Why Is the Feminine Represented as Chaos? | Q&A 06-02-2021 | Jordan B. Peterson

hi everyone and welcome to the third q a since i've been back in 2020 and 2021 the questions for this were submitted on thinkspot one week in advance of its recording the video will also be published one week in advance or a few days in advance on thinkspot so if you'd like to be in on it first you can try it out there all right so away we go with the questions first why is the feminine represented as chaos my feminist friends often question that part of your teaching what is the archetypal role of women who do not feel inclined toward traditional modes of being well we could answer the first question first there is no archetypal role of women or not a simple archetypal role of women who do not feel inclined toward traditional modes of being because the archetype is the tradition so that's a contradiction in terms essentially why is the feminine represented as chaos well let's throw something back at your feminist friends why is the masculine represented as order by feminists i mean let's address that question initially so it seems to be an uh a foregone conclusion that the patriarchy is represented with masculine symbols and it seems equally a foregone conclusion that the patriarchy is order so if the masculine symbolism is used by feminists themselves to represent order what is left for the feminine to be represented by order well that's already taken and the reason your feminist friends object to it is well i would say fundamentally there's two reasons is they object to everything and they don't understand it and they don't notice their own behavior so why don't you ask them well why is the masculine represented as order and then there's a deeper answer too which is well in some sense i don't know it's not me that's doing the representing mean let's look at taoist symbolism the taoists whose ideas i am definitely not responsible for who represent an age-old tradition represent yin and yang as the two fundamental modes of being in the famous paisley dual paisley symbol it's actually dual serpents head to head um yin is feminine and yang is masculine well why don't you get your feminists to ask the taoists why yin is feminine now the reason is as far as i can tell is that the feminine challenges the masculine and it challenges the masculine by throwing the masculine into disorder and it does that primarily through rejection and so if you're a man and you're trying to embody productive order let's say and you make an advance on a woman the feminine you make an advance on the feminine then we'll say archetypally and you're rejected then that interjects a tremendous amount of chaos into your existence the chaos that's attended on such a fundamental rejection and that rejection may require a total rethinking of the order because the fundamental purpose of the order at least as it's manifested by men the met the the masculine is to be attractive to the feminine and so if that's not working then the order needs to be restructured and then we might say well ask your feminists this are they calling constantly for the masculine to be reordered and obviously the answer to that is yes except insofar as they also wish to participate in it which is something perhaps we'll get to later they're always calling for the masculine to be reordered and so how would you symbolize what it is that calls for order to be reordered if you wouldn't symbolize it as chaos so you know i guess i'm somewhat annoyed by this by the by all appearances i guess it's because it isn't me doing this symbolic labeling which is another thing that my critics don't seem to understand i didn't invent these symbolic domains far from it i'm merely drawing people's attention to them um you know and you might say well what's the evidence that the feminine is represented by chaos well i outlined all sorts of evidence in my three books and carl jung has outlined all sorts of evidence in his you know 50 books and joseph campbell has outlined all sorts of evidence and eric neumann in the great mother which is an absolutely superb book which you could recommend to your feminist friends certainly camille paglia would recommend eric neumann's work because she's a great fan of his so he wrote a great book called the origins and history of consciousness which is one of the greatest books in the union pantheon but one that stands on its own and also one that jung said he wished he would have written in in the forward to it so that's really saying something and then the great mother which is also by eric neumann is a catalog of the symbolism of the feminine which you could um encourage your feminist readers to your feminist friends to read if they would actually like to read something that isn't within their pantheon let's say but would add something incredibly extraordinary and credible to it i mean palia believed that neumann's viewpoint was the proper path that literary criticism and and by implication cultural criticism should have taken in the 20 late 20th and 20 and early 21st century that's the path i took that's the path she took at least in part it's certainly not the path that the universities took because they took the path that is predicated on the proposition that our culture the west western culture let's say is predicated on the on power on the arbitrary expression of power as the fundamental human motivation which is an unbelievably shallow and uh erroneous conclusion if the masculine is represented as order even by feminists themselves and if feminists are calling for a complete complete revamping of the patriarchal structure then how in the world can those same feminists complain let's say when i point out that the feminine is symbolized by chaos well in their case it's certainly acting as chaos and the other thing i should also insist upon is that i don't draw a moral distinction with regards to the utility of order versus chaos order is the domain of what we have comprehended and control and we certainly want to comprehend things and control them because we want things to turn out the way we want them to turn out and that's the definition of control but chaos is the domain that surrounds that from which all new things flow which is also part of the reason that it's feminine because the feminine is that from which all new things flow as well as that which rejects the order and selects these are very deep issues they're very fundamental issues i mean do your feminist friends also doubt the reality of hypergamy because that's the proclivity of women to mate at or up or across or up hierarchies of socioeconomic status it's been well documented across many many cultures although it is ameliorated to some degree in the most egalitarian cultures as opposed to being exaggerated as personality traits are and those the difference between men and women personality is exaggerated in those cultures hypergamy is also an indication of the feminine's tendency to reject the current embodiment of order in the form of the masculine entities that present themselves to her let's say so i don't think your feminist friends have a leg to stand on with regards to the criticism i just think they want to have their cake and eat it too and they haven't read the relevant books and they like to say things they haven't thought through and they want and and it's an easy way of dismissing my ideas and they don't know what they're throwing away when they throw away the feminine identification with chaos and plenitude and generation and creativity and all of that because somehow they think it's an insult because they don't understand anything about what i'm saying and don't want to and so that's that's the answer to your feminist friends do you think the underlying reason for cancel culture is that we are so connected through technology but so isolated just wanting to be heard what do you think is the deepest reason well i don't think that the underlying reason is for cancer culture is that we are so connected through technology i think it would be happening anyways i think it's possible that technology facilitates the kind of bullying that cancel culture essentially represents by making it somewhat easier and also making it less likely that the people who are doing it are going to be held responsible for their actions but i don't think it's the fact that we're connected through technology and i'm presuming the questioner means modern technologies such as those that underlie the use of social media rather than you know books and and and print and and tv and all those technologies that we've had for at least some time um the deepest reason for cancel culture well i would say there's two deep reasons one is it's a form of bullying and it might even be a female specific form of bullying or female not specific that's wrong it's the form of bullying that goes after reputations essentially and that's a feminine form of bullying because the feminine use of aggression tends to be reputation destruction and cancer culture is a manifestation of that and i don't know to what degree cancel culture and its assorted manifestations are a manifestation of the feminine tendency to destroy reputations but it looks like it looks to me like there's something to that so we don't know right we don't know how female anti-social behavior proclivities are going to manifest themselves in the political realm but would be foolish to think that they won't because they certainly manifested themselves in you know male antisocial tendencies certainly manifested themselves in the male political realm so why would we expect anything different on the female side in any case no i think the reason that council culture exists is well that there's this bullying issue but there's an another deep reason which is that the philosophy upon which cancer culture rests is the philosophy that states that the fundamental motivating drive and the organizing principle of western culture is power and power is something like the ability to use force to compel others to act against their own best interests or to act against what they would freely choose so it's the antithesis of informed negotiation right if i have power over you that means i can force you to do my will rather than negotiate with you to do our will or to allow you or to facilitate you using your will so that's how i'm going to use power in this discussion and this culture war we're in is fought against the philosophy that presumes that it's power of that sort that structures our social relations now if you believe that and you shouldn't because it's nonsense it's it's the anti-truth because that isn't what structures our social relations it's an aberration upon what structures our social relations well then you believe that people individuals are nothing but the mouthpiece of their group and their their group identity is beneficial to them because it allows for their expression the expression of their power and for the maintenance of their status and all of that if you believe that then there's no dialogue between people there's only power struggle between groups and so you don't give someone who isn't in your group the opportunity to speak or to exist for that matter why would you because they're just doing their power thing and you're doing your power thing and it's it's a battle of all against all and you want your power identity to win so cancel culture is the logical outcome of that reasoning why would you you don't engage with your opponents because there's no you to engage there's no individual there's just the group identity expressed in power so you can't have a rational discussion modify your axioms and come to a negotiated settlement that that's all part of the enlightenment hypocrisy or even deeper than that the judeo-christian hypocrisy now i take umbrage to that let's say because i don't believe that these principles are even western in their derivation i believe they're human universal in their derivation and so unless the people who are criticizing western culture want to attribute to western culture only the best of human culture because that's what this is which i think is something they would have a hard time swallowing um i don't believe the best in human culture has manifested itself as the drive to power i think that's an appalling philosophy i think the only people who believe that are those who use power to negotiate their own social relations and who wish they had the power to negotiate the broader social contract so i think the hypothesis that power is the fundamental motivation is an unconscious confession on the part of its professors and i think all of their actions indicate precisely that so you know who you're dealing with when you hear someone who makes that claim they're either deeply cynical or they're narcissistic or they're machiavellian or and and they believe that's how everyone else is i think that comes i think that's absolutely clear for example in the writings of darada who is personally appalling as a human being in every possible way and i mean i think it is reasonable under most conditions to separate the thinker from his thoughts or her thoughts but i'd be willing to make an exception in the case of darada but he believed that power structures human relations that's where he got his sexual gratification was through the expression of power and i believe he did think that that's what structured human social relations and that's how he acted and that's how he thought and so his effect as the most cited social scientist ever is so pernicious that it's it's it's absolutely beyond comprehension so so those are the reasons for cancel culture it gives malevolent machiavellians the the uh opportunity to bully in a manner that destroys reputations without repercussion and so there's no shortage of fun in that and it gives those and it's required ideologically for the sake of consistency by those who claim that power is the fundamental structuring motivation of western culture or perhaps culture at large insofar as it isn't possible to distinguish between culture and western culture unless as i said you're willing to attribute all the positive aspects of human universal culture to the west so the critique is broader than a critique of western culture that this is the point that i'm making it's a critique of the fundamental human endeavor the golden thread that stretches back centuries and when they when the cultural critics say that this is a war of fundamentals they mean that this is a war that goes all the way to the bottom it's a war about whether or not it's the logos that's the center of motivation for human social structures and their answer would be no it's the power mad adversary so you can you can draw from that statement whatever conclusion you want it often seems like intelligent people lack social skills where socially highly competent persons are usually not all that smart no that isn't how it is there are exceptions and much is made of them i suppose the popularity of the show the big bang theory is an indication of that so intelligence gets caricatured as um system as the systematizing tendency versus the empathizing tendency you can look that up if you want this the systematic the systemizing tendency which is seen in its extreme in the case of autism is a part of the tendency to think systematically and to prefer things to people and there are intelligent people who are systematizers they're usually characterized as nerds just and the most accurate caricaturization the most accurate caricature is perhaps the big bang or the most what would you say the most amusing caricature the most uh thoughtful caricature but its popularity indicates that you know the trope has some merit some identifiable merit there are a subset of highly intelligent people who are systematizers and they tend to lack social skills but even systematizers who aren't intelligent lack social skills and you can be virtually certain that the more intelligent systematizers have more social skills than the less intelligent systematizers so overall there's a positive relationship between intelligence and social skill make no mistake about it because intelligence is that's general cognitive ability is such a pervasive phenomena that ever virtually everything that has a cognitive element well i would say everything that has a cognitive element is positively correlated with iq or with general cognitive ability general iq is general cognitive ability standardized and corrected for age by the way and general cognitive ability is the proclivity for people who do well on solving one set of abstract problems to solve all sets of abstract problems it's a unitary phenomena very powerful unitary phenomena phenomenon [Music] so it's just not the case and it's certainly not the case that emotional intelligence which doesn't exist by the way it's a manifestation of agreeableness on the big five scale because the big five does exist even though its constituent elements don't have the same predictive power as general cognitive ability they're reliably measurable and valid predictors of many uh non-obvious phenomenon let's say so the big five extroversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness and openness were derived through statistical techniques that are very similar to those that were used to derive the single factor of general cognitive ability sometimes parsed into verbal and non-verbal intelligence and there's some utility in that even though those two are very highly correlated especially across time factor analysis which is the statistical technique applied to personality adjectives reliably reveals that there are five factors and if you're talking about personality you're talking about one or more of those five factors whether you know it or not and whether you want to or not and that's that now you could argue that there are six factors the people who push the hexaco model do argue that and more power to them they seem to have identified something useful in honesty humility perhaps maybe that's the inverse of what the investigators into the dark triad which includes machiavellianism have also identified there does seem to be a paucity of words representing malevolence in the big five and that's because those judgmental words were parsed out of many of the adjective lists that were used to derive the big five to begin with there was an attempt to include non-judgmental adjectives in the initial derivation um so maybe there are six factors but there's certainly five and perhaps those can be broken down into ten we broke them down into ten my colin de young and i and some other compatriots colleagues and students of mine broke the big five down into ten aspects if you're interested in that you can use my personality test at understandmyself.com which also by the way enables you to generate a couple's report so if you and your partner both do the personality test you can get a couple's report that will identify where you are simpatico let's say and where you're likely to have trouble and why so you know hypothetically that's going to be useful and it's you know it is really useful to know that some of the conflicts that you're going to have with your partner are a consequence of the differences between your innate temperaments and to know that those temperamental differences exist and to be able to take them into account so anyways it isn't the case that highly intelligent people lack social skills it is the case that we're very motivated to look at the deficits of highly intelligent people because it's so annoying that they exist you know look when i taught at harvard i used to have some of the undergraduates over for lunch or dinner not nearly as often as i would have liked to or should have my experience with the harvard undergraduates was that and they're very highly selected on the basis of general cognitive ability by the way although that's not the only means of selection even though it perhaps should be because that would be more fair than what's being done currently um that doesn't say that that isn't to say that that would be optimal because conscientiousness might be taken into account validly and so might openness which is the creativity dimension um if you're going to consider personality conscientiousness would be at the top of the list anyhow my observation with the harvard undergraduates was one-third of them were as smart as anybody ever going to meet and those were people kids who you could teach something to and they would immediately grip it and then they would immediately generalize it to areas that perhaps you haven't even considered which is a hallmark of extreme intelligence and also to some degree of creativity so that was always very interesting a third of them would catch on faster than virtually everybody who ever met but didn't have that generalization capacity and then a third would get it if they worked and so that was the harvard undergraduate population and so i would invite students particularly from that upper third let's say to have lunch because they were very interesting to me those kids and get to know them and like they were almost without exception and perhaps without exception they were great people you know they were generally attractive they were socially skilled they were humble you know and going to an ivy league school like harvard at least at that time was a humbling experience because no matter how smart you were where you came from and you were very likely to be a valedictorian for example if you were admitted to harvard you were not as smart as the p as some of the people around you and you were way not as smart as some of them and so it was a humbling experience for everyone now they might have been puffed up because they were at harvard to some degree but within harvard that was a whole different story that's not a place that's all that easy on your ego as a first year so uh you know and that's something to think about if you barely got in i would recommend if you barely got in that you attend somewhere where you're a bigger fish in a smaller pond it'd be a lot easier on you psychologically you know maybe the connection network wouldn't be as good but i would generally recommend that you know you don't go somewhere where you barely made it i i don't think that's the best possible route anyways these kids at the in the upper third of the upper you know one tenth of one percentile by no means lacked social skills you know most of them were good athletes because that was also a criteria for admission or they had performed some other quite remarkable feat of accomplishment at least one by the time they were applying because to get into harvard you needed to have extremely high general cognitive ability let's say you probably also needed to be conscientious at least implicitly but you definitely needed to have accomplished one or two remarkable things in your life before you got selected because general cognitive ability wasn't enough because harvard had a plethora of candidates in the stratosphere echelons of general cognitive ability and so you know i used to joke with my wife after we had a dinner like this that you know we're both primed to want to hate this highly accomplished person who had done so much by the time they were 18 but you know on meeting them you could see exactly why they got to where they were and that was merit insofar as that was properly selected for by the selection committee which at that time was less corrupt than it is now although not without its corruptions so no wrong intelligent people don't lack social skills a subset of highly intelligent people who are systematizers in their thinking lack social skills and it's convenient for all the rest of us insofar as we aren't in those upper echelons of general cognitive ability to look for the weaknesses of those who are but i'm afraid the story isn't that comforting so eq is not inversely proportional to iq quite the contrary so you know look think about it the more complicated the cognitive activity the better at it people who have high general cognitive ability are now there isn't anything more complicated than reading other people so why would iq falter in its prediction of that capability and then let's think about this a little bit further with regards to convenience so let's say you're a lawyer or a clinical psychologist or a doctor for that matter and let's say that you've been selected for for that occupation well what's been used to select you well in the case of clinical psychologist which is probably the most relevant case although lawyers and doctors also deal with people all the time and need to have a certain degree of emotional intelligence which by the way doesn't exist it's agreeableness fundamentally in the big five pantheon i think i forgot to finish that thought earlier in any case clinical psychologists are selected in large part although not entirely well on the basis of their gre scores that's the test used to get into to screen p applicants across universities when they apply to postgraduate clinical psychology programs which are very very very hard to get into so which means that the applicant to admission ratio is extremely high it's at least as hard to get into as medical school and i would argue probably harder but i might be wrong because they're both very hard to get into um they're you're basically selected on the basis of your gre scores about a third of your application would be a concept of your success would be a consequence of your gre scores and your grades and both of those are central markers for general cognitive ability and so all the people who publi practice clinical psychology have been selected on the basis of general cognitive ability and maybe that's not the only criteria that should have been used and it isn't because you know evaluation committees look at things like letters of recommendation which are not particularly valid predictors of competence by the way but maybe can be used to screen out you know by reading between the lines generally the letters of recommendation for anybody applying to programs that are highly selective are glowing and so it's very difficult to differentiate between them and a predictor with no differentiation has no utility and increasingly people are loath to provide accurate letters of recommendation because they're afraid that well they'll be caught up in some scandal if they let their opinion be known so they're in all likelihood becoming less valid predictors but in any case i'm hammering this point home because it needs to be hammered home intelligent people are better at everything that's complicated it's the nature of intelligence it's the central nature of intelligence and you know there are vast differences in intelligence between people and those have massive real world consequences and doesn't that just suck well it certainly does it's perhaps the most inedible object that psychological research has you know generated for your delectation and it isn't even clear that our culture can absorb the knowledge without crumbling so but there it is and and we're forced to deal with it now the upside is because we can measure general cognitive ability and this you've got to think this through people everyone we can sort people on general cognitive ability and so that's a bloody catastrophe for those who don't make the sorting isn't it and something has to be done about that and some thought put into it some real thought put into it not hand waving that says everyone can be trained to do anything which is liberal it's a lie it's not true it's an anti-truth unfortunately because wouldn't it be lovely if that was the case you know and hard work which is expressed in trait conscientiousness can compensate to some degree but no matter how hard i work for example i'm never going to be the kind of mathematician that can do cosmological level or or particle level physics i've seen mathematical geniuses i've had some of them as students they could learn in a month what took me five years not to learn very well i had a student who was a systematizer on the autistic spectrum and although also highly verbally proficient in in her systematic way god she learned more about statistics in two months being my graduate student than i did in 12 years of being a phd candidate and then a researcher and and you know she won awards for teaching statistic statistics in her first semester and those concepts to her were like reading an abc book for me and i'm not like that you know i have some sense of my own intellectual limitations i certainly see them in the mathematical realm my verbal intelligence is very high but my non-verbal intelligence is it's high but it's not very high and i've met people who have very high non-verbal intelligence and had the privilege to work with them but you know the thing about the sorting is that it's well obviously it's extremely hard on people who don't make the cut in in whatever direction the cut is being made but it allows the rest of us morons to be in a position to take preferential advantage of the talent that we've winnowed and that is now being presented to us and so we have to ask ourselves what's in our best interest people are we going to swallow the bitter pill of differences in general cognitive ability so that we can exploit for our own utility the massive advantage that those who have high general cognitive ability are able to present to us and are we going to play the game straight so that we do open the door to those who have proficiency in that regard so they can maximize their talent and and therefore benefit the rest of us because that's what we do when we use objective merit-based screening for application to places like harvard and if we did that well we'd stop screening out the asians for example which is an unbelievably perverse thing to do given that they have an edge in conscientiousness probably for cultural reasons but it's certainly the case that at ivy league institutes very very many asians in particular who have exceptional general cognitive ability are being screened out of the competition for personality defects and it's it's appalling and you know if the liberals who are listening to this and there's probably not that many of them but for the liberals who are listening to this is that really the kind of diversity that you're promoting is that what you want you're going to hobble the ability of the entire culture to take advantage of the pool of human intelligence that our testing uh technology allows us to identify now you know those people who are screened out and go to lesser less prestigious institutions than harvard are likely to do pretty damn well there as well so you know there are people who are going to land on their feet but that's not the point the point is our most prestigious institutes should be most open to those who are most capable of most benefiting and though it's clearly those who would be selected with objective objective analysis and for those of you who object to the idea of objective analysis you just try and replace it with something better something better you know extremely highly trained and extraordinarily intelligent psychometric experts have been trying to do that for a hundred years supported by the best research institutions in the world and they have come up with general cognitive ability and conscientiousness and that's a really hard game to beat i tried developing a neuropsychological battery as an adjunct to general cognitive ability for example and did actually manage to differentiate the personality screeners in some useful manner by breaking them into the 10 aspects that are tested again in the myo in understandmyself.com and we found some incremental predictive utility in that differentiation that took 15 years of research effort which involved by the way some of those people who were selected for extraordinarily high general cognitive ability um on the basis of the test that i was trying to compete with my my competition wasn't successful except insofar as i was able to differentiate with my colleagues able to differentiate uh personality you know into ten aspects so that meant we broke conscientious down in conscientiousness down into industriousness and orderliness and industriousness seems to be a better predictor of performance in social institutions than does orderliness there's some domain-specific prediction that that still remains for orderliness but you know so but that that was a small incremental utility improvement you're not going to replace general cognitive ability with anything that's better and hey man knock yourself out trying i did for 15 years i built a commercially applicable product as well which i couldn't sell because it was too accurate and therefore too threatening and that brings us to the next question what are your thoughts on the myers-brigg personality type indicator as opposed to the big five well myers-briggs was not generated with modern statistical technology and has all the lacks you'd expect so the it was generated as a consequence of its purported um affinity for or identity with jung's theories although it's not a product that carl jung either used or produced or as far as i know approved of not to say that he outright disapproved of it but it's not a direct consequence of his work on his domain it's an it's a consequence of inferences about his work from other people who studied his content and generally that doesn't go that well with the possible exception of eric neumann for example and a few others who i've put on my reading list which of recommended books which you can access at jordanbpeterson.com under books under recommended books now the myers-briggs is widely used as a personality test why well there's there's some things to be said in its favor it does provide a relatively accurate index of extroversion for example it lacks neuroticism entirely which is a big problem um and the terminology it uses is best replaced and i'm saying this you know despite my admiration for jung's thought it's best replaced with the factor analytically derived terms that are used in the big five and in the big ten aspect scale so it should be supplanted by those tests validly to serve the purposes of valid prediction and reliable testing now why is the myers-briggs so popular well i think the reason it's so there's two reasons that and they're valid reasons the first is that it is important for people to understand that people differ on the basis of their temperament that a systematizer for example who would be low in agreeableness um and and generally low in neuroticism but low in agreeableness certainly a systematizer does differ from an empathizer who would be high in agreeableness um that there are is diversity in the way that people process the world and that considering that diversity is actually useful if you actually consider the diversity which is to be found far more in the realm of personality than it is in the realm of inalienable attributes there's no reliable data as far as i know on racial differences in personality so the diff the diversity that the diversity inclusivity and equity people are striving to include is actually to be found in the domain of personality and not where they're looking um and the evidence for that is crystal clear so and is it useful to have a diverse range of personalities in your um organization and well that's a complicated question because it's preferentially useful to have a very large number of conscientious people in your workforce because they get the job done now you know conscientious people do tend to be a bit more conservative because they're they also tend to be orderly and so they might not be as open to new ideas as those who are not inhibited to such a degree by orderliness so it's the absence of an impediment rather than the presence of a feature but we don't understand the relationship between openness which is the creativity dimension and conscientiousness well enough to make more differentiated uh predictions so anyways is it useful to have a diversity of of personalities in your workforce well in so far as having a diversity of personalities in your workforce enables you to understand the target market which includes a diverse range of personalities and in so far as having a diverse range of personalities has been useful for the general human enterprise which is why it's been selected for it's possible that it's useful for your organization but but you know that's still somewhat problematic claim given that the evidence suggests that a preponderance of conscientious people is very helpful if you want to undertake what it is that you plan to undertake and then the open people might be necessary for vision and more emotionally stable people for resilience and more agreeable people to understand and empathize with everyone within the organization but also with the general community and disagreeable people who because they'll tell you what they think and work as you know whistleblowers by bringing things that will produce conflict to your attention because they're not conflict diverse these are very complicated matters now what the myers-briggs personality myers-briggs temperamental inventory does or personality type indicator does to the dialogue is bring it up fundamentally in a non-threatening way so you can administer the myers-briggs and while you're doing that you can inform everyone that temperamental differences exist and that they matter and that they're real and you can get the dialogue going and no one gets offended by their myers-briggs personality type categorization and when i so i tried to market a neuropsychological battery um that involved the cognitive operations of the prefrontal cortex that's what it tested as well as assessing conscientiousness i tried to market that to corporations for about 20 years and it was except in one case a dismal failure and the reason for that was really i'm telling you the truth is that it was too accurate and so one of the things would happen is that the manager that i was speaking to would want to take the test and he would generally score somewhere around the 50th percentile which doesn't mean he got 50 percent on the test it meant that he did as well as the average manager which is what you'd expect the average manager to do that meant he was better than one out of two managers which is actually pretty good but he'd look at it and he'd think well i'm 50th percent you know i got 50 on this test because he wasn't statistically versed i got 50 on this test well it can't be accurate because of course i'm a good manager well which being better than one and a half managers makes you um you know how can i rely on this to select people well maybe you want to select people who are better than you are but maybe you don't because that is threatening and well and it is a test that actually ranks people on the basis of their merit in relationship to a job especially your job is actually extremely threatening and what we found despite our repeated attempts was that it was so threatening that people were loath to use the test even though we could make a case for its unbelievable economic advantage so it's so advantageous to hire better people than to not hire them then there isn't a single decision that you can make in your company that's more important than who you hire and the economic utility of even small improvements in your hiring process is absolutely overwhelming and that can also be demonstrated mathematically but that means that the person you're talking to has to be able to understand and open to mathematical arguments and also by your story which they won't aren't necessarily prone to do it also means that the person you're talking to who's doing the selection has to benefit directly or at least not be punished for improving the selection process and the way that most corporations are set up is that those who accrue benefit from in from improving the hiring process are not those who are in control of the hiring process so the incentives are lined up in a perverse way so for example many of the people that i was negotiating with they would tell me they couldn't pay for the test i'd say well like this test has a 500 to one return on investment what do you mean you can't pay for it's not like we were charging an arm and a leg by the way either well i get evaluated on the cost side and the benefits get evaluated on someone else's watch well you know then i'm dead in the water aren't i because i there's no argument that i can make that will convince you to use the test because you'll be punished for its shortcomings and someone else will be rewarded for its benefits end of story and and we never did market this product successfully despite you know 15 years of work much of it published in the scientific literature so anyways back to the myers-briggs well it's a non-confrontational way of introducing discussion about personality into the workforce and so it's to be lauded for that and it does provide people with some information well it certainly provides them with information that there are differences in personality and that's a useful pedagogical um uh contribution let's say so thumbs up to the myers-briggs people for that for making a uh test that people could bear using now the problem is is that it's not the most accurate test the most accurate test as far as i'm concerned and you can for those of you who are able you can decide whether this is a valid claim or not is the understandmyself.com personality test the big five the ten aspect big five ten aspects slash big five markers and that paper by the way has been cited i'll just look at google scholar here for a minute the paper that that colin de young was a student of mine at the time wrote along with daniel higgins and no along with lena quilty my my my mistake daniel higgins is my partner in the business and also a co-author on the next three most highly cited papers that i've been associated with anyways the paper is between facets and domains 10 aspects of the big five and it's been cited 1700 times um where the median citation it it's been cited a lot it's the highest citation count paper i have and 1700 citations is a very large number of citations that that would be a moderate career level citation for a moderately successful researcher rather than just the citation count for one paper so people do have some regard for the ten aspect theory and increasingly so um that means they're more and more papers published using it so if you really want to know what your personality is i would say use understand myself and then you can also understand your your coupling better um if you want a non-confrontational introduction to the idea that personality diversity exists then use the myers-briggs but it isn't going to give you the most differentiated information that you can have so um i guess if i was pushed though and i uh you know someone from a corporation said to me well which one would you recommend using in the corporate environment well i'd make two cases i'd say well if you want to avoid conflict use the mbti if you want to help people understand their personalities and use an accurate instrument to do so for whatever cost that might have as well then use the 10 aspect scale because it's the most accurate and differentiated personality measure that exists as far as i'm concerned the hexaco model is great and a standard big five like the neo pir is also these are these are good instruments it's not like it's the only one but i think it's got the stats right at the most fundamental level and it offers the most differentiation so it gives you the biggest accuracy bang for your buck if you're interested in accuracy and it doesn't take very long you know it's a hundred questions and you can wrap them off pretty quickly and and you get a lot of information about who you are uh that's useful as far as i'm concerned okay next question how does one restore trust in our political medical judicial and other social systems when they're proving out to be fraudulent with every passing day well look the first first thing is they've been proving out to be fraudulent to some degree every day throughout the entire span of human history this is not new it's an existential fact it's a transcendental existential fact and that's why there's an archetype of the tyrant and we've used the archetype of the tyrant to represent the entire patriarchy it's implicit in that term the culture war right now is about whether or not the patriarchy is a tyrant it's a symbolic battle you know and the chaotic feminine is coming to to demand the restructuring that's what's playing out in in our culture but it's always playing out that's why it's archetypal that's why it's expressed in these deep symbols it's not like i'm in favor of it exactly it's it's just as far as i can tell that's how it is so you're you're you're asking how you restore trust in our political medical judicial and other social systems when they're proving out to be fraudulent well first of all you realize that you're that doesn't make your position unique you've realized that well how fraudulent are they that's the real issue and compared to what are they more fraudulent than you i doubt it so that's a good place to start that's why you know express my viewpoint that you start by cleaning up your own soul and maybe you start by with your room which by the way you can look at my room it's now clean and i haven't just hidden the mess in the corner so not that it couldn't use some more cleaning because it certainly could and so could i but you know really fraudulent but what are you doing about it you know being morally appalled and and putting yourself on a moral plane that in some sense supersedes social institutions themselves so that's your claim i'm a better human being than the average social institution is moral really really you think that do you think that you're a better human being than the american court system for example you know all things considered i understand it has its flaws so i doubt that so and then the next thing i would say is so they've been proving fraudulent forever and mostly they're not fraudulent okay so we got to keep that in mind because they're fraudulent compared to our hypothetical ideal but you have to be careful with that because you know if you're going to go around imposing the hypothetical ideal as the proper moral standard well then you have to live up to it and good luck with that but it also gives you carte blanche to you know abandon the system because of its moral inadequacy and also to claim that every action you take which is in service of this hypothetical higher good is justified because the higher good is so much higher and so every iniquity on your part that can be justified by your hypothetical end is now permissible and if you don't think the malevolent part of you will take advantage of that moral claim then you don't know anything about malevolence so now what can you do about it how does when we store trust in our medical political medical judicial and other social systems well i would say by acting as an honorable agent with integrity in all of your dealings starting with your relationship with yourself extending to your relationship with your intimate other extending past that to your family extending past that to your community extending past that to the economic and political systems that you serve and that serve you and so if you want to restore trust in the system well then start by being trustworthy and that will help that's what you can do and you know being trustworthy that's no mean feat right that that makes you really something that makes you someone who can be relied on to keep their contractual obligations it's a very powerful act don't don't mistake it for something trivial and local it's to be a beacon on the hill is no is no trivial accomplishment so get at it and then the next thing i would say is well do you belong to a political party have you ever democratic republican i don't care have you ever contributed to the political medical judicial and other social systems that you're decrying insofar as you're able i mean i've had some experience working with political parties when i was a kid on later in life as well but you know i had status by that point but so we'll go back to when i was a kid 14 i worked with the ndp a socialist party in alberta and the doors were open man believe me these political parties they're starving to death for for committed individuals to help so if you're concerned about these fraudulent social systems it's like hey fix one it's right there in front of you there isn't a single political party in my country there isn't a single political party in my country that wouldn't welcome a young person who wanted to contribute to making it better with open arms and great relief and so and it's the same with the judicial medical and other systems it's like well if you're concerned about fraudulence in the medical profession you're really concerned about it well then maybe you should be a nurse or a doctor like this is on you it's not they and maybe you can you know when you listen to people talk and and they keep talking about the they that's the problem you got to ask yourself well are you sure it's there or is it us because for most of the time it's us and so you know how much are you proving to be fraudulent with every passing day that's the right question you know and a couple of hundred thousand non-fraudulent young people while that have a major impact and so maybe you could start by being one of them so this standing back as a young individual and criticizing the social system it's it's a fool's game it's like you're the beneficiary and the victim but you're all you know the beneficiary as well as the victim and if it's fraudulent well it's fraudulent to the same degree no it's less it's less fraudulent than you you can be virtually certain of that at least when the system is functional because it's functional and sometimes highly functional so so you know allowing yourself to be disenchanted by that is just an excuse for not picking up your responsibility and getting the hell on with it it's like the system's broken yeah it's always been broken the old man is blind yeah he's always been blind he speaks words of slogans yeah well that's always been the case bloody the the the ancient egyptians had this figured out you know the mesopotamians before them had this figured out it's not a news story the old dying king is corrupt yeah right no kidding that's why you rescue him from the belly of the beast that's your goal as a job as an individual so get at it and don't let your cynicism confuse you into thinking that it's wisdom it might be wisdom compared to naive optimism but it's not true wisdom true wisdom is you're the problem and then fix it and if you want more reliable social institutions well start by becoming more reliable and then start working for the social institutions so you might say well they're so fraudulent and corrupt that we need to replace them it's like yeah then i think we just maybe not allow you the opportunity to do that you know because really you that's what you're going to do and that's going to work out well what else has worked out well in your life oh radical one that segues into this question quite nicely i've come to harbor some pessimistic beliefs about human nature i'm young and optimistic about my future but i've grown disenchanted by how i see each other's see others treat each other how do you believe we can bring back optimism in human relationships um well of course you're going to be disenchanted because you were young and naive and so being disenchanted is part of maturing but the next part of maturing is to move forward optimistically as an axiom of your faith in mankind and yourself as a recognition of your moral obligation to do so right so now your eyes are open you see well you know there's a snake in the garden and kane is your brother well yeah it's always been that way and welcome to reality so what do you do you allow that to make you corrupt and nihilistic not if you think that it's the corruption and the nihilism that's the problem so you're obligated to be optimistic in some sense despite the evidence and that's faith so you know pick up your cross and stumble uphill consciously and you bring back optimism in human relations by structuring your own to the best of your possible ability and that'll expand outward as you become more competent move through your life be productive generous kind discerning wise educated you be a good father to everyone not the tyrant that resentment breeds in your own heart and that's an act of moral courage and that's real maturity so and and if you want an adventure well there's one for you i have low intelligence and feel hopeless what jobs do you recommend i take well you're probably not particularly well suited for jobs that require a tremendous amount of transformation of thinking or a tremendous amount of abstraction but that doesn't mean there are no jobs for you and so jobs that are more stable and repetitive routine let's say you're better suited for vocational jobs and there's vocational jobs playing a remarkably important role in our culture so and hard work can get you a long ways and so you know i don't know what you mean when you say low intelligence you know i mean there are catastrophically low intelligence ratings say 60 and below it's tough to find anything that you're going to be able to be productive in doing and i don't know what to do about that above that hard work is going to make a huge difference and aiming right so aim at the vocational end of the distribution and put a plan in place and stick to it and work diligently at it that's what you've got you've got your ability to work and maybe you can capitalize on your other personality attributes as well and as i've said already in this podcast you can do a personality test at understandmyself.com i would also say on my selfauthoring.com website there's an opportunity for you to map out a plan and this one of the to map out a plan to write about your past but also to write about your present self so the present authoring program enables you to do an inventory of your personality strengths and weaknesses and there's a virtues analysis and a false analysis and i would say if you're leery about your future for whatever reason you should do the virtues analysis it's like what have you got to offer and hopefully you have the ability to work hard and maybe you have other personality attributes that are important and that you could understand and then capitalize on so i would say do the understandmyself.com personality test do the virtues section of the present authoring exercise at selfauthoring.com put together a plan and aim at the vocational end of the job distribution don't despair there's plenty of opportunity at that level for someone who's honest which is a huge advantage who has integrity who's willing to work hard i'm not going to sugarcoat it you know life is harder at the shallow end of the gene pool let's say to use scars phrase from the lion king we're all at the shallow end of the gene pool in some regard you know so the cognitive end is that's a rough hit but general cognitive ability isn't everything even though it's a lot of things and so aim integrity hard work a plan that's what you've got and so you have to make the best of it how can i tell if i'm being authentic or possessed by an idea in the past things i thought were me were just cultural fads another question allied with that how can i tell if i'm being truthful in the present if i can only look reflexively at an outcome to see if it was fit enough from a pragmatic perspective that's a complicated question we'll start with the first one how can i tell if i'm being authentic or possessed by an idea look when you were possessed by those ideas you might have been at least partially authentic because one of the things you might ask yourself is well were they stepping stones to a better you you know people get possessed all the time because they admire certain ideas and sometimes that admiration impels them into a kind of apprenticeship and so they were stupider before they got possessed by that idea and as they transf transformed themselves across the apprenticeship cycle say being apprenticed to this fad like idea they learn something from it so you know you might you might have learned and grown as a consequence of what possessed you now you know it's possible that a lot of that spoke to the development of parts of you that you don't want to develop you know that they spoke to your malevolence and spoke to your desire to manipulate and all of that and you have to sort that out but look i also don't think it's all that easy to figure out when you're authentic that that's subtle you know you you your felt sense of confidence in your words when you're not trying to win is something like your ability to judge your authenticity you know are you saying this to achieve a local end or are you saying this because you have thought deeply and this is the best expression you can manage of a deeply held conviction that's a lifetime it's a lifetime of work or it's a lifetime work to sort those things out the best i could come up with was in my first book well the first of the more popular books in 12 rules for life don't lie now not lying is not the same as being authentic exactly because as your question highlights it's not that easy to tell when you're telling the truth right because well what the hell do you know it's certainly not the truth what you know it might be your best approximation but it's certainly not the truth and you're by no means unerring in your ability to discern when it is that you're even speaking your truth because that's so complicated you just have to practice doing that continually to get anywhere near good at it like so it's years and years of effort to a stringent moral effort to begin to manage that but i do believe that people can tell by and large when they're outright lying and they can stop doing that they can stop saying things they know to be false and so that's the most obvious impediment to authenticity is outright lies of commission stop engaging in those stop saying things you know to be false now that begs the question how do you know them to be false well that's complicated sometimes that's a feeling of repugnance at your own words sometimes it's a feeling of touchy embarrassment so that if people call you in what you say you get disproportionately angry um sometimes it's knowing a set of facts that you haven't let affect the way you think or present yourself you know you're purposefully keeping yourself in the fog as per rule three of beyond order um those are all things you have to sort out for yourself but i think it starts with an act of faith and which is at least in part why religious systems insist upon faith and faith isn't belief in something that no one's saying would believe you know that's that's a misapprehension of faith faith is something like a decision that truth serves the good and the good is worth serving and so therefore truth is worth serving it's just that's an axiomatic proposition and you can debate its empirical justification and of course we wouldn't be tempted into temptation if we couldn't debate its empirical justification because the objection is yeah and what exactly does truth buy you that falsehood wouldn't buy you better and if you don't think that you're tempted by that counter position well then you don't know anything about temptation because that is the temptation of the counter position so and it's powerful temptation that's why it's a statement of faith that this that that um conquers it it's a decision so you probably were possessed by an idea but maybe there was something in you that was striving to be authentic and maybe you can speed that process of transformation along by vowing by taking a vow and that's adopting a religious commitment which is i'm going to serve truth and the good despite the proximal cost and that's a statement of faith because you're staking your life on that right because every decision you make from here on in will be a will be affected by that by that decision so it's a fundamental decision and hopefully that will guide you in your endeavor so that your possession by cultural fads which might be a necessary part of your apprenticeship will be temporary and serve this zigzagging path to something that's better for you in the future the second question how can i tell if i'm being truthful in the present if i can only look reflexively at well you can't if you can only look reflexively at an outcome to see if it was fit enough from a pragmatic perspective then you can't tell if you're being truthful in the present virtually by definition but i wouldn't say why do you think you can only look reflexively at an outcome to see if it was fit enough from a pragmatic perspective i don't think you're bound by that exactly now i know there's a deeper issue at hand there because i've claimed to be a pragmatist for example or at least to some degree problem with this question is there's really three questions in it and they have to be answered at the same time how can i tell if i'm being truthful in the present or maybe there's five questions if i can only that's another question because can you only look reflexively that's another question at an outcome that's another question to see if it was fit enough from a pragmatic perspective i would say that there are too many questions in that question for me to unpack simultaneously um so what i would encourage you to do is to break your question down into some questions and try again because i can't answer all of them at once i don't have the mental wherewithal to do it i see what you're driving at but it's just too much it's too many questions packed into one to be able to unpack spontaneously so it has been wonderful to see tammy in interviews lately would you and her continue doing consider doing a q a for young couples who want to get married and for those already married who want to stay married would love to see you together two together all the best another top question on thinkspot well i think we would consider it i can bring it up with her um i and i will and yes i guess we would consider it i don't know if i'm in a state and i don't know if she is either to do that in the spontaneous way that it would really need to be done you know because that should be something that's live but we could consider doing a q a like this on that topic and so well look we'll see what the comments section says when this is released on youtube and maybe we'll make our decision as a partial consequence of that but thank you for asking and um i'm pleased that you've been positively affected by tami's appearances on on youtube um the general response to what the general response to what she's been saying has been overwhelmingly positive and so of course that's very reassuring for me because she put herself out there and for her as obviously as well so it would be that it would be interesting to do that with her so i'll bring it up with her you know we keep thinking we keep thinking well who are we to offer such advice you know and tammy is doing everything she can to hammer herself into the sort of person who would be capable of doing that which is i suppose what a grandmother should be so but it's not like we're both hyper confident in our capacity to to do such things i guess maybe we're all that you have got and so tough luck for us and you so but you know but we struggle with that with regard to sexuality you said that it is a good question to ask yourself who is in control well yeah that's the question isn't it you know if you're masturbating to pornography and the consequence of that is an immediate influx of guilt then you have to ask yourself who's in control and that's a really important question who's in control that's what terrified me about developing some psychoanalytic acumen because once you realize that you're a house that many spirits can and do inhabit and that many of them aren't you and that many of them aren't working towards the purposes you might want yourself to be working to and that's the realization of the myth that you're embodying from the union perspective it's a very very serious question the fundamental human myth is cain versus abel and so who are you are you kane or abel well the answer is you're both and then the question is well who's got the upper hand and then the next question is who do you want to have the upper hand is it god and abel or satan and cain and that's a question that's just as germane to non-believers as it is to believers and isn't that remarkable and appalling and overwhelming and terrifying all at the same time if you have any sense of what it means so if your behavior is embarrassing you well there's only two possibilities isn't there you shouldn't be so embarrassed and i suppose the voice that says yes to all expression of human sexuality would say that your guilt and shame is merely the detrimental hangover of an oppressive patriarchy that's judgmental in its attitudes towards sexuality well yeah well what would you use judgment to differentiate if it isn't sexuality so i don't think that argument goes anywhere you have to consult your own conscience like i know the conscience can become an oppressive force on its own that's the indwelling of the great tyrant you know and freud made much of that a too oppressive superego and i've certainly seen clients whose expression of healthy sexuality was inhibited by a too rigid superego that can definitely happen but that doesn't mean that all guilt about all forms of sexual expression constitutes a superego run amok i mean it doesn't take a genius to figure out that there was some relationship between the sexual revolution of the 1960s which according to randy thornhill by the way who's perhaps the world's top biology biological thinker on this particular topic thornhill believed that the liberalism of the 60s was a consequence at least in part and in large part i should say of the hygienic revolution of the previous six decades and more that enabled us to reduce the impact at least in the west of infectious diseases and because we were much less prone to the transmission and receipt of infectious diseases we could afford to be more liberal by the 1960s so we got more sexually liberal and what happened aids and i say that without prejudice and what's the most effective means of facilitating the reproduction of a deadly virulent agent and its propagation through the population unrestrained sexual behavior and so that would be a multitude of partners so sexual shame is there for a reason and it's not a trivial reason and it's not just going to go away because we may wave the magic wand and make the patriarchal oppressor vanish and that's not going to happen either by the way so if you're ashamed about your sexual behavior then you have to ask yourself is the shame wrong or is the sexual behavior wrong and i'm asking you i'm not judging your behavior because what the hell do i know about you and i have enough trouble with my own behavior so you know this is on you is your shame what you should be dispensing with or the behavior and you know it might be a little a column and a little column b because life is never simple but if you don't feel ennobled by your porn related masturbation then perhaps that means it's of questionable utility i certainly don't see it as a stabilizing social force i don't see it as something people do in public and and brag about and and i know that sexual behavior is private and should remain that way but you get what i'm driving at so look i think people shouldn't lie especially to themselves and i think repeatedly engaging in a behavior that you judge yourself to be morally reprehensible is a form of performative contradiction which is the acting out of a lie and i suspect you know that or you wouldn't be asking the question and so you know what should you do with pornography well you know the answer to that and so does everybody else everyone knows it's not good it's not good for those who produce it it's not good for those who participate withingly or unwittingly because there's plenty of them in its production it's not good for its consumers or certainly not the highest good and what's the highest good sexuality incorporated within a functional intimate relationship bound by vows of mutual celibacy and we all know that too that stabilizes our families it stabilizes our societies it stabilizes our psyches and so anything you do that isn't in service of that goal is likely to be counterproductive and i suspect it's your own psyche your own soul telling you that so if your sexuality if your sexual behavior isn't an expression of your highest being then it it isn't serving you in the deepest sense you're serving it and that's what your shame indicates so get out there and find a partner and commit to her or him i feel like being forced to wear masks is a violation of personal rights but i want to respect the rights of businesses to decide what they require how do i act i feel weak as you say i feel if i don't stop wearing them i'm participating in a lie and if i don't stop there's no end look everybody is torn apart by this situation and no one really knows what to do and that includes me you know um i think all by and large the entire human race has done a remarkable job of dealing with this pandemic that the cities are our cities are not burning down our economies are not in tatters we're not completely out of our minds and really that's quite an accomplishment now are our cities partly in tatters and are we partly insane yes definitely and do we know that all of what we did was good well it most certainly wasn't but we stumbled by not too badly and you know with any luck this is going to come to an end so i guess my advice and this is the advice i follow myself is i think it's time to suspend judgment for six months sometimes you don't know what to do and you know your conscience is bothering you because well being forced to wear masks obviously is a violation of your personal rights and so is being locked down and we've sacrificed our civil liberties in a dreadful manner and god only knows what we're going to do when the next infectious disease cycle begins because we've we don't know where the boundaries are like what if we have a particularly bad influenza are we going to be locked down again that the the presidents are in and and now we have to deal with that and that is a very terrifying issue and to the degree that it's terrifying and that it's a real threat you know you're tortured by your conscience but you but i don't think that it's obvious that what you're doing is wrong it's obvious that it's really complicated and so i would my response to this is to suspend judgment for six months for six months from now fearing as i do the loss of civil liberties and being wary as i am about what it means for how we're going to handle infectious disease in the future where you know i'm wearing the masks when i'm required to so that's the best i can do with that i have no particular insight with regards to this pandemic it affected me and my family in the same way it affects everyone else it throws us into psychological disarray in all the same ways and brings up all the same moral questions and i wish i had a better answer but i don't so i mean i've got the vaccine so that's par a partial answer on my part but i understand the position of those who don't want to take it and i would be unwilling to compel them by force that's for sure because that's not the right approach although i would encourage people to get the damn vaccine and get let's get the hell over this that's but i did that i put my body on the line to do it that's my decision i'm not saying it's right it's what i decided to do um so give yourself a break of course you have moral qualms and and you should and so should all of us but you know i guess i would close that by saying but let's not forget we did a pretty damn good job of dealing with this so far i mean it looks like a mess on the ground but it could have been a hell of a lot worse and i'm really amazed that it wasn't i know that cards haven't all fallen into play yet you know and who knows maybe one thing it could do is alert us to the presence of our real enemy you know because we have lots of proximal enemies and they tend to be other people but we have a real enemy and that tends to be infectious disease and aids didn't quite teach us that but and the pandemic probably wouldn't either but it would be a good thing to learn you know maybe we could aim our future selves at an increasingly disease-free society for everyone in the world and that's the other thing it has to be for everyone right because we're all the same body as it turns out so getting a handle on infectious disease around the world that's an unwarranted good and it might have extremely beneficial effects politically too especially if randy thornhill is right and you know the worst of tyrannical authoritarianism is driven by concerns that arise as a consequence of infectious disease prevalence it's a radical hypothesis and maybe it's true and so if we got rid of infectious disease to the degree that we could if we made that public enemy number one we might simultaneously do be doing the best possible thing to limit the attractiveness of totalitarian ideology so well you can watch randy thornhill's discussion with me if you want more information if you want more information about that it'll be released within the next two months it's a killer theory so to speak so and do you have any advice on what to do with porn and masturbation the less poor and the better that's my advice but let's make that more specific to the degree that use of porn and masturbation is undermining your sense of yourself and providing you with a dearth of motivational reasons to get out there and engage with a real partner then it's definitely not in your best interest and that's what your conscience is telling you you know and it's it's it's the expedient at the expense of the meaningful obviously right obviously there isn't any more obvious manifestation of the expedient at the expense of the meaningful than pornography and masturbation and that's hardly a heroic path so maybe the less of it the better i'm aware by the way of the statistics showing that the introduction of pornography into a community doesn't raise but lowers rape probability i think that's a separate discussion from this but i just want you to know i'm not ignorant of that you talk about beauty and the beast and the relationship between belle and the beast one character i haven't heard you expand much on is gaston gesta himself is a beast in his own way yes he's the real beast can you discuss the difference between gaston and beast and how they relate to the real world yes to some degree i'll do that we'll see how much i manage it gaston is the persona from a union perspective whereas the beast is the shadow he's the real thing and in the beast there is the aggression that needs to be integrated into the character into belle's world and that's masculine that's the masculine aggression that needs to be integrated into belle's psyche right because you can read beauty and the beast as a psychological drama with beauty as the protagonist beauty is more beautiful when she's in relationship with the beast and that's something to think about because it's not you know beauty is the heroine who's who's uh whose first kiss resurrects her it's a different story it's the story of the soul the soul the necessity of the soul to encounter the best deal the the aggressive the the the domineering all of that and to incorporate it and to be able to use it so it's the shadow and that's the beast gaston is a persona and the persona goes every which way and so gasta is the voice of the mob and so is your persona you know because gaston will do anything for status anything at all except be real he has the same problem that pinocchio is faced with in the pinocchio story so you remember you may remember in the tokyo story pinocchio's trying to shed his strings the way that he's been manipulated behind the scenes right by the forces of his own psyche being manipulated by social forces we feel that intensely right now it's given rise to all this conspiratorial thinking pinocchio is trying to move forward to become genuine and what are the two temptations that are offered to him on his pathway well the first is being an actor and i had a hard time with that for a long time because i thought well i mean this is hollywood why would being an actor be such a terrible thing but i realized at some point something that should have been clear to me much earlier that pinocchio was being offered a persona right it's act like you're the thing it's like the pickup artist thing that's it the pickup artist thing is be a great persona it's like well there's actually some utility in that because no persona is not good but all persona is also not good and the problem with pickup artists is that you know they're all persona no status and no status doesn't mean no participation in the power hungry you know patriarchy it means no genuine productive reciprocity just the facade of that and the signaling of that so it's a well that's what the persona is and that's gaston and obviously he'll go whatever way the crowd goes even if it means going after his loved hypothetically loved one's father or even if it means going after his soul's father because bell is his soul and her father is the father of us all and so you know gestalt will sacrifice his soul and his relationship with god for the adulation of the mob that's gaston well who's the beast well obviously gaston bell is smart enough to note that and also to be perplexed by her attraction to the beast but while attraction is perplexing and and the redeemable beast is a perplexing entity um that's what drove nietzsche's cognitions on the revaluation of good and evil at least in part and and that that influenced jung's thinking in a very deep manner um the beast is the antidote to gaston because the beast gaston make no mistake about it like he's a specimen as he says himself he's a power to be reckoned with he's a well-developed persona but the beast is what harbors the capacity to withstand that and that's why bell is attracted to him fundamentally he's the real thing the broken man confronting his own shadow so it's a it's a brilliant piece of animation it might be the best thing disney ever produced uh beauty and the beast the lyrics are the songs are unbelievably witty it's a it's a masterpiece that movie so bell is the soul the psyche the anima the beast is the shadow and the way to the self um gaston is the persona he's the pickup artist why do we need to contemplate our own malevolence i know it seems self-evident no actually it doesn't it by by no means does it seem self-evident and i understand it for reasons such as knowing what you're capable of so you can be careful to avoid it but what if you get stuck in it how do you move forward after being aware of it especially if you've actually done it i'm not speaking of criminal behavior well you you have actually done it and so is everybody else so that's the first thing you realize is that this is a universal human problem it's also your problem and it's your personal problem but it's a universal human problem and so in some sense you can let yourself off the hook by realizing that you know it's useful that's partly why i think it's useful i mean that's why i've been writing these books is to say well here's the human universal situation the horror of nature the benevolence of nature the tyranny of social structure the protecting sheltering nurturing aspect of human social structure the nobility of the psyche the malevolence of the adversary all wrapped up in the dragon of chaos that's human reality is as i conceive it and i think it's from that reality that religious stories are extracted that's really what makes them religious is that they have those characters those archetypal characters as the spirits that communicate to us and that are represented by our religious stories and in part by our ideologies well you need to contemplate your own malevolence because you that helps you understand who you are and who you could be and you could be something absolutely brutal and terrible you could be the worst manifestation of those who criticize the patriarchy of of that which those who create criticize the patriarchy accuse you of right nothing but motivation by power and that's certainly there especially to the degree that you're resentful and ungrateful etc etc so i guess i so you need to contemplate your own malevolence so that you understand who you are and that means you have to contemplate malevolence as such because you're not only who you are you're who you could be for better or worse and i actually think it's i think it's a lot easier to start to understand who you could be if you were better if you deeply understand who you could be if you were worse and who you might be to the degree that you're blind to that worse presently you know so you think oh my god i could be that malevolent a force for ill that's horrible but highly compelling and plausible given my understanding of my own character i'm way deeper on the negative end than i thought much more closely aligned with the forces of hell than i presumed well that's an easy that's easy to swallow factually right you think yeah there's evidence for that it's not so easy to swallow emotionally it's it's a bitter pill to say the least it's the black pill let's say well what does that mean well though that means that there's a countervailing spirit and that's the spirit that opposes that and that's what you could embody and so i don't think that you can contemplate the good without contemplating the evil first even first i don't think it has the depth it it you're not you know they say the beginning that fear of god is the beginning of wisdom it's it's something like that necessary fear it's like well i don't want to be a monster okay well how much of a monster are you well i'm as monstrous as i have been so that's on me conscience wise but like i'm also the same being that's been as monstrous as any being throughout history no nothing human is foreign to me let's say well so are you the nazi prison guard well are you so sure you aren't that's the real question and if you're not so sure you aren't well are you so sure that you shouldn't be and i think that's an easier question i think you're more sure than you shouldn't be if someone you're more sure that you shouldn't be if someone asked you you would say well i shouldn't be that and perhaps have very little qualms on the topic qualms about the topic so that's what you should not be well what's the antithesis of that well let's say it's a good man or more broadly speaking a good person that's the opposite of what's malevolent and that's a good place to start it's like well not that not that first and then i can stumble up towards the light you know insofar as i've been able to master my darkest self and to contemplate what that might be and to decide that that isn't where i'm going no matter what expediency be damned and i think that's enough for tonight thanks very much for listening and asking questions i hope that my answers are helpful

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 492,553

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

Id: rY9X6a-xxFo

Length: 98min 29sec (5909 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AdrenalineCrow]

Glad to hear that JP is vaccinated

[u/SgtFury]

Good for you Jordan.