand is that that's part and parcel of being human that we're insufficient embodiments of our own ideals and that's always the case and even if we do progress our ideal becomes more sophisticated and so we still exist in a relationship of judgment with our ideal and and to some degree that's permanent it's just part of the condition of being human having said that just like it's reasonable to in to assume someone's innocence before and having their guilt proved rather than the other way around it's useful for you to reward yourself for being good on those occasions that you were good and so that'll also help you accept yourself more completely as a good person to the degree that you are so you know when you do something good you might try to make it a habit of noting that maybe telling someone about it or at least telling yourself about it and maybe rewarding yourself in some way for it at least by the recognition and that then you'll come to accept yourself as a good person more easily right and you imagine if if you had a child around you and you were trying to reward them for being a good person and also encourage them to be good you would notice when they've done something good and tell them you know and and and make a bit of an issue out of it and being specific about it really helps you know i noticed that you when you cut up that apple you gave a little more than half to your sister and you didn't have to do that that shows you're paying attention and that's very powerful and you can do that with yourself too you know you notice when you did what you were supposed to that day or when you did something kind for someone else or when you did something creative that that worked out or at least when you attempted to do that you know or when you managed to control a very tempting bad habit it's very hard to learn to reward yourself properly for proper action but it's very much worth doing and it will spill into your relationships with other people and so you treat yourself like someone you're trying to do the best for it it's hard to do that because you're acutely aware of your own faults let's say but you don't want to dispense with your virtues what are some steps to take in order to become better than the person i was in the past well i talked earlier today about the future authoring program i'm going to return to that i mean we built that for a reason you need to lay out a vision of yourself as an ideal like who do you want to be five years from now what do you want your life to be like across the most important dimensions of your life we need a vision of that first of all something to aim at you know what would you like your family relationships to be like if they were ideal what would your intimate relationship be like if it was better what would your job be like or your career how might you take care of yourself mentally and physically how do you regulate your your proclivity towards harmful temptations how do you make intelligent use of your of the time that you have for yourself how do you continually educate yourself how do you illuminate yourself philosophically and spiritually you need a vision for that and a plan and then you have to decompose that into steps that'll lead you in that direction and that's how you incrementally move towards being a better person and maybe as you do that you have to revise your ideal version of yourself because of something you learned but that's okay that's part and parcel of the process so because you're not going to specify the ideal with 100 accuracy the first time you you specify it i'm 40 but i feel like a child watching everyone around me get older and die so i'm homesick for the past instead of accepting the terrifying present how can i stop mourning the past well i grouped the last three questions together including this one because they all allowed me to talk reasonably about these programs the self-authoring program has a past authoring component that helps people write out an autobiography now you're suffering from what freud described as reminiscences of the past you're possessed by reminiscences they won't get out of your mind and what that means to me is well it's one of two things one is that there's things in your past that you need to understand more deeply and that's why they're still calling to you and there are things in your past that you had perhaps that you need to have in the present and the future and so you could do the past authoring program and write out your past it it asks you to detail the most emotionally significant events that occurred during different epochs or stages of your life so you have to break your life into a number of stages i think we recommended six but you can break it into as many as you want or as few and then to deal out detail out the significant positive and negative occurrences you know that stand out in your memory from those times and that'll kind of help put the past to rest but it also might highlight for you what it is that you're nostalgic for and then that can help you figure out what to aim for in the future and so you know it sounds like you're rather hopeless about the present and by implication the future and and maybe that's because you don't have a richly enough developed conception of what it could be so you could go back to your past and find out what it is that you wanted and had and then you need to make a plan for how you might obtain that in the future um now it's a bit more complicated than that because you talked about death you know and and so you may be longing in some sense for a return to in a state of blissful ignorance where you weren't concerned about mortality and you know the only real medic medication for that i think that's real is to live as worthwhile a life as you can as full of life so you don't have regrets i'm not sure that so much that people are afraid of death there there may be afraid of not living enough and maybe if you lived enough you could let it go when it was time i i think there's some truth in that and so if you're overly afraid of death it may be because you have a lot of unlived life in you and you could go back to the past and you can find out what you needed and perhaps had then and then you can strive to attain that in the present and the future and those exercises could at least in principle help you with that so what are you missing right what are you missing that the past had for you and maybe you write that down like well i had this it was really important to me and i you know i had a loving relationship with someone and i don't have that now i i had the security of a comfortable home life and i don't have that now it's well those are things that now become ambitions right because a lack is an ambition and a lack are mirror images of one another so if you can identify what you lack you can derive an ambition from that and you might say well that's impossible it's like well you decompose it into small steps and that's complicated but so life is complicated so there's no way around that what's your advice to someone who took your understand myself test and scored zero on agreeableness but still recognizes the need to collaborate with many people well that's an interesting question zero is pretty low um the best personality predictor of imprisonment conduct behavior anti-social personality criminality is low agreeableness now it's not a very powerful predictor uh at least as it's measured with self-report questionnaires but it's the most powerful predictor and so if you're low in agreeableness you will have the proclivity to be less empathetic and sensitive to other people than they might like and you might also be harsh and stubborn and i mean there's advantages right you'll tell the truth more likely because you're not so concerned about upsetting people you're likely more difficult to stop um and there's some utility in that once you're set on your pathway but it's reasonable for you to take a good look at that because it could easily cause you and other people a fair bit of trouble now i don't know the rest of your personality configuration so you know if you're conscientious but low in agreeableness well then you'll be able to keep and maintain contractual obligations the sense of duty which isn't the same as the empathic sense that indicated by agreeableness the sense of duty will keep you to your word so if you're high in conscientiousness well then you can rely more on contractual obligation like what's the deal here what's my end of the deal what do i have to do to uphold that it has to be more explicit rather than implicit because you're not going to be a good gauge of other people's emotional state and you said yourself personally i feel almost zero regard for the emotions of those around me yet i can't avoid them and complete what i need to do at the same time okay so you have a strategic problem as well so um you also might practice consciously practice doing things for other people and you'd have to do that strategically there is some evidence i don't remember where i ran across this that doing so is a facilitator of mental health and so you might have to learn to be act agreeable more explicitly when you're undertaking something with someone you may have to learn to ask yourself explicitly what's in it for them right why is this an equitable arrangement and and if you're conscientious that's going to be an easier thing to to understand so well what can you do about being so low in agreeableness well you can capitalize on your other personality traits you know maybe you're high in openness and so what you can offer to other people is the opportunity to collaborate with you in a creative endeavor and they might leap at that opportunity maybe you're extroverted now extroverted disagreeable people tend to be narcissistic so that's that's a rough one um because if you're extroverted and disagreeable well then your narcissism is gonna be problematic and that's especially true if you're low in conscientiousness because then you won't be able to keep verbal contracts either so um but if you're extroverted let's say well you do have the option of being entertaining and enthusiastic and that's something you have to offer other people so you have to look at your entire personality constellation and figure out what you need to rely on to rectify those areas where you're you know where you deviate substantially from the norm you may also need to find someone in your life who is agreeable assuming they can stand you um they might be attracted to you just out of perverseness but and and ask for their opinion because their superior empathic sense let's say might lay them open to um exploitation that's the downside of high agreeableness by the way uh but they're going to be much more attuned to the social niceties of a given situation and so you might need to ally yourself with someone who's clearly more empathic and and you know control your tendency to take advantage of them if you can so um and then the last thing i said well practice you know doing things for other people you might have to do it coldly and calculatingly at least to begin with because you don't have that easy empathic sense but that doesn't mean it has to be false you know it's it depends on what it's in service of and if it's in service of rectifying and maintaining your relationships with other people then that's an admirable goal even if it's a cold cognitive goal rather than a warm and health heartfelt goal and so it's certainly better than the alternative which is to not do it at all so you know maybe you have to do something altruistic once a week or something like that as part of your attempt to broaden the scope of your personality you know and then maybe you could have the advantages of being disagreeable which means for example that you're no pushover and that you know you'll pursue your own agenda that you'll strive to win and and so forth you could have the advantages of that and some of the advantages of being someone whose empathy makes them easier to get along with and to collaborate with other people i'm 25. i had a drug problem when i was younger in my late teens and early 20s i stole money on multiple occasions i don't even know who some of those people i stole from are and can't repay them however even in the instances where i could apologize or repay i feel completely unable to i'm too ashamed this bothers me all the time i can't sleep or do anything i really hate myself i think that i'm a rotten person and don't know how to handle it do you have any advice for this well if i was your therapist i would say tell me about every single occasion that you remember where this happened now you can't tell me because i'm not there but you could write it down and that would help it and and maybe you could write down why you did it and maybe you could do that with a bit of compassion you know i mean obviously your behavior was sufficiently reprehensible to be plaguing your conscience but at least you have a conscience that's something and so and people make mistakes especially when they're young especially when they're added by drug use let's say that's there's plenty of occasion there for misbehavior that's for sure and it's pretty common in any case you're plagued by this so there is the past has still got its tentacles around you well write it down write down every episode every time you worry about something like that write it down and get a list that's your symptoms then you know the idea of approaching one of these people and apologizing and offering to repay them that's a pretty good idea maybe you could list all the people that you stole from who you could do that with and then rank order them in order of difficulty and then think about how you would approach the least difficult of all those people and what you'd say and maybe you have to write that out now i'm not saying you have to do it but you could do that to begin with and then you could decide whether or not you could do it and if you could do it with the easiest person and then you could see how that goes maybe that actually helps and then if if you can't do that maybe there are some other means of clearing your conscience so when you write all this down write down how much you took and then maybe your goal could be you donate twice that amount to a charity like to so you have to research charity and find one that you think is really valuable you know where it would do some good and so you know you don't have to pay it all back at once but maybe you could pay once a month or whatever i don't know what your budget is maybe twice a month maybe once every three months whatever you could afford and so then you've atoned for your sin let's say and you've transformed something bad that the people who experienced have probably already forgotten about i mean unless you were stealing huge amounts of money and destroyed their lives they've probably moved on and so you could transform your nefarious actions into something that was good now maybe a donation to charity you know wouldn't do it for you you could try it once and see if that helps you know pay off one of your existential debts and and see if that helps it's a negotiation with yourself and so then i guess i would also ask um are you more broadly depressed and anxious you know what i mean so are you fixating on this in a manner that's truly counterproductive that's reflective of a deeper issue with depression or anxiety and you'd know that for example if you know well you said you can't sleep or do anything you really hate yourself that's signs of generalization beyond the confines of these misdeeds and so if that's the case then perhaps even if you did atone for what you had done other preoccupations with previous instances of unacceptable behavior would start to plague you to the same degree that's a more complex problem and if that's the case then well your best bet then is to find a competent mental health professional and have your circumstance evaluated and you know if you're really torturing yourself to death about this despite the fact that you've apparently ceased your drug abuse well maybe there's something else fueling it and you may need to investigate that so that's about all i can think of along those lines why do we need to contemplate our own malevolence what if you get stuck in it how do you move forward after becoming aware of it especially if you've actually done something bad i'm not speaking of criminal behavior well i think the reason that we need to contemplate our own malevolence is so that we don't i think it's a human propensity a profoundly deep human propensity to see the world in terms of good and evil shades of good and evil but even absolutes of good and evil and we understand that malevolence exists that now and then people act to hurt others and although apologists exclaimed that that's generally motivated by the desire for some good i'm not convinced uh there's a certain pleasure in vengeful harm and we all feel the desire to be vengeful merely as a consequence of the in some sense the perceived central unfairness of existence itself and the undeserved suffering that seems to accompany it it's easy to become frustrated by that and embittered by that and to lash out and to hurt and so that's malevolence well and it's a very destructive force now and we don't think well of it and so if you identify malevolence somewhere else than within you can become powerfully motivated to take corrective action against the perceived source of malevolence so i see that for example when critics of our social structures insist that the fundamental motivating factor that organizes those structures is the arbitrary expression of undeserved power or invalid power privileged power let's say well yes to some degree because every structure has its element of corruption none of us are perfect and neither are institutions but the danger of that view is that once you've identified the locale of malevolence and it's not you well then you're a moral actor and can do no wrong in your pursuit of the wrongdoer and that's very very dangerous it's not that easy to identify the wrong doer especially when you're talking about social institutions and some appreciation of your own malevolence might stop you from being so vicious in your pursuit of the perceived wrongdoers who are who aren't you and you know that one of the terrible attributes of utopian totalitarian societies is their proclivity to localize malevolence in some group and then their unbridled pursuit of destruction in relationship in relationship to that group and all the atrocities that go along with that as a consequence of that attribution of malevolence and so it's a tenet of the judeo-christian ethic that the adversary is best confronted within and now you know you object to that for good reasons like do you really want to do that do you really want to see yourself as a perpetrator rather than a victim or a hero and the answer to that is well no it's devastating it can be devastating but you know it says it's been said that the fear of god is the beginning of wisdom and i think that that fear of god so to speak is allied with this apprehension of internal malevolence i don't think that you can be motivated to be good i don't think you can be serious about your attempts to be good unless you have some real sense of just how far off track you can get or have got and how malevolent you have been or could be in your actions you just don't take yourself seriously enough until you see the devil within and when you see that well it can be traumatizing and you're objecting to that what if you get stuck in that and it's no wonder people don't want to contemplate it but it's not easy for me to see how you can go through all the difficult gyrations necessary to put your moral house in order if you don't view yourselves as akin to the perpetrator in very many important senses so and you take that on to yourself and try to rectify that within yourself and so i guess you contemplate your own malevolence so that you don't unconsciously project malevolence onto others and and assume your own you know assume your own moral rectitude now you know this might contradict what i said about innocent before proven guilty and those are difficult things to reconcile you know but i guess that's why this the idea of original sin emerged at least in part you know it's not necessarily that any of us are specifically guilty of something and that's the legal issue and and maybe that's the issue with regards to your treatment of others when you're formally accused of a crime the proper presumption is innocence that doesn't mean the proclivity isn't there so i know those things are hard to sort out and and maybe my explanation doesn't differentiate them you know as wisely as they might be differentiated but you can be sorely tempted toward something as an indicator of your malevolence without being guilty of acting that out and you have to deal with the fact of sore temptation as well as the fact that you're innocent in that you didn't act it out so it's something like that you have to localize malevolence somewhere because you you tend to see it as an existential constant right it's it's it's something that exists in the world that needs a locale and the safest locale and the most salutary locale i believe is the identification of malevolence within um it isn't obvious to me that that's more traumatizing than localizing it in the social structures for example but it might be you spoke once about going into the deep to save your father but i never knew my father at all so who is it that i'm saving well i would say that you're saving your relationship with the paternal spirit so the egyptians had a god of the state that was osiris osiris he was the old king and he was archaic and willfully blind especially to the machinations of his evil brothers seth and so the egyptians represented their knowledge of social structures in a narrative and well the the social structure you know the culture is like an old king whose best days are behind him and who is always in danger of being overthrown by his evil brother it's like very astute representation of the state well horus is the god of attention he has he's the eye the famous egyptian eye of horus and he's the falcon who can see and and so he pays attention and that capacity to pay attention as for the egyptians was what rescued osiris from the depths of the underworld when he was overthrown by his malevolent brother so who are you saving while you're saving osiris and that could be your father insofar as the spirit of osiris characterizes your father but if you don't have a father that doesn't mean that spirit isn't there so maybe what you're doing is rescuing your relationship with the central animating tendency of human civilization insofar as that's paternal or maybe you're rescuing your relationship with god the father that being an expression of that animating principle um it's complicated but that's that's the gist of it so you you repair your relationship with the culture that gave birth to you and that's the father in the broadest sense well not the broadest sense because that would be god but in a broader sense so you repair your relationship with what's common across all men that might be another way of thinking about it does life have meaning without god can life be meaningful without god and without eternity well at the highest and most abstract levels perhaps not so i mean life has proximal meanings right there's the meaning that you experience when you're engaged in a piece of art or when you're reading or when you're engrossed in a movie or in a conversation there's the meaning that emerges within your relationships with people that you cherish or are enthusiastic with there's meanings of security and predictability there's meanings of duty and responsibility and active engagement with your job and your career there's meanings of aesthetic pleasure now all of those have their value and each of them has their place and you know maybe there's a hierarchy of value there as well so that some of those meanings are deeper than others and then you might say well what characterized the deepest of all meanings and it would be something like relationship with the transcendent and that would establish a relationship between you and what's always been conceptualized is god which is generally supposed to be something ineffable right it's not definable but you might think about it as the central animating spirit of the age or the value around which all other values are organized or the wisdom of the ages or the creative spirit that possesses you when you're inspired or what grips you with enthusiasm at a sports event or at a musical event all of those things and we need a relationship with that and we find our deepest meaning in that relationship and if we don't find it i think if we don't find it in something that's explicitly religious then we tend to magnify something of lesser value say something political into that to fill the void so yes life has proximal meanings without god without eternity but at the ultimate level something's lacking and it's the desire to fulfill that lack that and maybe the lock itself that's part and parcel of the religious instinct so you can kill god but you can't that doesn't rectify the hunger for god and then that hunger seeks out replacements that's how it looks to me so and then you know you you might also say well does that mean you have to believe in god and i don't think of the proper answer to that is that you need to agree with a propositional statement does god exist yes like does this is this table there yes it's not that kind of relationship it's characterized in the old testament as a struggle so israel means those who struggle with god and you have to participate in that struggle and you can do that weirdly enough as a believer as a non-believer maybe sometimes more intensely as a non-believer the issue might be more paramount than the issue of virtue and and the issue of the ultimate orientation dr peterson as an art student i wonder how to create a poetic piece deeply storied and metaphoric without becoming a piece of propaganda i feel like trying too hard to create a meaningful and poetic piece often results in the creation of something rife with bias and ideology however letting my unconscious take full control creates what seems like an empty and uninteresting piece is there a method to control that chaos without corrupting its meaning while still expressing it poetically for the time being i decided to concentrate on learning good technique well the first thing i would say is that is what you should be doing as a student is you should be concentrating on learning good technique because those are the tools that you're going to have to express your creative intuition so that's a great place to start and you said you're a student so well you're not a master you're a student so of course you're going to wonder how to create a poetic piece without becoming a prop piece of propaganda you're going to be struggling without your entire artistic career you know and you might say well the more tools you have at your disposal the more opportunity you have to produce something of value and so great that it's a it's a it's the right answer to the problem well then trying too hard i think a lot of what artists do is play and so i remember watching this video of pablo picasso creating a painting on a piece of glass so you could see exactly what he was doing and he'd paint and erase and paint in a race and paint the race and he was just playing and watching what was happening constantly and he was sort of seeing what would happen but he was very disciplined i mean he had all the tools that is at hand right i mean he'd gone through his apprenticeship and so master your craft and play with what you're mastering and those two will come together across time and now and then you'll produce a poetic piece deeply storied and metaphoric that isn't a piece of propaganda and then you'll have succeeded as an artist at least in that instance and then maybe you'll be able to do that over and over so don't try so hard that's part of it perhaps that doesn't mean don't discipline yourself with regard to broadening your skill set that's really a good idea but then you have to bring the spirit of play into that and the spirit of discovery and trying too hard and then when you say you're trying too hard what are you trying too hard to do you know that might be worth thinking about too are you trying too hard to produce a high quality piece of art well maybe that's not the right goal maybe the right goal is something like i'm going to play with these new skills that i've developed and see what happens i mean picasso for example there's an online archive of picasso's work and you know when he was painting roosters he painted hundreds of them i think castle produced 60 000 paintings some outrageous number of paintings and they were by no means all masterpieces um although perhaps that's cynical there were plenty of masterpieces that's for sure and so i'm not saying this in a denigrating fashion you could see picasso approaching a masterpiece in his repeated attempts to represent say something like a rooster and represent it this way represent this way i represent it this way producing multitudes of variants and then you know honing in on the ultimate goal or being able to select from all those variants the optimal representation playing playing hard playing in a disciplined fashion playing with the tools that he had and so and that's part of letting the unconscious in right is to to let the process of play take you where it's going to go and maybe you have to abandon the idea of producing the finished piece of art or at least you have to abandon the idea of producing it on that occasion because art is a process of exploration right as well and so confining that to the production of a given entity to brutally is going to impede the manifestation of that spirit is there a way we can reach people who are controlled by ideology if schools are bent on teaching crt and other marxist-inspired doctrine how can we turn the tide is there a way we can reach people who are controlled by ideology yes um by acting honorably and by telling a better story so that's the goal right you have to tell a better story or you have to act out a better story and and telling it would also be helpful you have to offer something more attractive fundamentally and that doesn't mean that there's no room for criticism but i think telling a better story is the fundamental issue if schools are bent on teaching critical race they're in other marxist inspired doctrine how could we turn the tide well i offered some ideas about that tell a better story it's not self-evident that indoctrinating students at school is going to work that well i mean i remember myself as a junior high school student and my friends we were pretty cynical about what we were being taught especially if it was contaminated by something that it shouldn't have been contaminated by and so it might be that pushing all this has exactly the opposite consequence at least over the long run we'll see but basically you have to tell a better story and you have to get your arguments in order and so if you have kids well that's tough one you can discuss what they learned at home you can encourage them to use their judgment i told my kids you don't have to follow stupid rules but if you break them and you get caught well you have to deal with that but as far as i'm concerned you know if you've thought it through and the rule is stupid then well you're free to oppose it as long as you're willing to take the consequences so you can you can have intelligent discussions with your kids especially if you're interested and they're willing to bring things up and so and you can keep an eye on what they're being taught and then maybe you can object to the teacher and you can object to the school board best to do it in writing and i would also recommend and encourage that i've cleaned my room and feel called to serve the greater community what are some signs that you're ready to go in the world and serve people offer you opportunities or you see opportunities and maybe those are the same thing if you're ready the your readiness primes you to be cognizant of the next steps forward and then if you put yourself together other people are going to recognize that and they're going to put opportunities in front of you and so then you can say yes and the way you go that's how that works out so another sign well you said you feel called to serve the greater community okay so that's a sign as well i mean assuming that it's not mere expression of narcissism on your part you're ready for it so watch and look and see if you see an opportunity that inspires you or that someone offers to you even if it's lowly in that direction right even if it's starting at the bottom starting at the bottom is fine you learn that way you learn everything about what you're doing by starting at the bottom and there's something to be said for that so last question in your last q a you said you decided to take the vaccine my friends and i were surprised by this is it safer than i think i don't know you know why did i get the vaccine well balance of risk i suppose um i don't need covid um i've had enough health trouble and i had covid so i had covet and i got the vaccine because some blood markers indicated that my immunity might not be what it should be was it the right thing to do how the hell do i know i don't bloody well know um i don't think the vaccine makers are conspiratorial fundamentally or any more than any other organization um my wife was very ill in recent years and is somewhat immunocompromised so that entered into it i wanted to stop worrying about covid um it seemed to me that the evidence that case rates plummeted after the vaccine was strong i've had vaccines before and they don't seem to have hurt me i felt some obligation not to be a carrier although i would say that wasn't the prime issue i'm sick and tired of the lockdown and assume that if in canada we reach a certain threshold of vaccinated people that it'll be done with and i'm ready for that and willing to take some risk for it um but you know i have family members who don't want to take the vaccine and i can certainly understand why and i'm not beating my chest at them so balance of risk i was more concerned about not getting it than i was about getting it so i got it and i'm not saying that's any moral accomplishment on my part it was just seemed like the tired of the lockdown and so tired of worrying about it not that i was worrying about getting kovid that much but you know it gives me some moral authority when i say enough of this as well you know with these rules that have been applied to us curtailing our civil liberties like i had the goddamn vaccine so get out of my face and maybe that's the fundamental profession all right thank you for listening assuming you're still listening see you at the next q a

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 486,227

Rating: 4.9472604 out of 5

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

Id: W_luzlgqYz0

Length: 85min 7sec (5107 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021