#448 – Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning

0:00:06 The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, his second time on this The Lex
0:00:07 Friedman podcast.
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0:00:46 The thing that makes me feel like home.
0:00:49 The thing I miss when I’m traveling.
0:00:51 That’s a good definition of home.
0:00:55 The place you miss the most when you’re away from it.
0:01:00 I think I’ve read a quote from like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer.
0:01:05 One of those like hardcore, maybe a bit cynical philosophers.
0:01:06 Who was it?
0:01:12 Anyway, the quote was something like home is the place you have tried
0:01:14 to escape the most, but failed.
0:01:17 Oh, boy.
0:01:21 It’s kind of like from the whole school of thought that life is suffering.
0:01:28 And so happiness is the moments where you escape the suffering briefly.
0:01:30 That kind of that kind of perspective on life.
0:01:33 So probably Schopenhauer, probably one of those guys.
0:01:39 And you know, in that same vein, I could say that, you know, taking a nap
0:01:48 on an acely bed, cold bed surface, warm blanket is a kind of escape from the suffering.
0:01:52 It is, no matter what, an escape from the world.
0:01:58 It’s the kind of escape that once you return, you feel so refreshed with new eyes.
0:02:00 Everything is brighter.
0:02:01 Everything’s more hopeful.
0:02:06 Everything radiates the possibility of something good happening.
0:02:09 So I’m a big fan of naps.
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0:04:13 Both, I truly believe it is both.
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0:04:55 Talking is one of the ways to shine a light on the Jungian shadow.
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0:05:28 Let me take a sip.
0:05:31 Delicious.
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0:05:50 It almost feels like dessert versus like a refreshing, energizing kind of flavor,
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0:05:56 But to each their own, I’m actually learning that people have fundamentally different
0:06:01 tastes in foods, in ice cream, whatever.
0:06:03 And I think that’s beautiful.
0:06:06 For most of my life, I get stuck on certain foods I like.
0:06:09 And I just keep eating that thing, some creature of habit in a sense.
0:06:11 Because I find a thing that makes me happy.
0:06:13 And I just keep doing the thing that makes me happy.
0:06:15 It’s kind of logical.
0:06:16 I don’t get bored.
0:06:19 I guess I don’t get bored easily because everything is so full of life.
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0:06:24 And I just don’t need to go to and using this full of awesomeness.
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0:06:50 And now, dear friends, here’s Jordan Peterson.
0:07:07 [Music]
0:07:11 You have given a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy.
0:07:14 And the lectures were powerful.
0:07:18 There’s some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama,
0:07:22 the way you like lock in an idea, but then are struggling with that idea.
0:07:25 All of that, that feels like it’s a Nietzschean.
0:07:28 Yeah, well, he has a big influence on me stylistically.
0:07:31 And like in terms of the way I approached writing,
0:07:39 and also many of the people that were other influences of mine were very influenced by him.
0:07:43 So I was blown away when I first came across his writings.
0:07:53 They’re so intellectually dense that I don’t know if there’s anything that approximates that.
0:07:58 Dostoevsky, maybe, although he’s much more wordy, Nietzsche is very succinct,
0:08:00 partly because he was so ill, because he would think all day.
0:08:02 He couldn’t spend a lot of time writing.
0:08:06 And he condenses writings into very short, while this aphoristic style he had.
0:08:09 And it’s really something to strive for.
0:08:15 And then he’s also an exciting writer like Dostoevsky and dynamic.
0:08:18 And romantic in that emotional way.
0:08:20 And so it’s really something.
0:08:21 And I really enjoyed doing that.
0:08:23 I did that lecture that you described.
0:08:27 That lecture series is on the first half of “Beyond Good and Evil,” which is a stunning book.
0:08:34 And that was really fun to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean
0:08:37 and how they’ve echoed across the decades since he wrote them.
0:08:39 And yeah, it’s been great.
0:08:46 Taking each sentence seriously and deconstructing it and really struggling with it.
0:08:51 I think underpinning that approach to writing requires deep respect for the person.
0:08:55 I think if we approach writing with that kind of respect,
0:09:00 you can take, or well, you can take a lot of writers and really dig in on singular sentences.
0:09:03 Yeah, well, those are the great writers because the greatest writers,
0:09:07 virtually everything they wrote is worth attending to.
0:09:11 No, and I think Nietzsche is in some ways the ultimate exemplar of that because
0:09:17 often when I read a book, I’ll mark one way or another.
0:09:21 I often fold the corner of the page over to indicate something that I’ve found that’s
0:09:22 worth remembering.
0:09:27 I couldn’t do that with a book like “Beyond Good and Evil” because every page ends up marked.
0:09:33 And that’s in marked contrast, so to speak, to many of the books I read now,
0:09:40 where it’s quite frequently now that I’ll read a book and there won’t be an idea
0:09:41 that I haven’t come across before.
0:09:46 And with a thinker like Nietzsche, that’s just not the case at the sentence level.
0:09:51 And I don’t think there’s anyone that I know of who did that to a greater extent than he did.
0:09:55 So there’s other people who whose thought is of equivalent value.
0:10:00 I’ve returned recently, and I’m going to do a course on to the work of this Romanian
0:10:05 historian of religions, Mircea Eliata, who’s not nearly as well known as he should be
0:10:11 and whose work, by the way, is a real antidote to the post-modern nihilistic Marxist
0:10:16 stream of literary interpretation that the universities as a whole have adopted.
0:10:18 And Eliata is like that, too.
0:10:21 I used this book called “The Sacred and the Profane”
0:10:26 quite extensively in a book that I’m releasing in mid-November.
0:10:30 “We who wrestle with God,” and it’s of the same sort.
0:10:33 It’s endlessly analyzable.
0:10:39 Eliata walked through the whole history of religious ideas, and he had the intellect
0:10:40 that enabled him to do that.
0:10:45 And everything he wrote is dreamlike in its density.
0:10:53 So every sentence or paragraph is evocative in an image-rich manner.
0:10:58 And that also, what would you say, deepens and broadens the scope.
0:11:02 And that’s part of often what distinguishes writing that has a literary end
0:11:04 from writing that’s more merely technical.
0:11:10 Like, the literary writings have this imagistic and dreamlike reference space around them.
0:11:17 And it takes a long time to turn a complex image into something semantic.
0:11:25 And so if your writing evokes deep imagery, it has a depth that can’t be captured merely in words.
0:11:29 And the great romantic poetic philosophers, Nietzsche has a very good example.
0:11:30 Dostoevsky is a good example.
0:11:32 So is Mircea Eliata.
0:11:33 They have that quality.
0:11:35 And it’s a good way of thinking about it.
0:11:40 You know, it’s kind of interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence.
0:11:46 There’s a good book called “The User Illusion,” which is the best book on consciousness that I ever read.
0:11:51 It explains the manner in which our communication is understandable in this manner.
0:11:54 So imagine that when you’re communicating something,
0:11:59 you’re trying to change the way that your target audience perceives and acts in the world.
0:12:01 So that’s an embodied issue.
0:12:08 But you’re using words, which obviously aren’t equivalent to the actions themselves.
0:12:14 You can imagine that the words are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke.
0:12:17 And that the images can be translated into actions.
0:12:18 Yeah.
0:12:26 And the greatest writing uses words in a manner that evokes images that profoundly affects perception and action.
0:12:27 And that’s the…
0:12:31 So I would take the manner in which I act and behave.
0:12:33 I would translate that into a set of images.
0:12:35 My dreams do that for me, for example.
0:12:37 Then I compress them into words.
0:12:43 I toss you the words, you decompose them, decompress them into the images, and then into the actions.
0:12:46 And that’s what happens in a meaningful conversation.
0:12:50 That’s a very good way of understanding how we communicate linguistically.
0:12:56 So if the words spring to the visual, full visual complexity,
0:12:59 and then that can then transform itself into action, that’s…
0:13:01 And change in perception, because…
0:13:01 Change in perception.
0:13:02 Well, those are both relevant.
0:13:09 And it’s an important thing to understand because the classic empiricists make the presumption.
0:13:15 And it’s an erroneous presumption that perception is a value-free enterprise.
0:13:19 And they assume that partly because they think of perception as something passive.
0:13:21 You know, you just turn your head and you look at the world and there it is.
0:13:24 It’s like perception is not passive.
0:13:26 There is no perception without action.
0:13:27 Ever.
0:13:28 Ever.
0:13:31 And that’s a weird thing to understand because even when you’re looking at something,
0:13:33 like your eyes are moving back and forth.
0:13:37 If they ever stop moving for a tenth of a second, you stop being able to see.
0:13:40 So your eyes are jiggling back and forth just to keep them active.
0:13:43 And then there’s involuntary movements of your eyes.
0:13:44 And then there’s voluntary movements of your eyes.
0:13:48 Like what you’re doing with your eyes is very much like what a blind person would do
0:13:52 if they were feeling out the contours of an object.
0:13:53 You’re sampling.
0:13:58 And you’re only sampling a small element of the space that’s in front of you.
0:14:03 And the element that you choose to sample is dependent on your aims and your goals.
0:14:04 So it’s value-saturated.
0:14:07 And so all your perceptions are action predicated.
0:14:12 And partly what you’re doing when you’re communicating is therefore not only changing
0:14:18 people’s actions, let’s say, but you’re also changing the strategy that they use to perceive.
0:14:22 And so you change the way the world reveals itself for them.
0:14:26 See, this is why it’s such a profound experience to read a particularly deep thinker.
0:14:31 Because you could also think of your perceptions as the axioms of your thought.
0:14:32 That’s a good way of thinking about it.
0:14:35 A perception is like a, what would you say?
0:14:40 It’s a thought that’s so set in concrete that you now see it rather than conceptualize it.
0:14:44 A really profound thinker changes the way you perceive the world.
0:14:48 That’s way deeper than just how you think about it or how you feel about it.
0:14:53 What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver a powerful idea?
0:14:59 For example, utopian ideas of Marx or utopian ideas.
0:15:02 You could say dystopian ideas of Hitler.
0:15:08 Those ideas are powerful and they can saturate all your perception with values.
0:15:15 And they focus you in a way where there’s only a certain set of actions.
0:15:18 Yeah, right. Even a certain set of emotions as well.
0:15:20 And it’s intense and it’s direct.
0:15:26 And they’re so powerful that they completely alter the perception and the words bring to life.
0:15:28 Yeah, it’s like a form of possession.
0:15:32 So there’s two things you need to understand to make that clear.
0:15:40 The first issue is that as we suggested or implied that perception is action predicated,
0:15:43 but action is goal predicated, right? You act towards goal.
0:15:49 And these propagandistic thinkers that you described,
0:15:54 they attempt to unify all possible goals into a coherent singularity.
0:15:58 And there’s advantages of that. There’s the advantage of simplicity, for example,
0:16:03 which is a major advantage. And there’s also the advantage of motivation, right?
0:16:09 So if you provide people with a simple manner of integrating all their actions,
0:16:12 you decrease their anxiety and you increase their motivation.
0:16:16 That can be a good thing if the unifying idea that you put forward is valid.
0:16:22 But it’s the worst of all possible ideas if you put forward an invalid unifying idea.
0:16:26 And then you might say, well, how do you distinguish between a valid unifying idea
0:16:29 and an invalid unifying idea? Now, Nietzsche was very interested in that,
0:16:35 and I don’t think he got that exactly right. But the postmodernists, for example,
0:16:38 especially the ones, and this is most of them, with the neo-Marxists bent,
0:16:42 their presumption is that the fundamental unifying idea is power,
0:16:45 that everything’s about compulsion and force, essentially.
0:16:50 And that that’s the only true unifying ethos of mankind, which is,
0:16:56 I don’t know if there’s a worse idea than that. I mean, there are ideas that are
0:17:00 potentially as dangerous. The nihilistic idea is pretty dangerous,
0:17:04 although it’s more of a disintegrating notion than a unifying idea.
0:17:09 The hedonistic idea that you live for pleasure, for example, that’s also very dangerous.
0:17:13 But if you wanted to go for sheer pathology, the notion that,
0:17:17 and this is Foucault in a nutshell, and Marx, for that matter, that power rules everything,
0:17:24 not only is that a terrible unifying idea, but it fully justifies your own use of power.
0:17:30 I don’t mean the power Nietzsche talks about. His will to power was more his insistence that
0:17:39 a human being is an expression of will rather than a mechanism of self-protection and security.
0:17:43 Like, he thought of the life force in human beings as something that strived
0:17:47 not to protect itself, but to exhaust itself in being and becoming.
0:17:52 It’s like an upward-oriented motivational drive even towards meaning.
0:17:57 Now, he called it the will to power, and that had some unfortunate consequences,
0:18:01 at least that’s how it’s translated. But he didn’t mean the power motivation
0:18:05 that people like Foucault or Marx became so hung up on.
0:18:08 So, it’s not power like you’re trying to destroy the other. It’s power,
0:18:13 full flourishing of a human being, the creative force of a human being.
0:18:18 Yeah. Well, you could imagine that, and you should, you could imagine that you could
0:18:24 segregate competence and ability. Imagine that you and I were going to work on a project.
0:18:31 We could organize our project in relationship to the ambition that we wanted to attain,
0:18:35 and we can organize an agreement so that you were committed to the project voluntarily,
0:18:38 and so that I was committed to the project voluntarily.
0:18:43 So, that means that we would actually be united in our perceptions and our actions
0:18:47 by the motivation of something approximating voluntary play.
0:18:50 Now, you could also imagine another situation where I said,
0:18:55 “Here’s our goal, and you better help me or I’m going to kill your family.”
0:18:58 Well, the probability is that you would be
0:19:06 quite motivated to undertake my bidding. And so then you might say,
0:19:08 “Well, that’s how the world works. It’s power and compulsion.”
0:19:15 But the truth of the matter is that you can force people to see things your way, let’s say,
0:19:19 but it’s nowhere near as good a strategy, even practically,
0:19:23 than the strategy that would be associated with something like voluntary.
0:19:30 Voluntary joint agreement of pattern of movement strategy towards the goal.
0:19:32 See, this is such an important thing to understand because it
0:19:39 helps you start to understand the distinction between a unifying force that’s
0:19:43 based on power and compulsion and one that is much more in keeping,
0:19:47 I would say, with the ethos that governs western societies, free western societies.
0:19:52 There’s really a qualitative difference, and it’s not some morally relativistic illusion.
0:19:58 So, if we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche’s thought,
0:20:04 the idea he first introduced and thus spoke Zarathustra of the Ubermench,
0:20:09 that’s another one that’s very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot
0:20:15 like it’s about power. For example, in the 20th century, it was misrepresented and co-opted
0:20:23 by Hitler to advocate for the extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races.
0:20:28 And the dominion of the superior Aryans. Well, that was partly because Nietzsche’s
0:20:34 work also was misrepresented by his sister after his death, but I also think that there’s
0:20:40 a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization. So, Nietzsche, of course, famously announced the
0:20:47 death of God, but he did that in a manner that was accompanied by dire warnings, like Nietzsche said,
0:20:51 because people tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement, but Nietzsche actually said that
0:20:59 he really said something like the unifying ethos under which we’ve organized ourselves
0:21:06 psychologically and socially has now been fatally undermined by, well, by the rationalist proclivity,
0:21:12 by the empiricist proclivity. There’s a variety of reasons. Mostly, it was conflict between the
0:21:17 Enlightenment view, let’s say, and the classic religious view, and that there will be dire
0:21:23 consequences for that. And Nietzsche knew, like Dostoevsky knew, that, see, there’s a proclivity
0:21:29 for the human psyche and for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity,
0:21:35 because the cost of disunity is high, fractionation of your goals, so that means you’re less
0:21:38 motivated to move forward than you might be, because there’s many things competing for your
0:21:44 attention, and also anxiety, because anxiety actually signals something like goal conflict.
0:21:50 So there’s an inescapable proclivity of value systems to unite. Now, if you kill the thing
0:21:56 that’s uniting them, that’s the death of God, they either fractionate and you get confusion,
0:22:03 anxiety, and hopelessness, or you get social disunity, or and you get social disunity, or
0:22:12 something else arises out of the abyss to constitute that unifying force. And Nietzsche
0:22:17 said specifically that he believed that one of those manifestations would be that of
0:22:24 communism, and that that would kill, he said this in Will to Power, that that would kill tens of
0:22:31 millions of people in the upcoming 20th century. He could see that coming 50 years earlier,
0:22:35 and Dostoevsky did the same thing in his book, The Demons. So this is the thing that the A
0:22:41 religious have to contend with. It’s a real conundrum, because I mean, you could dispute the idea that
0:22:47 our value systems tend towards a unity, and society does as well, because otherwise we’re
0:22:53 disunified. But the cost of that disunity, as I said, is goal confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness.
0:22:58 So it’s like a real cost. So you could dispense with the notion of unity altogether, and the
0:23:02 postmodernists did that to some degree. But they pulled off a sleight of hand too, where they replaced
0:23:09 it by power. Now Nietzsche did, he’s responsible for that to some degree, because Nietzsche said,
0:23:15 with his conception of the overman, let’s say, is that human beings would have to create their own
0:23:22 values. Because the value structure that had descended from on high was now shunted aside.
0:23:28 But there’s a major problem with that, many major problems. The psychoanalysts were the first people
0:23:33 who really figured this out after Nietzsche. Because imagine that we don’t have a
0:23:39 relationship with the transcendental anymore that orients us. Okay, now we have to turn to
0:23:47 ourselves. Okay, now if we were a unity, a clear unity within ourselves, let’s say, then we could
0:23:54 turn to ourselves for that discovery. But if we’re a fractionated plurality internally, then when we
0:23:58 turn to ourselves, we turn to a fractionated plurality. Well, that was Freud’s observation.
0:24:02 It’s like, how can you make your own values when you’re not the master in your own house?
0:24:10 Like you’re a war of competing motivations, or maybe you’re someone who’s dominated by the will to
0:24:15 force and compulsion. And so why do you think that you can rely on yourself as the source of values?
0:24:20 And why do you think you’re wise enough to consult with yourself to find out what those values are
0:24:26 or what they should be, say, in the course of a single life? I mean, you know, it’s difficult to
0:24:31 organize your own personal relationship, like one relationship in the course of your life, let alone
0:24:37 to try to imagine that out of whole cloth you could construct an ethos that would be psychologically
0:24:43 and socially stabilizing and last over the long run. It’s like, and of course, Marx, people like that,
0:24:50 the people who reduce human motivation to a single axis, they had the intellectual hubris to
0:24:54 imagine that they could do that. Postmodernists are a good example of that as well.
0:25:04 Okay, but if we lay on the table, religion, communism, Nazism, they are all unifying ethos.
0:25:11 They’re unifying ideas, but they’re also horribly dividing ideas. They both unify and divide. Religion
0:25:22 has also divided people, because in the nuances of how the different peoples wrestle with God,
0:25:26 they have come to different conclusions, and then they use those conclusions that perhaps the people
0:25:31 in power use those conclusions to then start wars, to start hatred, to divide.
0:25:38 Yeah, well, it’s one of the key sub themes in the Gospels is the sub theme of the Pharisees.
0:25:45 And so the fundamental enemies of Christ in the Gospels are the Pharisees and the scribes
0:25:49 and the lawyers. So what does that mean? The Pharisees are religious hypocrites.
0:25:56 The scribes are academics who worship their own intellect. And the lawyers are the legal minds
0:26:04 who use the law as a weapon. And so they’re the enemy of the Redeemer. That’s a subplot in the
0:26:12 Gospels stories. And that actually all means something. The Phariseic problem is that the best
0:26:18 of all possible ideas can be used by the worst actors in the worst possible way. And maybe this
0:26:24 is an existential conundrum is that the most evil people use the best possible ideas to the worst
0:26:30 possible ends. And then you have the conundrum of how do you separate out, let’s say, the genuine
0:26:36 religious people from those who use the religious enterprise only for their own machinations.
0:26:40 We’re seeing this happen online. Like one of the things that you’re seeing happening online,
0:26:47 I’m sure you’ve noticed this, especially on the right wing psychopathic troll side of the
0:26:53 distribution, is the weaponization of a certain form of Christian ideation. And that’s often
0:26:59 marked at least online by the presence of, what would you say, cliches like Christ is king,
0:27:03 which has a certain religious meaning, but a completely different meaning in this sphere of
0:27:09 emerging right wing pathology, right wing, the political dimension isn’t the right dimension
0:27:14 of analysis. But it’s definitely the case that the best possible ideas can be used for the worst
0:27:20 possible purposes. And that also brings up another specter, which is like, well, is there any reliable
0:27:27 and valid way of distinguishing truly beneficial unifying ideas from those that are pathological?
0:27:32 And so that’s another thing that I tried to detail out in these lectures, but also in this
0:27:37 new book is like, how do you tell the good actors from the bad actors at the most fundamental
0:27:42 level of analysis? And good ideas from the bad ideas and your electron truth, they need to also
0:27:51 struggle with. So how do you know, how do you know that communism is a bad idea versus it’s a good
0:27:57 idea implemented by bad actors? Right, right. That’s a more subtle variant of the religious
0:28:00 problem. And that’s what the, that’s what the communists say all the time, the modern day
0:28:06 communists like real communism has never been tried. And you could say, I suppose with some
0:28:13 justification, you could say that real Christianity has never been tried because we always fall short
0:28:20 of the ideal mark. And so, I mean, my rejoinder to the communists is something like every single
0:28:26 time it’s been implemented, wherever it’s been implemented, regardless of the culture and the
0:28:31 background of the people who’ve implemented it, it’s had exactly the same catastrophic consequences.
0:28:37 It’s like, I don’t know how many examples you need of that, but I believe we’ve generated
0:28:44 sufficient examples so that that case is basically resolved. Now, the general rejoinder to that is
0:28:50 it’s really something like, well, if I was in charge of the communist enterprise, the utopia
0:28:56 would have come about, right? But that’s also a form of dangerous pretense. Part of the way, see,
0:29:02 that problem is actually resolved to some degree in the notion of, in the developing notion of
0:29:08 sacrifice that emerges in the Western canon over thousands and thousands of years. So one of the
0:29:13 suggestions, for example, and this is something exemplified in the passion story, is that you
0:29:19 can tell the valid holder of an idea because that holder will take the responsibility for the
0:29:27 consequences of his idea onto himself. And that’s why, for example, you see one way of conceptualizing
0:29:34 Christ in the gospel story is as the ultimate sacrifice to God. So you might ask, well, what’s
0:29:40 the ultimate sacrifice? And there are variants of an answer to that. One form of ultimate sacrifice
0:29:44 is the sacrifice of a child, the offering of a child, and the other is the offering of the self.
0:29:50 And the story of Christ brings both of those together because he’s the Son of God that’s
0:29:57 offered to God. And so it’s a archetypal resolution of that tension between ultimate sacrifice.
0:30:05 Ultimate because once you’re a parent, most parents would rather sacrifice themselves
0:30:09 than their children, right? So you have something that becomes of even more value than yourself.
0:30:16 But the sacrifice of self is also a very high order level of sacrifice. Christ is an archetype
0:30:22 of the pattern of being that’s predicated on the decision to take to offer everything up to the
0:30:28 highest value, right, that pattern of self-sacrifice. And I think part of the reason that’s valid is
0:30:35 because the person who undertakes to do that pays the price themselves. It’s not externalized.
0:30:40 They’re not trying to change anyone else, except maybe by example. It’s your problem.
0:30:45 And like Solzhenitsyn pointed that out too, when he was struggling with the idea of good
0:30:50 versus evil. And you see this in more sophisticated literature, you know, in
0:30:57 really unsophisticated literature or drama, there’s a good guy and the bad guy. And the good guy’s
0:31:07 all good and the bad guy’s all bad. And in more sophisticated literature, the good and bad are
0:31:14 abstracted. You can think of them as spirits. And then those spirits possess all the characters in
0:31:19 the complex drama to a greater or lesser degree. And that battle is fought out both socially and
0:31:27 internally. In the high order religious conceptualizations in the West, if they culminate, let’s
0:31:32 say in the Christian story, the notion is that battle between good and evil is fundamentally
0:31:41 played out as an internal drama. Yeah. So for a religious ethos, the battle between good and evil
0:31:46 is fought within each individual human heart. Right. It’s your moral duty to constrain evil
0:31:51 within yourself. And well, there’s more to it than that, because there’s also the insistence that
0:32:00 if you do that, that makes you the most effective possible warrior, let’s say, against evil itself
0:32:06 in the social world. That you start with the battle that occurs within you in the soul, let’s say.
0:32:11 The soul becomes the battleground between the forces of good and evil. The idea that there’s
0:32:17 an idea there too, which is if that battle is undertaken successfully, then it doesn’t have
0:32:24 to be played out in the social world as actual conflict. You can rectify the conflict internally
0:32:29 without it having to be played out as fate, as Jung put it. So what would you say to Nietzsche,
0:32:36 who called Christianity the slave morality? His critique of religion in that way was slave
0:32:43 morality versus master morality. And then you put an ubermansche into that. See, I would say that the
0:32:50 woke phenomenon is the manifestation of the slave morality that Nietzsche criticized and that
0:32:58 there are elements of Christianity that can be gerrymandered to support that
0:33:08 motive perception and conception. But I think he was wrong in his essential criticism of
0:33:14 Christianity in that regard. Now, it’s complicated with Nietzsche because Nietzsche never criticizes
0:33:21 the Gospel stories directly. What he basically criticizes is something like the pathologies
0:33:27 of institutionalized religion. And I would say most particularly of the, what would you say,
0:33:36 of the sort of casually too nice Protestant form. That’s a thumbnail sketch and perhaps
0:33:43 somewhat unfair. But given the alignment, let’s say, of the more mainstream Protestant movements
0:33:49 with the woke mob, I don’t think it’s an absurd criticism. It’s something like the degeneration
0:33:56 of Christianity into the notion that good and harmless are the same thing or good and empathic
0:34:03 are the same thing, which is simply not true and far too simplified. And so, and I also think
0:34:08 Nietzsche was extremely wrong in his presumption that human beings should take it to themselves to
0:34:12 construct their own values. I think he made a colossal error in that presumption.
0:34:16 And that is the idea of the Ubermench, that the great individual, the best of us,
0:34:22 yeah, should create our own values. Well, and I think the reason that he was wrong about that is
0:34:28 that so when God gives instructions to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he basically tells them
0:34:33 that they can do anything they want in the walled garden. So that’s the kind of balance between
0:34:37 order and nature that makes up the human environment. Human beings have the freedom,
0:34:45 vouchsafe to them by God to do anything they want in the garden, except to mess with the most
0:34:50 fundamental rule. So God says to people, you’re not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge
0:34:55 of good and evil, which fundamentally means there is an implicit moral order and you’re
0:35:01 to abide by it. Your freedom stops at the foundation. And you can think about that.
0:35:05 I’d be interested even in your ideas about this as an engineer, let’s say, is that
0:35:15 there is an ethos that’s implicit in being itself. And your ethos has to be a reflection of that.
0:35:20 And that isn’t under your control. You can’t gerrymander the foundation because
0:35:26 your foundational beliefs have to put you in harmony, like musical harmony, with the actual
0:35:33 structure of reality as such. So I can give you an example of that. So our goal in so far as we’re
0:35:39 conducting ourselves properly is to have the kind of interesting conversation that allows both of
0:35:46 us to express ourselves in a manner that enables us to learn and grow, such that we can share that
0:35:51 with everyone who’s listening. And if our aim is true and upward, then that’s what we’re doing.
0:35:57 Well, that means that we’re going to have to match ourselves to a pattern of interaction.
0:36:02 And that’s marked for us emotionally, like you and I both know this. If we’re doing this right,
0:36:06 we’re going to be interested in the conversation. We’re not going to be looking at our watch.
0:36:10 We’re not going to be thinking about what we’re aiming at. We’re just going to communicate. Now,
0:36:14 the religious interpretation of that would be that we were doing something like
0:36:21 making the redemptive logos manifest between us in dialogue. And that’s something that can be shared.
0:36:26 To do that, we have to align with that pattern. I can’t decide that there’s some arbitrary way
0:36:31 that I’m going to play you. I mean, I could do that if I was a psychopathic manipulator. But
0:36:39 to do that optimally, I’m not going to impose a certain mode of a certain a priori aim, let’s
0:36:50 say, on our communication and manipulate you into that. So the constraints on my ethos reflect the
0:36:57 actual structure of the world. And this is the communist presumptions. We’re going to burn
0:37:02 everything down and we’re going to start from scratch. We’ve got these axiomatic presumptions,
0:37:06 and we’re going to put them into place. And we’re going to socialize people so they now
0:37:12 think and live like communists from day one. And human beings are infinitely malleable. And we
0:37:16 can use a rational set of presuppositions to decide what sort of beings they should be. The
0:37:22 transhumanists are doing this too. It’s like, no, there’s a pattern of being that you have to
0:37:26 fall into alignment with. And I think it’s the pattern of being, by the way, that
0:37:32 if you fall into alignment with, it gives you hope, it protects you from anxiety,
0:37:37 and it gives you a sense of harmony with your surroundings and with other people. And none
0:37:42 of that’s arbitrary. But don’t you think we both arrived to this conversation with rigid axioms
0:37:48 that we have, maybe we’re blind to them, but in the same way that the Marxists came with very
0:37:53 rigid axioms about the way the world is and the way it should be, aren’t we calling to that?
0:37:58 Well, we definitely come to the conversation with a hierarchy of foundation laxioms,
0:38:03 right? And I would say the more sophisticated you are as a thinker, the deeper the level at
0:38:08 which you’re willing to play. So imagine first that you have presumptions of different depth,
0:38:15 there’s more predicated on the more fundamental axioms, and then that there’s a space of play
0:38:21 around those. And that space of play is going to depend on the sophistication of the player,
0:38:28 obviously. But those who are capable of engaging in deeper conversations talk about more fundamental
0:38:34 things with more play. Now, we have to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure,
0:38:39 because we wouldn’t be able to understand each other or communicate if a lot of things weren’t
0:38:46 already assumed or taken for granted. How rigid is the hierarchy of axioms that religion provides?
0:38:51 This is what I’m trying to understand. The rigidity of that- It’s as rigid as play.
0:38:55 Well, play is not rigid at all. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it’s got a rigidity.
0:39:00 There’s some constraints. It took me about 40 years to figure out the answer to that question. So it
0:39:07 wasn’t, I’m serious about that. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t a random answer. So play is very rigid in
0:39:12 some ways. So like, if you and I go out to play basketball or chess, like, there are rules and
0:39:16 you can’t break the rules because then you’re no longer in the game. But then there’s a dynamism
0:39:21 within those rules that’s, well, with chess, it’s virtually infinite. I mean, I think what is it?
0:39:25 There’s more patterns of potential games on a chessboard than there are subatomic
0:39:31 particles in the observable universe. Like, it’s an insane space. So it’s not like there’s not
0:39:37 freedom within it. But by the, it’s, it’s a weird paradox in a way, isn’t it? Because music is like
0:39:43 this too, is that there are definitely rules. And so, and there are things, you can’t throw a basketball
0:39:49 into a chessboard and still be playing chess. But weirdly enough, if you adhere to the rules,
0:39:55 the realm of freedom increases rather than decreasing. And I think you can make the same
0:39:59 case for a playful conversation. It’s like, we’re playing by certain rules and a lot of them are
0:40:05 implicit. But that doesn’t mean that it might mean the reverse of constraint, you know, because
0:40:11 in the seminar, for example, that I was referring to, the Exodus seminar, and then the Gospel
0:40:16 seminar, everybody in the seminar, there’s about eight of us, played fair. Nobody used power.
0:40:21 Nobody tried to prove they were right. They put forward their points. But they were like, here’s
0:40:28 a way of looking at that. Assess it. And they were also doing it genuinely. It’s like, this is what
0:40:33 I’ve concluded about, say, this story. And I’m going to make a case for it. But I’d like to hear
0:40:38 what you have to say, because maybe you can change it, you can extend it, you can find a flaw in it.
0:40:43 And that’s, well, that’s a conversation that has flow and that’s engaging and that other people
0:40:48 will listen to as well. And that’s also, see, I think that one of the things that we can conclude
0:40:54 now, and we can do this even from a neuroscientific basis, is that that sense of engaged meaning
0:40:59 is a marker, not only for the emergence of harmony between you and your environment,
0:41:03 but for the emergence of that harmony in a way that is developmentally
0:41:11 rich, that moves you upward towards, what would you say? Well, I think towards a more effective
0:41:15 and tropic state. That’s actually the technical answer to that. But it makes you more than you
0:41:20 are. And there’s a directionality in that. Well, I would like to sort of, the reason I like talking
0:41:27 about communism, because it has clearly been shown as a set of ideas to be destructive
0:41:35 to humanity. But I would like to understand from an engineering perspective, the characteristics
0:41:42 of communism versus religion, where you can identify religious thought is going to lead
0:41:49 to a better human being, a better society. And communist Marxist thought is not because there’s
0:41:53 ambiguity, there’s room for play in communism and Marxism, because they kind of had a utopian
0:41:59 sense of where everybody’s headed, don’t know how it’s going to happen. Maybe revolution is required,
0:42:05 but after the revolution is done, we’ll figure it out. And there’s an underlying assumption that
0:42:10 maybe human beings are good, and they’ll figure it out once you remove the oppressor. I mean,
0:42:17 all these ideas kind of, until you put them into practice, they can be quite convincing
0:42:22 if you’re in the 19th century. If I was reading, which is kind of fascinating, the 19th century
0:42:30 produced such powerful ideas, Marx and Nietzsche. Oh, fascism too, for that matter. Fascism. So,
0:42:35 you know, if I was sitting there, like, especially if I’m feeling shitty about myself,
0:42:41 a lot of these ideas are pretty powerful as a way to plug the nihilist hole.
0:42:45 Yeah, right. Absolutely. Well, and some of them may actually have an appropriate scope of
0:42:51 application. It could be that some of the foundational axioms of communism, socialism/
0:42:57 communism are actually functional in a sufficiently small social group. Maybe a tribal group even.
0:43:05 Like, I also have a, I’m not sure this is correct, but I have a suspicion that the pervasive attractiveness
0:43:11 of some of the radical left ideas that we’re talking about are pervasive precisely because
0:43:16 they are functional within, say, families, but also within the small tribal groups that people
0:43:23 might have originally evolved into and that once we become civilized, so we produce societies that
0:43:28 are united even among people who don’t know one another, different principles have to apply as
0:43:35 a consequence of scale. So, that’s partly an engineering response, but I think there’s a
0:43:42 deeper way of going after the communist problem. So, I think part of the problem, fundamental
0:43:48 problem with the communist axioms is the notion that the world of complex social interactions
0:43:54 can be simplified sufficiently so that centralized planning authorities can deal with it. And I think
0:44:00 the best way to think about the free exchange rejoinder to that presumption is, no, the sum total
0:44:06 of human interactions in a large civilization are so immense that you need a distributed network of
0:44:11 cognition in order to compute the proper way forward. And so, what you do is you give each actor
0:44:17 their domain of individual choice so that they can maximize their own movement forward and you
0:44:22 allow the aggregate direction to emerge from that rather than trying to impose it from the top down,
0:44:28 which I think is computationally impossible. So, that might be one engineering reason why
0:44:32 the communist solution doesn’t work. Like I read in Solzhenitsyn, for example, that the
0:44:40 central Soviet authorities often had to make 200 pricing decisions a day. Now, if you’ve ever
0:44:47 started a business or created a product and had to wrestle with the problem of pricing,
0:44:53 you’d become aware of just how intractable that is. Like, how do you calculate worth? Well,
0:44:58 there’s the central existential problem of life. How do you calculate worth? It’s not something
0:45:05 like a central authority can sit down and just manage. And there are a lot of inputs that go
0:45:10 into a pricing decision. And the free market answer to that is something like, well, if you get the
0:45:16 price right, people will buy it and you’ll survive. This is a fascinating way to describe how ideas
0:45:22 fail. So, communism perhaps fails because just like with people who believe the earth is flat,
0:45:28 when you look outside, it looks flat. But you can’t see beyond the horizon, I guess.
0:45:34 In the same way with communism, communism seems like a great idea in my family and my
0:45:40 people I love, but it doesn’t scale. And it doesn’t iterate. And that’s a form of scaling too.
0:45:45 Right. Well, I mean, whatever ways it breaks down, it doesn’t scale. And you’re saying religious
0:45:50 thought is the thing that might scale. I would say religious thought is the record of those
0:45:56 ideas that have in fact scaled. Right. And iterated. Does religious thought iterate?
0:46:02 Does that mean there’s a fundamental conservative aspect to religious thought?
0:46:07 Tradition. Yeah. This is why, like Mircea Eliata, for example, who I referred to earlier,
0:46:13 one of the things Eliata did, and very effectively, and people like Joseph Campbell, who in some ways
0:46:20 were popularizers of Eliata’s ideas and Carl Jung’s, what they really did was devote themselves
0:46:26 to an analysis of those ideas that scaled and iterated across the largest possible spans of time.
0:46:32 And so Eliata and Jung, Eric Neumann, they were looking, and Campbell, they were looking at patterns
0:46:38 of narrative that were common across religious traditions that had spanned millennia and found
0:46:42 many patterns. The hero’s myth, for example, is one of those patterns. And it’s, I think,
0:46:46 the evidence that it has its reflection in human neurophysiology and neuropsychology is
0:46:53 incontrovertible. And so these foundational narratives, they last. They’re common across
0:46:59 multiple religious traditions. They unite. They work psychologically, but they also reflect the
0:47:04 underlying neurophysiological architecture. So I can give you an example of that. So the hero myth
0:47:10 is really a quest myth. And a quest myth is really a story of exploration and expansion of adaptation.
0:47:18 Right? So Bilbo, the Hobbit, he’s kind of an ordinary every man. He lives in a very constrained
0:47:23 and orderly and secure world. And then the quest call comes and he goes out and he expands his
0:47:29 personality and develops his wisdom. And that’s reflected in human neuropsychological architecture
0:47:35 at a very low level, way below cognition. So one of the most fundamental elements of the mammalian
0:47:41 brain, and even in lower animal forms, is the hypothalamus. It’s sort of the root of primary
0:47:48 motivation. So it governs lust, and it regulates your breathing, and it regulates your hunger,
0:47:52 and it regulates your thirst, and it regulates your temperature, like really low level biological
0:47:58 necessities are regulated by the hypothalamus. When you get hungry, it’s the hypothalamus. When
0:48:04 you’re activated in a defensively aggressive manner, that’s the hypothalamus. Half the hypothalamus
0:48:10 is the origin of the dopaminergic tracts, and they subsume exploration. And so you could think of
0:48:18 the human motivational reality as a domain that’s governed by axiomatic motivational states, love,
0:48:24 sex, defensive aggression, hunger, and another domain that’s governed by exploration. And the rule
0:48:33 would be something like, when your basic motivational states are sated, explore. Well, and that’s not
0:48:39 cognitive. Like I said, this is deep, deep brain architecture. It’s extraordinarily ancient. And
0:48:45 the exploration story is something like, go out into the unknown and take the risks because the
0:48:52 information that you discover and the skills you develop will be worthwhile, even in sating the
0:48:58 basic motivational drives. And then you want to learn to do that in a iterative manner. So it
0:49:02 sustains across time, and you want to do it in a way that unites you with other people. And there’s
0:49:08 a pattern to that. And I do think that’s the pattern that we strive to encapsulate in our
0:49:11 deep religious narratives. And I think that in many ways, we’ve done that successfully.
0:49:19 What is the believe in God? How does that fit in? What does it mean to believe in God?
0:49:25 Okay, so in one of the stories that I cover in We Who Wrestle With God, which I only recently
0:49:31 begun to take apart, say, in the last two years, is the story of Abraham. And it’s a very cool story.
0:49:36 And it’s also related, by the way, to your question about what makes communism wrong. And
0:49:43 Dostoevsky knew this, not precisely the Abraham story, but the same reason. In notes from underground,
0:49:49 Dostoevsky made a very telling observation. So he speaks in the voice of a cynical nihilistic and
0:49:55 bitter bureaucrat who’s been a failure, who’s talking cynically about the nature of human beings,
0:50:01 but also very accurately. And one of the things he points out with regards to modern utopianism
0:50:05 is that human beings are very strange creatures, and that if you gave them what the socialist
0:50:12 utopians want to give them, so let’s say all your needs are taken care of, all your material needs
0:50:17 are taken care of, and even indefinitely. Dostoevsky’s claim was, you don’t understand human beings
0:50:22 very well, because if you put them in an environment that was that comfortable, they would purposefully
0:50:28 go insane just to break it into bits, just so something interesting would happen. Right. And
0:50:34 he says it’s the human proclivity to curse and complain. And he says this in quite a cynic
0:50:39 and caustic manner, but he’s pointing to something deep, which is that we’re not built for comfort
0:50:45 and security. We’re not infants. We’re not after satiation. So then you might ask, well, what the
0:50:52 hell are we after then? That’s what the Abraham story addresses. And Abraham is the first true
0:50:57 individual in the biblical narrative. So you can think about his story as the archetypal story
0:51:02 of the developing individual. So you said, well, what’s God? Well, in the Abraham story, God has
0:51:08 characterized a lot of different ways in the classic religious texts. Like the Bible is actually a
0:51:14 compilation of different characterizations of the divine with the insistence that they reflect
0:51:21 an underlying unity. In the story of Abraham, the divine is the call to adventure. So Abraham
0:51:28 has the socialist utopia at hand. He’s from a wealthy family, and he has everything he needs.
0:51:34 And he actually doesn’t do anything until he’s in his 70s. Now, hypothetically, people in those
0:51:38 times lived much longer. But a voice comes to Abraham, and it tells him something very specific.
0:51:46 It says, leave your zone of comfort, leave your parents, leave your tent, leave your community,
0:51:54 leave your tribe, leave your land, go out into the world. And Abraham thinks, well, why have I got
0:51:59 naked slave girls peeling grapes and feeding them to me? It’s like, what do I
0:52:03 need an adventure for? And God tells them, and this is the covenant, by the way,
0:52:08 part of the covenant that the God of the Israelites makes with his people. It’s very,
0:52:13 very specific. And it’s very brilliant. He says, if you follow the voice of adventure,
0:52:20 you’ll become a blessing to yourself. So that’s a good deal because people generally live at odds
0:52:27 with themselves. And he says, God says, that’s not all. You’ll become a blessing to yourself in a way
0:52:34 that furthers your reputation among people and validly, so that you’ll accomplish things that
0:52:39 were real, and people will know it, and you’ll be held high in their esteem, and that will be valid.
0:52:46 So that’s a pretty good deal because social people would like to be regarded as of utility
0:52:51 and worth by others, and so that’s a good deal. And God says, that’s not all.
0:52:57 You’ll establish something of lasting permanent and deep value. That’s why Abraham becomes the
0:53:04 father of nations. And finally, he caps it off, and he says, there’s a better element even to it.
0:53:09 There’s a capstone. You’ll do all three of those things in a way that’s maximally beneficial to
0:53:15 everyone else. And so the divinity in the Abrahamic story is making a claim. He says, first of all,
0:53:21 there’s a drive that you should attend to, so the spirit of adventure that calls you out of your
0:53:27 zone of comfort. Now, if you attend to that, and you make the sacrifices necessary to follow that path,
0:53:33 then the following benefits will accrue to you. Your life will be a blessing. Everyone will hold
0:53:37 you in high esteem. You’ll establish something of permanent value, and you’ll do it in a way that’s
0:53:43 maximally beneficial to everyone else. And so think about what this means biologically or from an
0:53:48 engineering standpoint. It means that the instinct to develop that characterizes outward moving
0:53:55 children, let’s say, or adults is the same instinct that allows for psychological stability, that
0:54:02 allows for movement upward in a social hierarchy, that establishes something iterable, and that does
0:54:08 that in a manner that allows everyone else to partake in the same process. Well, that’s a good
0:54:14 deal. And I can’t see how it cannot be true because the alternative hypothesis would be that the spirit
0:54:20 that moves you beyond yourself to develop, the spirit of a curious child, let’s say, what is that
0:54:26 antithetical to your own esteem? Is that antithetical to other people’s best interest? Is it not the
0:54:32 thing that increases the probability that you’ll do something permanent? That’s a stupid theory.
0:54:39 So God is a call to adventure with some constraints. A call to true adventure.
0:54:44 To true adventure. Yeah, and then that’s a good observation because that begs the question,
0:54:51 what constitutes the most true adventure? Well, that’s not fully fleshed out until,
0:54:55 at least from the Christian perspective, let’s say. That’s not fully fleshed out until the
0:55:01 Gospels, because the passion of Christ is the, you could say, this is the perfectly reasonable
0:55:07 way of looking at it. The passion of Christ is the truest adventure of Abraham. That’s a terrible
0:55:14 thing, because the passion story is a catastrophic tragedy, although it obviously has its redemptive
0:55:21 elements. But one of the things that’s implied there is that there’s no distinction between the
0:55:27 true adventure of life and taking on the pathway of maximal responsibility and burden. And I can’t
0:55:32 see how that cannot be true, because the counter hypothesis is, well, Lex, the best thing for
0:55:40 you to do in your life is to shrink from all challenge and hide, to remain infantile, to remain
0:55:45 secure, not to ever push yourself beyond your limits, not to take any risks. Well, no one thinks
0:55:53 that’s true. So basically the maximally worthwhile adventure could possibly be highly correlated
0:56:00 with the hardest possible available adventure? The hardest possible available adventure voluntarily
0:56:06 undertaken. Does it have to be voluntary? Absolutely. How do you define voluntarily? Well,
0:56:14 here’s an example of that. That’s a good question, too. When Christ is the night before the crucifixion,
0:56:21 which in principle he knows is coming, he asks God to relieve him of his burden. And understandably
0:56:25 so. I mean, that’s the scene famously in which he’s sweating, literally sweating blood,
0:56:32 because he knows what’s coming. And the Romans designed crucifixion to be the most agonizing
0:56:38 and humiliating possible, agonizing, humiliating and disgusting possible death. Right? So there
0:56:42 was every reason to be apprehensive about that. And you might say, well, could you undertake that
0:56:48 voluntarily as an adventure? And the answer to that is something like, well, what’s your relationship
0:56:53 with death? Like, that’s a problem you have to solve. And you could fight it and you could be
0:56:58 bitter about it. And there’s reasons for that, especially if it’s painful and degrading. But
0:57:06 the alternative is something like, well, that’s what’s fleshed out in religious imagery always.
0:57:13 It’s very difficult to cast into words. It’s like, no, you, you welcome, you welcome the struggle.
0:57:19 That’s why I called the book, We Who Wrestle With God. You welcome the struggle. And Lex, I don’t
0:57:26 see how you can come to terms with life without construing it something like, construing it as
0:57:31 something like, bring it on, welcome the struggle. And I can’t see that there’s a limit to that.
0:57:35 It’s like, well, I welcome the struggle until it gets difficult. Well,
0:57:42 so there’s not a bell curve, like the struggle of moderation, basically have to welcome
0:57:48 whatever as hard as it gets. And the crucifixion in that way is a symbol of that. Well, and it,
0:57:54 well, it’s, it’s worse than that in some ways, because the crucifixion exemplifies
0:57:59 the worst possible death. But that isn’t the only element of the struggle, because
0:58:06 mythologically, classically, after Christ’s death, he harrows hell. And what that means,
0:58:11 as far as I can tell psychologically, is that you’re not only required, let’s say,
0:58:16 to take on the full existential burden of life and to welcome it, regardless of what it is,
0:58:22 and to maintain your upward aim, despite all temptations to the contrary. But you also have
0:58:28 to confront the root of malevolence itself. So it’s not merely tragedy. And I think the
0:58:32 malevolence is actually worse. And the reason I think that is because I know the literature on
0:58:39 post-traumatic stress disorder. And most people who encounter, let’s say, a challenge that’s so brutal,
0:58:45 that it fragments them, it isn’t mere suffering that does that to people. It’s an encounter with
0:58:50 malevolence that does that to people. They’re owned sometimes, often, by the way, soldier will go
0:58:56 out into a battlefield and find out that there’s a part of him that really enjoys the mayhem.
0:59:02 And that conceptualization doesn’t fit in well with everything he thinks he knows about himself
0:59:08 and humanity. And after that contact with that dark part of himself, he never recovers.
0:59:14 That happens to people. And it happens to people who encounter bad actors in the world, too. If
0:59:20 you’re a naive person and the right narcissistic psychopath comes your way, you are in, like,
0:59:24 mortal trouble because you might die. But that’s not where the trouble ends.
0:59:31 If there’s a young man in their 20s listening to this, how do they escape the pull of
0:59:37 Dostoevsky’s notes from underground? With the eyes open to the world, how do they select the
0:59:44 adventure? So, there’s other characterizations of the divine, say, in the Old Testament story. So,
0:59:48 one pattern of characterization that I think is really relevant to that question is
0:59:56 the conception of God as calling and conscience. Okay, so what does it mean? It’s a description
1:00:02 of the manner in which your destiny announces itself to you. And I’m using that terminology,
1:00:08 and it’s distinguishable, say, from Nietzsche’s notion that you create your own values. It’s like,
1:00:13 part of the way you can tell that that’s wrong is that you can’t voluntarily
1:00:18 gerrymander your own interests, right? Like, you find some things interesting,
1:00:24 and that seems natural and autonomous, and other things you don’t find interesting and you can’t
1:00:31 really force yourself to be interested in them. Now, so what is the domain of interest that makes
1:00:36 itself manifest to you? Well, it’s like an autonomous spirit. It’s like certain things in
1:00:41 your field of perception are illuminated to you. Think, oh, that’s interesting, that’s compelling,
1:00:48 that’s gripping. Rudolf Otto, who studied the phenomenology of religious experience, described
1:00:55 that as numinous. Thing grips you because you’re compelled by it, and maybe it’s also somewhat
1:01:00 anxiety-provoking. It’s the same reaction that, like, a cat has to a dog when the cat’s hair
1:01:05 stands on end. That’s an awe response. And so there’s going to be things in your phenomenological field
1:01:12 that pull you forward, compel you. That’s like the voice of positive emotion and enthusiasm.
1:01:18 Things draw you into the world. It might be love. It might be aesthetic interest. It might be friendship.
1:01:27 It might be social status. It might be duty and industriousness. Like, there’s various domains
1:01:34 of interest that shine for people. That’s sort of on the positive side. God is calling, right?
1:01:40 That would be akin to the spirit of adventure for Abraham. But there’s also God as conscience,
1:01:49 and this is a useful thing to know, too. Certain things bother you. They take root within you,
1:01:54 and they turn your thoughts towards certain issues. Like, there are things you’re interested in that
1:02:00 you’ve pursued your whole life. There are things I’m interested in that I felt as a moral compulsion.
1:02:04 And so you could think, and I think the way you can think about it technically is that
1:02:12 something pulls you forward so that you move ahead and you develop. And then another voice,
1:02:18 this voice of negative emotion says, while you’re moving forward, stay on this narrow pathway,
1:02:24 right? And it’ll mark deviations, and it marks deviations with shame and guilt and anxiety,
1:02:30 regret. And that actually has a voice. Don’t do that. Well, why not? While you’re wandering off
1:02:36 the straight narrow path. So the divine marks the pathway forward and reveals it, but then puts up
1:02:42 the constraints of conscience. And the divine in the Old Testament is portrayed not least as the
1:02:47 dynamic between calling and conscience. What do you do with the negative emotions?
1:02:51 You didn’t mention envy. There’s some really dark ones that can really pull you into some
1:02:57 bad places. Envy, fear. Yeah, envy is a really bad one. Pride and envy are among the worst.
1:03:03 Those are the sins of Cain, by the way, in the story of Cain and Abel. Because Cain fails
1:03:08 because his sacrifices are insufficient. He doesn’t offer his best. And so he’s rejected,
1:03:14 and that makes him bitter and unhappy. And he goes to complain to God and God says to him some
1:03:19 two things. He said, if God tells him if your sacrifices were appropriate, you’d be accepted.
1:03:26 It’s a brutal thing. It’s a brutal rejoinder. And he also says, you can’t blame your misery
1:03:33 on your failure. You could learn from your failure. When you fail, you invited in the spirit of envy
1:03:38 and resentment, and you allowed it to possess you. And that’s why you’re miserable. And so Cain is
1:03:43 embittered by that response, and that’s when he kills Abel. And so you might say, well, how do you
1:03:49 fortify yourself against that pathway of resentment? And part of classic religious practice
1:03:57 is aimed to do that precisely. What’s the antithesis of envy? Gratitude. That’s something you can
1:04:04 practice. Right? I mean, literally practice. I think envy is one of the biggest enemies for a
1:04:12 young person. Because basically, you’re starting from nowhere. Life is hard. You’ve achieved nothing.
1:04:19 And you’re striving, and you’re failing constantly. And you see other people whom you think aren’t
1:04:23 having the same problem. Yeah, and they succeeded. And they could be your neighbor. They could be
1:04:29 succeeding by a little bit or somebody on the internet succeeding by a lot. And I think that
1:04:34 can really pull a person down. That kind of envy can really destroy a person. Yeah, definitely.
1:04:39 Well, the gratitude element would be something like, well, yeah, you don’t know anything,
1:04:47 and you’re at the bottom, but you’re not 80. You know, one of the best predictors of wealth
1:04:53 in the United States is age. So then you might say, well, who’s got it better?
1:05:00 The old rich guy or the young poor guy? And I would say most old rich guys would trade their
1:05:06 wealth for youth. So it’s not exactly clear at all at any stage, who’s got the upper hand? Who’s
1:05:10 got the advantage? And you know, you could say, well, I’ve got all these burdens in front of me
1:05:17 because I’m young and oh my God, or you could say every dragon has its treasure. And then that’s
1:05:23 actually a pattern of perception. You know, I’m not saying that people don’t have their challenges,
1:05:30 they certainly do. But discriminating between a challenge and an opportunity is very, very
1:05:35 difficult. And learning to see a challenge as an opportunity, that’s the beginning of wisdom.
1:05:42 It’s interesting, I don’t know how it works, maybe you can elucidate, but when you have envy
1:05:49 towards somebody, if you just celebrate them, so gratitude, but actually, as opposed to sort of
1:05:54 ignoring and being grateful for the things you have, like literally celebrate that person,
1:06:00 it transforms, it like, it lights the way. I don’t know why that is exactly.
1:06:05 The only reason you’re envious is because you see someone who has something that you
1:06:12 want. Okay, so let’s think about it. Well, first of all, the fact that they have it means that
1:06:19 in principle, you could get it, at least someone has. So that’s a pretty good deal. And then you
1:06:24 might say, well, the fact that I’m envious of that person means that I actually want something.
1:06:28 And then you might think, well, what am I envious of? I’m envious of their attractiveness to women.
1:06:34 It’s like, okay, well, now you know something about yourself. You know that one true motivation
1:06:39 that’s making itself manifest to you is that you wish that you would be the sort of person who
1:06:44 is attractive to women. Now, of course, that’s an extremely common longing among men, period,
1:06:51 but particularly among young men. It’s like, well, what makes you so sure you couldn’t have that?
1:06:56 Well, how about, here’s an answer. You don’t have enough faith in yourself. And maybe you don’t have
1:07:01 enough faith in, well, I would say, the divine. You don’t believe that the world is characterized
1:07:09 by enough potentiality so that even miserable you has a crack at the brass ring. And like,
1:07:13 I talked about this actually practically in one of my previous books, because I wrote a chapter
1:07:19 called “Compare Yourself to Who You Are and Not to Someone Else at the Present Time.” Well, why?
1:07:26 Well, your best benchmark for tomorrow is you today. And you might not be able to have what
1:07:32 someone else has on the particular axis you’re comparing yourself with them on. But you could
1:07:37 make an incremental improvement over your current state, regardless of the direction that you’re
1:07:45 aiming. And it is the case. And this is a law. The return on incremental improvement is exponential
1:07:51 or geometric and not linear. So even if you start, this is why the hero is always born in a lowly
1:07:57 place, mythologically. Christ, who redeems the world, is born in a manger with the animals to
1:08:04 poverty-stricken parents in the middle of a God-versaikened desert in a nondescript time and place
1:08:13 isolated. Well, why? Well, because everyone young struggles with their insufficiency. But that doesn’t
1:08:19 mean that great things can’t make themselves manifest. And part of the insistence in the
1:08:25 biblical text, for example, is that it’s incumbent on you to have the courage to have faith in yourself
1:08:33 and in the spirit of reality, the essence of reality, regardless of how you construe the
1:08:39 evidence at hand. Right. Look at me. I’m so useless. I don’t know anything. I don’t have anything.
1:08:45 It’s hopeless. I don’t have it within me. The world couldn’t offer me that possibility. Well,
1:08:50 what the hell do you know about that? This is what Job figures out in the midst of his suffering in
1:08:57 the book of Job, because Job is tortured terribly by God who makes a bet with Satan himself to bring
1:09:04 him down. And Job’s decision in the face of his intense suffering is, “I’m not going to lose faith
1:09:09 in my essential goodness, and I’m not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of being itself,
1:09:16 regardless of how terrible the face it’s showing to me at the moment happens to be.” And I think,
1:09:24 okay, what do you make of that claim? Well, let’s look at it practically. You’re being tortured by
1:09:30 the arbitrariness of life. That’s horrible. Now you lose faith in yourself and you become cynical
1:09:38 about being. So are you infinitely worse off instantly? And then you might say, well, yeah,
1:09:44 but it’s really asking a lot of people that they maintain faith even in their darkest hours. It’s
1:09:50 like, yeah, that might be asking everything from people. But then you also might ask, this is a
1:09:58 very strange question, is if you were brought into being by something that was essentially good,
1:10:05 wouldn’t that thing that brought you into being demand that you make the best in yourself manifest?
1:10:13 And wouldn’t it be precisely when you most need that, that you’d be desperate enough to
1:10:19 risk what it would take to let it emerge? So you kind of make it seem that reason could
1:10:27 be the thing that takes you out of a place of darkness. So finding that calling through reason,
1:10:34 I think it’s also possible when reason fails you to just take the leap, navigate not by reason,
1:10:40 but by finding the thing that scares you the risk to take the risk, take the leap,
1:10:46 and then figure it out while you’re in the air. Yeah, well, I think that’s always part of a heroic
1:10:52 adventure. Is that ability to cut the Gordian knot? But you could also ask from an engineering
1:10:57 perspective, okay, what are the axioms that make a decision like that possible? And the answer would
1:11:02 be something like, I’m going to make the presumption that if I move forward in good faith, whatever
1:11:06 happens to me will be the best thing that could possibly happen, no matter what it is.
1:11:12 And I think that’s actually how you make an alliance with truth. And I also think that
1:11:16 truth is an adventure. And the way you make an alliance with truth is by assuming
1:11:25 that whatever happens to you, if you’re living in truth, is the best thing that could happen,
1:11:30 even if you can’t see that at any given moment. Because otherwise, you’d say that
1:11:34 truth would be just the handmaiden of advantage. Well, I’m going to say something
1:11:39 truthful, and I pay a price. Well, that means I shouldn’t have said it. Well, that
1:11:45 possibly, but that’s not the only possible standard of evaluation. Because what you’re
1:11:50 doing is you’re making the outcome your deity, right? Well, I just reverse that and say, no, no,
1:11:58 truth is the deity. The outcome is variable, but that doesn’t eradicate the initial axiom.
1:12:08 Where’s the constant, right? What’s the constant? He may be, when you said Abraham was being fed
1:12:13 by naked ladies. That’s an interpolation, obviously, but we’ve been out of keeping for the times.
1:12:20 But it does make me think, sort of in stark contrast in each his own life, that perhaps
1:12:28 getting laid early on in life is a useful starter. Step one, get laid and then go for adventure.
1:12:33 There’s some basic, like a mis-association of- So, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to bring
1:12:38 the sexual element in because it’s a powerful motivating force and it has to be integrated.
1:12:44 I don’t think it’s adventure. It’s romantic adventure. Right, right. But the lack of basic
1:12:52 interaction, sexual interaction, I feel like is the engine that drives towards that cynicism
1:12:59 of the incel. It is, but there’s very little doubt about that. We know perfectly well anthropologically
1:13:06 that the most unstable social situation you can generate is young men with no access to women.
1:13:13 That’s not good. And they’ll do anything, anything to reverse that situation. So,
1:13:20 that’s very dangerous. But then I would also say there’s every suggestion that the pathway
1:13:26 of adventure itself is the best pathway to romantic attractiveness. And we know this
1:13:31 in some ways in a very blunt manner. The Google boys, the engineers who are too, what would you say,
1:13:37 naively oriented towards empirical truth to note when they’re being politically incorrect,
1:13:41 they wrote a great book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which I really like. It’s a very good
1:13:48 book and it’s engineers as psychologists. And so they’ll say all sorts of things that no one
1:13:52 with any sense would ever say that happened to be true. And they studied the pattern of
1:13:58 pornographic fantasy and women like pornographic stories, not images. So women’s use of pornographic
1:14:05 pornography is literary. Who are the main protagonists in female pornographic fantasy?
1:14:13 Pirates, werewolves, vampires, surgeons, billionaires, Tony Stark, you know. And so
1:14:18 the basic pornographic narrative is Beauty and the Beast, those five categories.
1:14:26 Parable aggressive male, tamable by the right relationship, hot erotic attraction. And so
1:14:31 I would say to the young men who, and I have many times to the young men who are locked in isolation,
1:14:38 it’s first of all, join the bloody club because the default value of a 15-year-old male on the
1:14:44 mating market is zero. And there’s reason for that. You know, and zero is a bit of an exaggeration,
1:14:48 but not much. And the reason for that is, well, what the hell do you know? Like, you’re not good
1:14:54 for anything. Yeah, you have potential and maybe plenty. And hopefully that’ll be made manifest,
1:14:59 but you shouldn’t be all upset because you’re the same loser as everyone else your age has always
1:15:04 been since the beginning of time. But then you might ask, well, what should I do about it? The
1:15:09 answer is get yourself together. You know, stand up straight with your shoulders back, take on
1:15:15 some adventure, find your calling, abide by your conscience, put yourself together, and you’ll
1:15:21 become attractive. And we know this is, look, we know this is true. The correlation between male,
1:15:32 sexual opportunity and relative masculine status is about 0.6. That’s higher than the
1:15:38 correlation between intelligence and academic achievement. I don’t think that there’s a
1:15:44 larger correlation between two independent phenomena in the entire social science and health literature
1:15:50 than the correlation between relative male social status and reproductive success. It’s by far the
1:15:54 most fundamental determinant. Well, what’s the cause and effect there? It’s a loop. Men are motivated
1:15:59 to attain social status because it confers upon them reproductive success. And that’s not only
1:16:04 cognitively, but biologically. I’ll give you an example of this. There’s a documentary I watch
1:16:08 from time to time, which I think is the most brilliant documentary I’ve ever seen. It’s called
1:16:15 Crumb. And it’s the story of this underground cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who was in high school,
1:16:23 was in the category of males for whom a date was not only not likely, but in unimaginable.
1:16:32 So he was at the bottom of the bottom rung, and almost all the reactions he got from females
1:16:40 wasn’t just, “No, it was like, are you out of your mind?” With that contempt. And then he became
1:16:45 successful. And so the documentary is super interesting because it tracks the utter pathology
1:16:50 of his sexual fantasies because he was bitter and resentful. And if you want to understand
1:16:57 the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like, and you watch Crumb, you’ll find out a lot
1:17:02 more about that than anybody with any sense would want to know. But then he makes this transition.
1:17:06 And partly because he does take the heroic adventure path. And he actually has a family and
1:17:12 children. And he’s actually a pretty functional person, as opposed to his brothers, one of whom
1:17:18 commits suicide, and one of whom is literally a repeat sexual offender. It’s a brutal documentary.
1:17:25 But what he did in his adolescence, after being rejected, was he found what he was interested
1:17:28 in. He was a very good artist. He was very interested in music. And he started to pursue
1:17:33 those sort of single-mindedly. And he became successful. And as soon as he became successful,
1:17:38 and the documentary tracks this beautifully, he’s immediately attractive to women. And then you
1:17:44 might ask too, even if you’re cynical, it’s like, “Well, why do I have to perform for women?”
1:17:47 And the answer to that is something like, “Why the hell should they have anything to do with
1:17:52 you if you’re useless?” They’re going to have infants. They don’t need another one, right?
1:17:57 Partly the reason that women are hypergamous, unless they want males who are of higher status
1:18:02 than they are, is because they’re trying to redress the reproductive burden. And it’s substantial.
1:18:08 I mean, the female of any species is the sex that devotes more to the reproductive function.
1:18:14 That’s a more fundamental definition than chromosomal differentiation. And that’s taken
1:18:19 to its ultimate extreme with humans. And so of course, women are going to want someone around
1:18:26 that’s useful, because the cost of sex for them is an 18-year-old period of dependency with an
1:18:34 infant. So I think the adventure comes first. Heroic adventure comes first. Well, it’s complex,
1:18:37 because the other problem, let’s say, with the crumb boys is that their mother was extremely
1:18:42 pathological, and they didn’t get a lot of genuine feminine nurturance and affection.
1:18:47 Oh, of course. So the family and society are not going to help you most of the time with a
1:18:53 heroic adventure, right? They’re going to be a barrier. Well, in good families, they’re both,
1:18:59 because they put up constraints on your behavior. But like, I’ve interviewed a lot of successful
1:19:06 people about their calling, let’s say, because I do that with all my podcast guests. How did the
1:19:14 path that you took to success make itself manifest? And the pattern is very typical. Almost all the
1:19:20 people that I’ve interviewed had a mother and a father. Now, it’s not invariant, but I’d say
1:19:26 it’s there in 99% of the time. It’s really high. And both of the parents, or at least one of them,
1:19:33 but often both, were very encouraging of the person’s interests and pathway to development.
1:19:39 That’s fascinating. I’ve heard you analyze it that way before, and I had a reaction to that
1:19:43 idea, because you focus on the positive of the parents. I feel like it was the,
1:19:49 maybe I see biographies differently, but it feels like the struggle within the family
1:19:56 was the catalyst for greatness in a lot of biographies. Maybe I’m misinterpreting it.
1:20:02 No, no, no. I don’t think you, I think that that’s a reflection, maybe, correct me if I’m wrong,
1:20:06 I think that’s a reflection of that dynamic between positive and negative emotion.
1:20:11 Like my son, for example, who’s doing just fine. He’s firing on all cylinders, as far as I’m
1:20:15 concerned. He has a nice family. He gets along with his wife. He’s a really good musician. He’s
1:20:23 got a company. He’s running well. He’s a delight to be around. He was a relatively disagreeable
1:20:33 infant. He was tough-minded. He didn’t take no for an answer. There was some tussle in regulating
1:20:38 his behavior. He spent a lot of time when he was two sitting on the steps trying to get his act
1:20:46 together. That was the constraint. That wasn’t something that was, it’s an opposition to him
1:20:52 away, because it was in opposition to the immediate manifestation of his hedonistic desires,
1:20:58 but it was also an impetus to further development. The rule for me, when he was on the stairs was,
1:21:02 as soon as you’re willing to be a civilized human being, you can get off the stairs.
1:21:07 You might think, well, that’s nothing but arbitrary, super-ego, patriarchal, oppressive
1:21:13 constraint. Or you could say, well, no, what I’m actually doing is facilitating his cortical maturation,
1:21:18 because when a child misbehaves, it’s usually because they’re under the domination of some
1:21:23 primordial, emotional, or motivational impulse. They’re angry, they’re over-enthusiastic,
1:21:31 they’re upset, they’re selfish, like it’s narrow, self-centeredness expressed in an
1:21:39 immature manner. But see, okay, tell me if I’m wrong, but it feels like the engine of greatness,
1:21:45 at least on the male side of things, has often been trying to prove the father wrong,
1:21:51 or trying to gain the acceptance of the father. So that tension, where the parent is not encouraging,
1:21:57 like you mentioned, but is basically saying, no, you won’t be able to do this.
1:22:04 Okay, so my observation as a psychologist has been that it’s very, very difficult for someone
1:22:09 to get their act together, unless they have at least one figure in their life that’s encouraging
1:22:15 and shows them the pathway forward. So you can have a lot of adversity in your life,
1:22:20 and if you have one person around who’s a good model and you’re neurologically intact,
1:22:26 you can latch onto that model. Now, you can also find that model in books, and people do that sometimes,
1:22:31 like I’ve interviewed people who had pretty fragmented childhoods, who turned to books and
1:22:37 found the pattern that guided them in, like, let’s say, the adventures of the heroes of the past,
1:22:42 because that’s a good way of thinking about it. And I read a book called Angela’s Ashes that was
1:22:49 written by an Irish author, Frank McCourt’s fantastic book, beautiful book, and his father was
1:22:56 an alcoholic of gargantuan proportions. He just an Irish drinker who drank every scent that came
1:23:04 into the family, and many of whose children died in poverty. And what Frank did is a testament
1:23:08 to the human spirit, is he sort of divided his father conceptually into two elements. There was
1:23:14 sober mourning father who was encouraging and with whom he had a relationship, and then there was
1:23:22 drunk and useless later afternoon, an evening father, and he rejected the negative, and he
1:23:29 amplified his relationship with the positive. Now, like, he had other things going for him,
1:23:36 but he, you know, he did a very good job of discriminating. And I mean, partly the question
1:23:42 that you’re raising is, to what degree is it useful to have a beneficial adversary?
1:23:49 Yeah, and I mean, struggle-free progress is not possible. And I think there are situations
1:23:55 under which where, you know, you might be motivated to prove someone in your
1:24:02 immediate circle wrong, but then that also implies that at some level, for some reason,
1:24:07 you actually care about their judgment. You know, you just didn’t write them off completely.
1:24:13 Well, I mean, that’s why I say there’s an archetype of a young man trying to gain the approval
1:24:21 of his father. And I think that repeats itself in a bunch of biographies that I’ve read.
1:24:28 I don’t know, there must have been an engine somewhere that they found of approval of encouragement,
1:24:33 maybe in books, maybe in the mother, or maybe the role of the parents has flipped.
1:24:36 Well, my father was hard to please, very.
1:24:38 Did you ever succeed?
1:24:40 Yes, but it wasn’t easy ever.
1:24:44 When was the moment when you succeeded?
1:24:50 Late, pretty late, like 40, maybe later.
1:24:56 Was it a gradual or a definitive moment when a shift happened?
1:25:03 My father always was always willing to approve of the things I did that were good,
1:25:09 although he was not effusive by any stretch of the imagination and the standards were very high.
1:25:16 Now, I was probably fortunate for me, you know, and it does bear on the question you’re asking.
1:25:22 It’s like, if you want someone to motivate you optimally, God, it’s complicated because
1:25:25 there has to be a temperamental dance between the two people.
1:25:32 Like, what you really want is for someone to apply the highest possible standards to you
1:25:40 that you’re capable of reaching, right? And that’s a vicious dance because
1:25:46 you have to have a relationship with your child to do that properly, you know, because you want to,
1:25:49 if you want to be optimally motivating as a father, you keep your children on the edge.
1:25:56 It’s like, you might not reward something in your child that you would think would be good
1:25:58 in someone else because you think they could do better.
1:26:03 And so my father was pretty clear about the idea that he always expected me to do better.
1:26:13 And was that troublesome? It was like, I felt often when I was young that there was no pleasing him,
1:26:18 but I also knew that that wasn’t, I knew that that wasn’t right. See, I actually knew that wasn’t right
1:26:26 because I could remember, especially I think when I was very young, that I did things that
1:26:33 he was pleased about. I knew that was possible. So it wasn’t unpredictable and arbitrary,
1:26:37 it was just difficult. It sounds like he’s hit a pretty good optimal,
1:26:43 but it’s for each individual human that optimal differs. Well, that’s why you have to have a
1:26:50 relationship with your children. You have to know them. And well, with yourself too,
1:26:57 and with your wife, you can’t hit that optimal. That optimal is probably love.
1:27:03 Because love isn’t just acceptance. Love is acceptance and encouragement.
1:27:08 And it’s not just that either. It’s also, no, don’t do that. That’s beneath you.
1:27:14 You’re capable of more. And how harsh should that be? It’s like, that’s a really hard question.
1:27:19 You know, like if you really love someone, you’re not going to put up with their stupidity.
1:27:23 Don’t do that. You know, one of the rules I had with my little kids was,
1:27:28 don’t do anything that makes you look like an idiot in public. Why? Because I don’t want you
1:27:34 disgracing yourself. Why not? Because I like you. I think you’re great. And you’re not going to act
1:27:39 like a bloody fool in public so that people get the wrong idea about you. No! What about inside a
1:27:50 relationship? A successful relationship? How much challenge? How much peace? Is a successful
1:27:57 relationship one that is easy, one that is challenging? I would say to some degree that
1:28:05 depends on your temperament. My wife is quite a provocative person. And there are times when I,
1:28:12 I suppose, do I wish that, there are times when I casually wish that she was easier to get along
1:28:17 with. But as soon as I think about it, I don’t think that. Because I’ve always liked her. We
1:28:24 were friends ever since we were little kids. And she plays rough. And I like that as it turns out.
1:28:29 Now, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a pain from time to time. But, you know, and that is going to be
1:28:36 a temperamental issue to some degree and an issue of negotiation. Like, she plays rough, but
1:28:42 fair. And the fair part has been establishing that. It’s been part of our ongoing negotiation.
1:28:47 And part of it is in the play you get to find out about yourself or what your temperament is.
1:28:51 Because I don’t think that that’s clear until it’s tested.
1:28:56 Oh, definitely not. Definitely not. You find out all sorts of things about yourself in a
1:29:00 relationship. That’s for sure. Well, and partly the reason that there is provocativeness,
1:29:05 especially from women in relationship to men, is they want to test them out. It’s like,
1:29:09 can you hold your temper when someone’s bothering you? Well, why would a woman want to know that?
1:29:17 Well, maybe she doesn’t want you to snap and hurt her kids. And so how’s she going to find that out?
1:29:22 Ask you? Well, you’re going to say, well, I’d never do that. It’s like, never, eh? Let’s find out
1:29:29 if it’s never. So we don’t know how people test each other out in relationships, but,
1:29:35 or why exactly, but it’s intense and necessary. What’s your and what’s in general,
1:29:41 should a man’s relationship with temper be? You should have one. And you should be able to regulate
1:29:47 it. Like, that’s part of that attractiveness of the monstrous that characterizes women’s fantasies.
1:29:52 Right? Because, and Nietzsche pointed this out too. Go back to Nietzsche, you know?
1:29:56 Nietzsche, one of Nietzsche’s claims was that most of what passes for morality is nothing but
1:30:02 cowardice. You know, I’d never cheat on my wife. It’s like, is there anybody asking you too?
1:30:08 That you actually find attractive? Or are there dozens of people asking you too that you find
1:30:13 attractive? It’s like, well, I would never cheat. It’s like, no, you just don’t have the opportunity.
1:30:16 Now, I don’t, I’m not saying that everyone’s in that position, you know, that they would cheat
1:30:22 even if they had the opportunity, because that’s not true. But, and it’s the same with regards to,
1:30:27 oh, I’m a peaceful man. It’s like, no, you’re not. You’re just a weak coward. You wouldn’t dare have it
1:30:33 to have a confrontation, physical or metaphysical. And you’re passing it off as morality because
1:30:38 you don’t want to come to terms with the fact of your own weakness and cowardice. And part of the,
1:30:44 that, what I would say is twisted pseudo-Christian morality that Nietzsche was criticizing was
1:30:50 exactly of that sort. And it tied into resentment and envy. And he tied that in explicitly. He said
1:30:59 that failure in life, masked by the morality that’s nothing but weak cowardice, turns to the
1:31:04 resentment that undermines and destroys everything, and that does that purposefully.
1:31:09 Yeah, I think he was criticizing if under the facade of niceness, there’s an ocean of resentment.
1:31:17 Yeah, that’s for sure. That’s also the danger of being too forthcoming with people. See,
1:31:21 this is another thing, let’s say, about my wife, who’s not particularly agreeable. It’s like,
1:31:26 she’s not particularly agreeable, but she’s not resentful. And that’s because she doesn’t give
1:31:32 things away that she, that she isn’t willing to. And if you’re agreeable and nice and you’re conflict
1:31:37 avoidant, you’ll push yourself too far to please the other person. And then that makes you bitter
1:31:42 and resentful. So that’s not helpful. Do you think you’ll be in trouble for saying this on a podcast
1:31:50 later? No, no, we know each other pretty well. And like I said, it’s a trait that I find admirable.
1:31:58 It’s provocative and challenging. And it seems to work. Well, we’ve been together 50 years, so…
1:32:08 Quick pause, bathroom break. If we can descend from the realm of ideas down to history and reality,
1:32:16 I would say the time between World War I and World War II was one of history’s biggest testing of
1:32:27 ideas and really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that helped us understand the nature of good and
1:32:36 evil. I just want to ask you sort of a question about good and evil. Churchill, in many ways,
1:32:44 was not a good man. Stalin, as you’ve documented extensively, was a horrible man.
1:32:54 But you can make the case that both were necessary for stopping an even worse human being in Hitler.
1:33:06 So to what degree do you need monsters to fight monsters? Do you need bad men to be able to
1:33:14 fight off greater evils? It’s everything in its proper place is the answer to that.
1:33:20 You know, we might think that our life would be easier without fear, let’s say. We might say that
1:33:26 our life would be easier without anger or pain, but the truth of the matter is that those things
1:33:30 are beneficial even though they can cause great suffering, but they have to be in their proper
1:33:36 place. And that capacity that could in one context be a terrible force for evil, can in the proper
1:33:44 context be the most potent force for good. A good man has to be formidable. And partly what that means,
1:33:52 as far as I can tell, is that you have to be able to say no. And no means, like, I thought a lot about
1:33:58 no, working as a clinician, because I did a lot of strategic counseling with my clients in a lot
1:34:03 of extremely difficult situations. And I learned to take apart what no meant. And also when dealing
1:34:10 with my own children, because I used no sparingly, because it’s a powerful weapon, let’s say. But
1:34:15 I meant it. And with my kids, what it meant was, if you continue that pattern of behavior, something
1:34:23 you do not like will happen to you with 100% certainty. And when that’s the case, and you’re
1:34:29 willing to implement it, you don’t have to do it very often. With regards to monstrosity, it’s like
1:34:35 weak men aren’t good. They’re just weak. That’s Nietzsche’s observation. That’s partly again why
1:34:43 he was tempted to place the will to power, let’s say, and to deal with that notion in a manner that
1:34:48 when it was tied with the revaluation of all values was counterproductive.
1:34:54 Counterproductive in the final analysis. It’s not like there wasn’t something to what he was
1:35:02 driving at. Formidable men are admirable. And you know, don’t mess with them. Douglas Murray’s a
1:35:10 good example of that. He’s a rather slight guy, but he’s got a spine of steel. And there’s more
1:35:14 than a bit of what’s a monstrous in him. And Jacques Wilink is like that. And Joe Rogan is
1:35:20 like that. And you’re like that. But there’s a different level. I mean, if you look, to me,
1:35:28 Churchill might represent the thing you’re talking about. But World War II, Hitler would not be
1:35:36 stopped without Stalin. Well, I wonder, yes, yes. And if I may insert into this picture of complexity,
1:35:43 Hitler would have not stopped until he enslaved and exterminated the entirety of the Slavic people,
1:35:50 the Jewish people, the Slavic people, the Gypsies, everybody who’s non-Aryan. But then Stalin,
1:35:56 in the mass rape of German women by the Red Army as they marched towards Berlin,
1:36:01 is a kind of manifestation, the full monstrosity that a person can be.
1:36:08 You can easily be in a situation. You can easily, unfortunately, find yourself in a situation where
1:36:13 all you have in front of you are a variety of bad options. You know, that’s partly why,
1:36:17 if you have any sense, you try to conduct yourself very carefully in life, because
1:36:23 you don’t want to be in a position where you’ve made so many mistakes that all the options left
1:36:30 to you are terrible. And so you said, well, was it necessary to ally with Stalin? It’s like, well,
1:36:36 it’s very difficult to second guess the trajectory of something as complex as World War II. But
1:36:42 we could say casually, at least as Westerners have in general, that that alliance was necessary.
1:36:48 Now, I think the mistake that the West made in the aftermath of World War II was in not
1:36:54 dealing as forthrightly with the catastrophes of communism as an ideology as we did with fascism.
1:37:00 And that’s especially true of the intellectuals and the universities. I mean, it was very common
1:37:04 when I was teaching both at Harvard and at the University of Toronto for the students in my
1:37:10 personality class, where we studied Solzhenitsyn, who’s actually an existential psychologist in
1:37:16 many ways and a deep one. None of them knew anything about the Soviet atrocities. None
1:37:21 of them knew anything about what happened in Ukraine in the death of 6 million productive people.
1:37:28 I had no idea that the communists killed tens of millions of people in the aftermath of the
1:37:32 Russian Revolution. And they know even less about Mao and the Great Leap Forward. Yeah, right, right.
1:37:39 Which some estimates are 100 million people. Now, you know, when your error bars are in the tens of
1:37:44 millions, well, that’s a real indication of a cataclysm. And nobody knows how many people died
1:37:50 from direct oppression or indirect in the Soviet Union. 20 million, it seems like a reasonable
1:37:55 estimate. Solzhenitsyn’s upper bound was higher than that. And how do you measure
1:38:02 the intellectual output that was suppressed and killed off, the number of intellectuals,
1:38:06 artists and writers that were put into the gulags? Well, productive farmers, for that matter,
1:38:13 and anyone who was willing to tell the truth. Right, absolutely. So, yeah, catastrophic. And
1:38:20 so I think the West’s failure wasn’t so much allying with Stalin. I mean, it was Douglas MacArthur
1:38:26 who wanted to continue. He thought we should just take the Soviets out after the Second World War.
1:38:33 And they removed him from any position of authority where such a thing might be made possible.
1:38:39 And people were tired. But was MacArthur wrong? Well, he certainly wasn’t wrong
1:38:45 in his insistence that Stalin was as big a monster as Hitler or bigger.
1:38:54 So, the valorization of the leftist proclivity, the radical leftist proclivity is the sin of the
1:39:01 West, I think, more intensely than allying with Stalin. Tricky nuanced topic. But if we look at
1:39:06 the modern day and the threat of communism, Marxism in the United States, to me,
1:39:14 it’s disrespectful to the atrocities of the 20th century to call somebody like Kamala Harris a
1:39:24 communist. But I see the sort of escalation of the extremness of language being used when you call
1:39:30 somebody like Donald Trump a fascist. That makes total sense to then use similar extreme terminology
1:39:35 for somebody like Kamala Harris. But maybe I could ask your evaluation. If you look at the
1:39:39 political landscape today, somebody like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
1:39:44 Okay, well, the first thing I would say is that I think that viewing the political landscape
1:39:50 of today as a political landscape is actually wrong. I think it’s not the right frame of reference.
1:39:58 Because what I see happening are a very small percentage of dark tetrad personality types,
1:40:06 so Machiavellian, manipulative, narcissistic, wanting undeserved attention, psychopathic,
1:40:11 that makes them predatory parasites, and sadistic, because that goes along with the other three.
1:40:20 That’s about in the serious manifestation, that’s probably three to five percent of the population.
1:40:27 And they’re generally kept under pretty decent control by civilized people and stable social
1:40:37 interactions. I think that their machinations are disinhibited by cost-free social media communication.
1:40:44 So they gain disproportionate influence. Now, these people want undeserved recognition and
1:40:49 social status and everything that goes along with it, and they don’t care how they get it.
1:40:54 Because when I say they want that, I mean, that’s all they want.
1:41:01 So in the realm of social media, you mentioned yes, but are you also suggesting that they’re
1:41:05 overrepresented in the realm of politics, politicians and so on?
1:41:11 They’re overrepresented in the realm of fractious political discourse, because they can use ideas.
1:41:16 First of all, they can use, let’s say, the benevolent ideas of the right and the benevolent
1:41:23 ideas of the left, either one, and switch back and forth for that matter, as a camouflage for what
1:41:28 they’re actually up to. So you’ve interviewed a lot of people, and you have a really powerful mind,
1:41:33 you have a good read on people. So how do you know when you’re sitting across from a psychopath?
1:41:38 I wouldn’t say that I do know. In normal social circumstances, we have evolved mechanisms to
1:41:42 keep people like that under control. Let’s say that you and I have a series of interactions,
1:41:47 and you screw me over once. I’m not going to forget that. Now, I might not write you off
1:41:52 because of the one time, but if it happens three times, it’s like, we’re not going to play together
1:42:01 anymore. And in normal times, most of our social networks are connected and interacting. So if
1:42:08 you ripped me off three times and I noted that, I’m going to tell everybody I know, and they’re
1:42:13 going to tell everybody they know, and soon everyone will know, and that’s the end of your
1:42:17 tricks. But that assumes that we know who you are, and we’re in continual communication. Well,
1:42:28 all of that’s gone online. So anonymity does that. And so does the amplification of emotional
1:42:35 intensity by the social media platforms and their algorithms. I think what we’re doing,
1:42:43 this is happening on Twitter continually, is we’re giving the 5% of psychopaths a radically
1:42:47 disproportionate voice. And what they’re doing is there’s a bunch of them on the left, and they’re
1:42:51 all, we’re so compassionate. And there’s a bunch of them on the right. And at the moment, they’re
1:42:56 all, we’re so Christian and free speech oriented. It’s like, no, you’re not. You’re a narcissistic
1:43:03 psychopaths. And that’s your camouflage. And you hide behind your anonymity. And you use fractious
1:43:11 and divisive language to, to attract fools and to elevate your social status and your clout.
1:43:18 And, and not only that, to gain, what would you say, satisfaction for your sadistic impulses?
1:43:28 See, the problem is, it’s hard to tell who is the psychopath and who is a heterodox truth seeker.
1:43:34 Yeah. Well, if you were charitable about Tucker Carlson’s recent interview, you’d say that was
1:43:39 exactly the conundrum he faced. And it is hard. Like, I’ve thought about, for example, interviewing
1:43:46 Andrew Tate. And I thought, I don’t think so. And then I thought, why? I figured it’s not obvious
1:43:53 to me at all that he wouldn’t charm me. So I knew this guy, Robert Hare. Robert Hare was the
1:44:01 world’s foremost authority on psychopathy. He established the field of clinical analysis
1:44:06 of psychopathic behavior. And Hare was a pretty agreeable guy. So, you know, he would give people
1:44:10 the benefit of the doubt. And he interviewed hundreds of serious psychopaths, like imprisoned
1:44:17 violent offenders. And he told me in one of our conversations that every time he sat down with
1:44:23 violent offender psychopath, and he had a measure for psychopathy that was a clinical checklist,
1:44:30 so he could identify the psychopaths from just the, say, run-of-the-mill criminals. Every time
1:44:34 he sat down with them, they pulled the wool over his eyes. And it wasn’t an, he videotaped the
1:44:38 interviews. And it wasn’t until later when he was reviewing the videos that he could see what
1:44:46 they were doing. But in person, their tricks were more sophisticated than his detection ability.
1:44:50 Well, okay, this is fascinating because, again, you’re a great interviewer. I would love it if
1:44:58 you interviewed somebody like Putin. So this idea that you are a fool in the face of psychopathy
1:45:02 just doesn’t jive with me. I’m an agreeable guy. That’s the problem. I’ll give people the benefit
1:45:07 of the doubt. Right, right. But that’s good because the way you reveal psychopathy
1:45:15 is by being agreeable, not weak, but seeking with empathy to understand the other person.
1:45:22 And in the details, in the little nuanced ways that they struggle with questions,
1:45:29 the psychopathy is revealed. So from a, we’re kind of just to separate the two things. So one,
1:45:35 overrepresentation of psychopathy online with anonymity, that’s a serious fascinating problem.
1:45:42 But in the interview one-on-one, I don’t know if the job of a human being in conversation is to
1:45:48 not talk to psychopaths, but to talk, I mean, like, how would you interview Hitler?
1:45:52 Well, I’ve, you know, I’ve had very difficult clinical interviews with people
1:45:56 in my clinical practice. And so what do you, how do you approach that?
1:46:01 Well, I really probably approach that the way I approach most conversations. And it’s something
1:46:08 like, I’m going to assume that you’re playing a straight game, but I’m going to watch. And if you
1:46:14 throw in the odd crooked maneuvering, then I’ll note it. And after you do it three times, I’ll
1:46:20 think, okay, I see. I thought we were playing one game, but we’re actually playing another one.
1:46:26 And if I’m smart enough to pick that up, that usually works out quite successfully for me.
1:46:29 But I’m not always smart enough to pick that up.
1:46:33 But see, here’s the nice thing. There’s a one-on-one conversation that’s not recorded,
1:46:38 is different than one that’s listened by a lot of people, because I would venture to,
1:46:43 I trust the intelligence of the viewer and the listener to detect even better than you.
1:46:45 Yes. And I think that’s true, by the way.
1:46:47 To detect the psychopathy.
1:46:52 I’ve had the odd interview with people that I wasn’t happy with having organized,
1:47:00 because I felt that I had brought their ideas to a wider audience that might have been appropriate.
1:47:05 But my conclusion, and the conclusion of my producers and the people I talked to,
1:47:10 was that we could run the interview, the discussion, and let the audience sort it out.
1:47:15 And I would say they do. So I think as a general rule of thumb, that’s true.
1:47:19 And I also think that the long-form interviews are particularly good at that, because
1:47:27 it’s not that easy to maintain a manipulative stance, especially if you’re empty,
1:47:31 for like two and a half hours. So you get tired, you get irritable,
1:47:36 you show that you lose the track, you’re going to start leaking out your mistakes.
1:47:40 And that actually is the case for all the world leaders, I would say,
1:47:49 one hour is too short. Something happens at like two hour plus mark where you start to leak.
1:47:55 And I’m trusting the intelligence of the listener to sort of, to detect that.
1:47:58 Yeah. And it might be the intelligence of the distributed crowd.
1:48:02 And I mean, that is what I’ve seen with the YouTube interviews, is that it’s hard to fool
1:48:10 people as such over a protracted period of time. And I guess it’s partly because everybody
1:48:17 brings a slightly different set of falsehood detectors to the table. And if you aggregate
1:48:22 that, it’s pretty damn accurate. But of course, it’s complicated because
1:48:28 ideas of Nazi ideology spread in the 20s. There was a real battle between Marxism and
1:48:34 Nazism. Oh yeah. And I believe there are some attempts at censorship of Nazi ideology.
1:48:44 Censorship very often does the opposite. It gives the fringe ideologies power if they’re
1:48:51 being censored. Because that’s an indication that the man in power doesn’t want the truth
1:48:55 to be heard, this kind of idea. And that just puts fuel to the fire.
1:49:02 It also motivates the paranoid types because one of the reasons that paranoia spirals out
1:49:07 of control is because paranoid people almost inevitably end up being persecuted. Because
1:49:14 they’re so touchy and so suspicious that people start to walk on eggshells around them as if
1:49:18 there are things going on behind the scenes. And so then they get more distrustful and more
1:49:23 paranoid. And eventually they start misbehaving so badly that they are actually persecuted
1:49:29 often by legal authorities. And it’s down the rabbit hole they go. And so Musk is betting on
1:49:40 that to some degree. He believes that free expression on Twitter X will sort itself out and be of net
1:49:45 benefit. And I follow a lot of really bad accounts on X. Because I like to keep an eye on
1:49:51 the pathology of the left, let’s say, and the pathology of the right, thinking at least in my
1:49:56 clinical way that I’m watching the psychopaths dance around and try to do what their subversion.
1:50:00 And it’s an ugly place to inhabit, that’s for sure. But it’s also the case that
1:50:07 a very tiny minority of seriously bad actors can have a disproportionate influence. And
1:50:12 one of the things I’ve always hoped for for social media channels is that they separate
1:50:17 the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts. They should just be in different categories.
1:50:22 People who will say what they think and take the hits to their reputation,
1:50:27 anonymous types, if you want to see what the anonymous types say, you can see it. But don’t
1:50:32 be confusing them with actual people, because they’re not the same. We know that people are,
1:50:36 we know that people behave more badly when they’re anonymous. That’s a very well established
1:50:41 psychological finding. Well, and I think the danger to our culture is substantive. I think the
1:50:46 reason that everything, perhaps the reason that everything started to go sideways pretty seriously
1:50:52 around 2015 is because we invented these new modes of communication. We have no idea how to
1:50:59 police them. And so the psychopathic manipulators, they have free reign. About 30% of the internet
1:51:04 is pornography. A huge amount of internet traffic is outright criminal. And there’s a
1:51:09 penumbra around that that’s psychopathic narcissistic, trouble making trolls.
1:51:14 And that might constitute the bulk of the interactions online. And it’s partly because
1:51:18 people can’t be held responsible. So the free riders have free reign.
1:51:25 It’s a fascinating technical challenge of how to make our society resilient to the psychopaths
1:51:30 on the left and the right. It might be the fundamental problem of the age, given the
1:51:37 amplification of communication by our social networks. And so to generalize across psychopaths,
1:51:45 you could also think about bots, which behave similar to psychopaths in their certainty and
1:51:48 not caring. They’re maximizing some function. They’re not caring about anything else. Attention,
1:51:52 yeah. Yeah, yeah. Short-term attention, even worse. Yeah, because you might, you know,
1:51:58 that’s another problem. Like, if the algorithms are maximizing for the grip of short-term attention,
1:52:05 they’re acting like immature agents of attention, right? And so then imagine the worst case scenario
1:52:12 is negative emotion, garners more attention. And short-term gratification, garners more attention.
1:52:18 So then you’re maximizing for the grip of short-term attention by negative emotion. I mean,
1:52:24 that’s not going to be a principle if we were talking earlier about, you know, unsustainable,
1:52:32 unifying axioms. That’s definitely, that’s definitely one of them. Maximize for the
1:52:37 spread of negative attention, negative emotion that garners short-term attention. Jesus. Brutal.
1:52:46 I just, I tend to not think there’s that many psychopaths. So maybe to push back a little
1:52:53 bit, it feels like there’s a small number of psychopaths. Three to five percent is the estimate
1:52:57 worldwide. In terms of humans, sure. But in terms of the pattern of stuff we see online,
1:53:03 my hope is that a lot of people on the extreme left and extreme right, or just the trolls in general,
1:53:10 are just young people kind of going through the similar stuff that we’ve been talking about,
1:53:17 trying on the cynicism and the resentment. There is, there’s a drug aspect to it. There’s a pull
1:53:25 to that, to talk shit about somebody, to take somebody down. I mean, there is some pleasure in
1:53:31 that. There’s a dark pull towards that. And I think that’s the sadistic pull. And I think a lot
1:53:36 of people, I mean, you see, when you say sadistic, it makes it sound like some kind of, it’s a pathology.
1:53:41 It’s pleasure in the suffering of others. Right. But I just think that all of us have
1:53:46 the capacity for that. All humans have the capacity for that.
1:53:48 Some more than others, but everyone to some degree.
1:53:53 And when you’re young, you don’t understand the full implications of that on your own self.
1:53:59 So if you participate in taking other people down, that’s going to have a cost on your own
1:54:03 development as a human being. Like it’s going to take you towards the Dostoevsky’s notes from
1:54:08 underground, in the basement, cynical, all that kind of stuff, which is why a lot of young people
1:54:14 try it out. The reason is you get older and older, you realize that there’s a huge cost to that,
1:54:19 so you don’t do it. But there’s young people that, so like, I would like to sort of believe and hope
1:54:24 that a large number of people who are trolls are just trying out the derision. No doubt.
1:54:30 And then so they can be saved. They can be helped. They can be shown that there’s
1:54:36 more growth, there’s more flourishing to celebrating other people. And actually,
1:54:43 and criticizing ideas, but not in the way of derision, lol, but by formulating your own
1:54:49 self in the world, by formulating your ideas in a strong, powerful way, and also removing
1:54:54 the cloak of anonymity and just standing behind your ideas and carrying the responsibility of
1:54:59 those ideas. Yeah. I think all of that is right. I think the idea that that’s more likely to occur
1:55:04 among young people, that’s clear. People, as they mature, get more agreeable and conscientious.
1:55:08 So we actually know that what you said is true technically. It’s definitely the case that there
1:55:14 is an innate tilt towards pleasure in that sort of behavior, and it is associated to some degree
1:55:20 with dominance driving. And I do think it’s true, as you pointed out, that many of the people who
1:55:28 are toying with that pattern can be socialized out of it. In fact, maybe most people, even the
1:55:35 repeat criminal types, tend to desist in their late 20s. So imagine that, so 1% of the criminals
1:55:41 commit 65% of the crimes. So imagine that that 1% are the people that you’re really concerned with.
1:55:48 They often have stable patterns of offending that emerged in very, very young,
1:55:56 like even in infancy, and continued through adolescence and into adulthood. If you keep
1:56:02 them in prison until they’re in the middle of their late 20s, most of them stop. And that might be
1:56:11 the easiest way to understand that might just be delayed maturation. So are most people salvageable?
1:56:17 Yes, definitely. Is everyone salvageable? Well, at some point it becomes,
1:56:22 first of all, they have to want to be salvaged. That’s a problem. But then it also becomes something
1:56:30 like, well, how much resources are you going to devote to that? Like the farther down the
1:56:35 rabbit hole you’ve gone, the more energy it takes to haul you up. So there comes a point where
1:56:40 the probability that you’ll be able to get enough resources devoted to you to rescue you from the
1:56:46 pit of hell that you’ve dug is zero. And that’s a very sad thing. And it’s very hard to be around
1:56:52 someone who’s in that situation, very, very hard. And it seems that it’s more likely that the leaders
1:56:57 of movements are going to be psychopaths. And the followers of movements are going to be the
1:57:04 people that we’re mentioning that are kind of lost themselves to the ideology of the movement.
1:57:09 Well, we know that what you said is true, even historically, to a large degree, because
1:57:16 Germany was successfully denazified. And it’s not like everybody who participated in every
1:57:22 element of the Nazi movement was brought to justice, not in the least. The same thing happened in
1:57:32 Japan. So to some degree, the same thing happened in South Africa. And it’s the case, for example,
1:57:37 also in the stories that we were referring to earlier, the biblical stories, the patriarchs of
1:57:42 the Bible. Most of them are pretty bad people when they first start out. Like Jacob’s a really
1:57:48 good, because Jacob is the one who becomes Israel. He’s a major player in the biblical narrative.
1:57:56 And he’s a pretty bad actor when he first starts out. He’s a mama’s boy. He’s a liar. He steals
1:58:02 from his own brother. And in a major way, he deceives his father. He’s a coward. And yet he
1:58:11 turns his life around. So be careful, the leaders you idolize and worship. But then it’s not always
1:58:17 clear to know who is the good and who’s the evil. Yeah, that’s hard. You have been through some
1:58:22 dark places in your mind over your life. What have been some of your darker hours and how did
1:58:30 you find the light? Well, I would say I started contending with the problem of evil very young,
1:58:34 13 or 14. And that that’s been the main,
1:58:46 that was my main motivation of study for 30 years, I guess, something like that.
1:58:54 At the end of that 30 years, it became more and more, I became more and more interested in
1:58:58 fleshing out the alternative. Like once I became convinced that evil existed,
1:59:07 and that was very young. I always believed that if you could understand something well enough
1:59:15 that you could formulate a solution to it. But it turns out that seeing evil and understanding
1:59:24 that it exists is less complicated than a technical description of its opposite. Like what is good?
1:59:30 You can say, well, it’s not that, for sure. It’s not Auschwitz. How about we start there?
1:59:36 It’s as far from Auschwitz as you can get. It’s as far from enjoying being an Auschwitz
1:59:41 camp guard as you can get. Okay, well, where are you when you’re as far away from that as
1:59:46 you could possibly get? What does that mean? And it does have something to do with play,
1:59:54 as far as I’m concerned. Like I think the antithesis of tyranny is play. So that took me a long time
2:00:01 to figure out that specifically. And so that was very dark. I spent a lot of time studying
2:00:10 the worst behaviors that I could discover abstractly in books, but also in my clinical
2:00:18 practice and in my observations of people. And so that’s rough. More recently, I was very ill
2:00:25 and in a tremendous amount of pain that lasted pretty much without any break for three years.
2:00:33 And what was particularly useful to me then was the strength of my relationships,
2:00:40 my immediate relationships, my friendships. Also, the relationships that I had established
2:00:48 more broadly with people, because by the time I became ill, I was reasonably well known and
2:00:53 people were very supportive when I was having trouble. And that was very helpful. But
2:00:59 it’s certainly the case that it was the connections I had, particularly with my family,
2:01:04 but also with my friends that were the saving grace. And that’s something to know. I mean,
2:01:10 it’s necessary to bear the burdens of the world on your own shoulders. That’s for sure
2:01:15 the burdens of your own existence and whatever other responsibilities you can mount. But
2:01:22 that by no means means that you can or should do it alone. And so, you know, you might say, well,
2:01:31 welcoming the adversity of life as a redemptive challenge is a task that’s beyond the ability
2:01:37 of the typical person or even maybe of anyone. But then when you think, well, you’re not alone,
2:01:42 maybe you’re not alone socially, you’re not alone familial, maybe you’re not alone
2:01:47 metaphysically as well. You know, there’s an insistence. And I think it’s true. There’s an
2:01:53 insistence, for example, in the old and the New Testament alike, that the more darkness you’re
2:01:59 willing to voluntarily encounter, the more likely it is that the spirit of Abraham and the patriarchs
2:02:05 will walk with you. And I think that’s right. Like, I think it’s sort of technically true in that
2:02:11 the best parts of yourself make themselves manifest. If you want to think about it that way,
2:02:15 the best parts of yourself, whatever that means, make themselves manifest when you’re
2:02:20 contending actively and voluntarily with the most difficult challenges.
2:02:25 Why wouldn’t it be that way? And then you could think, well, that’s yourself. It’s like, well,
2:02:33 are the best unrevealed parts of you yourself? Well, no, they’re a kind of metaphysical reality.
2:02:39 They’re not yet manifest. They only exist in potential. They transcend anything you’re currently
2:02:45 capable of, but they have an existence. You could call that yourself, but like it was Jung’s
2:02:50 contention, for example, with regards to such terminology, that the reason we use the term
2:02:56 “self” instead of “God” is because when God was dispensed with, let’s say, by the processes Nietzsche
2:03:02 described, we just found the same thing deep within the instinctive realm, let’s say. We founded it
2:03:07 at the bottom of the things instead of at the top. It’s like, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter
2:03:15 fundamentally. What matters is whether or not that’s a reality. And I think it’s the fundamental
2:03:23 reality, because I do think that the deeper you delve into things, this is what happens to Moses
2:03:28 when he encounters the burning bush. So Moses is just going about his life. He’s a shepherd.
2:03:34 He’s an adult. He has wives. He has children. He has responsibilities. He’s left his home,
2:03:38 and he’s established himself. And so things are pretty good for Moses.
2:03:43 And then he’s out by Mount Horab in that story, but it’s the central mountain of the world. It’s
2:03:49 the same mountain as Sinai, which is the place where heaven and earth touch. And he sees something
2:03:55 that grabs his attention. Right? That’s the burning bush. And bush is a tree. That’s life. That’s the
2:04:01 tree of life. And the fact that it’s on fire is that’s life exaggerated, because everything that’s
2:04:07 alive is on fire. And so what calls to Moses is like the spirit of being itself, and it
2:04:13 attracts him off the beaten track. And he decides to go investigate. So Moses is everyone who goes
2:04:21 off the beaten track to investigate. And so as he investigates, he delves more and more deeply
2:04:28 until he starts to understand that he’s now walking on sacred ground. So he takes off his shoes,
2:04:33 and that’s a symbolic reference of identity transformation. He’s no longer walking the
2:04:39 same path. He no longer has the same identity. He’s in a state of flux. And that’s when
2:04:45 what happens is that he continues to interact with this calling. And Moses asks,
2:04:51 “What it is that’s being revealed?” And God says, “I’m the spirit of being itself.” That’s basically
2:04:57 the answer. “I am what I am.” It’s a more complex utterance than that. “I am what I will be.”
2:05:02 “I am what was becoming.” It’s all of that at the same time. It’s the spirit of being that’s
2:05:08 speaking to him, the spirit of being and becoming. And it tells Moses that he now, because he’s delved
2:05:13 so deeply into something so compelling, his identity has transformed and he’s become the
2:05:19 leader who can speak truth to power. And so he allies himself with his brother Aaron,
2:05:24 who’s the political arm and who can communicate. And he goes back to Egypt to confront the tyrant.
2:05:32 And that’s an indication of that idea that if you wrestle with life properly, that the spirit of
2:05:40 being and becoming walks with you. And it’s like, how can that not be true? Because the
2:05:48 contrary would be that there would be no growth in challenge. You have to be infinitely nihilistic
2:05:59 to believe that. It’s obvious, but it’s also just fascinating that hardship is the thing that ends
2:06:05 up being the catalyst for delving deeply. It’s hardship voluntarily undertaken. And it’s crucially
2:06:10 true. Look, if you bring someone into therapy, let’s say they’re afraid of elevators, and you
2:06:18 trick them into getting near an elevator, you’ll make them worse. But if you negotiate with them so
2:06:26 that they voluntarily move towards the elevator on their own recognizance, they’ll overcome their
2:06:31 fear and they become generally braver. But it has to be voluntary. See, I got to push back
2:06:37 and explore with you the question of voluntarily. Let’s look at Nietzsche. He suffered through
2:06:41 several health issues throughout his life. Migraines, eyesight issues, digestive problems,
2:06:49 depression with suicidal thoughts. And yet he is one of the greatest minds in the history of humanity.
2:06:57 So were these problems that he was suffering arguably involuntarily a feature or a bug?
2:07:02 That’s a good question. The same thing happens in the story of Job, because Job is a good man.
2:07:09 God himself admits it. And Satan comes along and says to God, I see you’re pretty proud of your
2:07:15 man there, Job. God says, yeah, he’s doing pretty well. And Satan says, I think it’s just because
2:07:19 things are easy for him. Let me have a crack at him and see what happens. And God says,
2:07:24 yeah, I think you’re wrong. Do your worst. Right. And that’s how people feel when those
2:07:30 slings and arrows come at them, let’s say like Nietzsche. Well, Job’s response to that. Now,
2:07:35 the story is set up so that what befalls Job is actually quite arbitrary, right? These catastrophes
2:07:41 that you’re describing. The volunteerism in Job is his refusal to despair even in the face of that
2:07:47 adversity. And that seems like something like an expression of voluntary free will. He refuses to
2:07:53 lose faith. And the way the story ends is that Job gets everything back and more. And, you know,
2:08:00 so that’s a dissent and assent story. And a cynic might say, well, the ends don’t justify the means.
2:08:04 And I would say fair enough, but that’s a pretty shallow interpretation of the story.
2:08:10 What it indicates instead is that if you’re fortunate, because let’s not forget that,
2:08:19 and you optimize your attitude even in the face of adversity, that there it’s not infrequently
2:08:23 the case that your fortunes will reverse. You know, when I found that in many situations,
2:08:37 the journalists whose goal was most malicious in relationship to me, who were most concerned with
2:08:44 improving their own, what would you say, fostering their own notoriety and gaining
2:08:51 social status at my expense, were the ones who did me the greatest favor. Those were the interviews
2:08:57 that went viral. And so that’s interesting, you know, because they were definitely the places
2:09:02 where the most disaster was at hand. And I felt that in the aftermath, every time that happened,
2:09:09 my whole family was destabilized for like two months because things, it wasn’t obvious at all
2:09:16 which way the dice were going to roll. But you leaned into that. So in a sense that there’s this
2:09:22 kind of transformation from the involuntary to the voluntary, basically saying bring it on,
2:09:28 that act of bring it on turns the hardship, involuntary hardship into voluntary hardship.
2:09:35 Well, not necessarily, let’s say, but you could say that’s your best bet. Well, you know,
2:09:43 I’m never going to say that you can transcend all catastrophe with the right attitude because
2:09:52 that’s just too much to say. But I could say that in a dire situation, there’s always an element
2:09:59 of choice. And if you make the right choices, you improve the degree, you improve your chances of
2:10:06 success to the maximal possible degree. It might be too much to say, but nevertheless,
2:10:14 this could be true. Victor Frankel, Marcus Aurelius. Well, that’s what the resurrection story
2:10:21 proclaims is that, you know, even under the darkest imaginable circumstances, the fundamental
2:10:29 finale is the victory of the good. And that seems to me to be true.
2:10:37 Do you ever regrets when you look back at your life in the full analysis of it?
2:10:44 Well, as I said, I was very ill for about three years, and it was seriously brutal. Like every,
2:10:50 this is no lie, every single minute of that three years was worse than any single time I’d ever
2:10:58 experienced in my entire life up to that. So that was rough. Was the roughest, the physical or the
2:11:08 psychological pain? Just little pain. Yep. Yeah, I was walking like 10 to 12 miles a day.
2:11:20 Rain or shine, winter, didn’t matter. Not good. And it was, it was worse than that because
2:11:32 as the day progressed, my pain levels would fall until by 10, 11 at night, when I was starting to
2:11:42 get tired, I was approaching, what would you say? I was approaching something like an ordinary bad day.
2:11:50 But as soon as I went to sleep, then the clock was reset and all the pain came back. And so
2:11:54 it wasn’t just that I was in pain, it was that sleep itself became an enemy.
2:12:01 And that’s really rough, man, because sleep is where you take refuge. You know, you’re worn out,
2:12:08 you’re tired, and you go to sleep and you wake up and it’s generally, it’s something approximating
2:12:14 a new day. This was like scissorfish on steroids. And that was, it was very difficult to maintain
2:12:18 hope in that because I would do what I could, like there were times when it took me like an hour
2:12:26 and a half in the morning to stand up. And so I do all that and more or less put myself back
2:12:30 into something remotely resembling human by the end of the day. And then I knew perfectly well,
2:12:35 exhausted if I fell asleep, that I was going to be right at the bottom of the bloody hill again.
2:12:43 And so after a couple of years of that, it was definitely the fact that I had a family that,
2:12:50 that carried me through that. What did you learn about yourself about yourself and about the human
2:12:56 mind from that, from all of those days? Well, I think I learned more gratitude
2:13:05 for the people I had around me. And I learned how fortunate I was to have that and how crucial
2:13:11 that was. My wife learned something similar. She, she was diagnosed with a form of cancer that,
2:13:18 as far as we know, killed every single person who ever had it except her. It’s quite rare. And
2:13:28 her experience was that what really gave her hope and played at least a role in saving her was
2:13:32 the realization of the depth of love that her son in particular had for her.
2:13:37 And that says nothing about her relationship with Michaela, with her daughter. It just so happened
2:13:46 that it was the revelation of that love that made Tammy understand the value of her life in a way
2:13:54 that she wouldn’t have realized of her own accord. We’re very, very, there’s no difference between
2:13:58 ourselves and the people that we love. And there might be no difference between ourselves and
2:14:04 everyone everywhere, but we can at least realize that to begin with in the form of the people that
2:14:09 we love. And I hope I’m better at that than I was. I think I’m better at it than I was.
2:14:17 I’m a lot more grateful for just ordinary, ordinariness than I was, because when I first
2:14:21 recovered, I remember I was standing, first started to recover. I was standing in this
2:14:27 pharmacy waiting for a prescription in a little town and they weren’t being particularly efficient
2:14:31 about it. And so I was in that standing in the aisle for like 20 minutes. And I thought,
2:14:39 I’m not on fire. I could just stand here for like the rest of my life, just not being in pain and
2:14:45 enjoying that. And you know, that would have been something that before that would have been,
2:14:49 you know, I would have been impatient and rare to go because I didn’t have 20 minutes to stand
2:14:54 in the middle of an aisle. And I thought, well, you know, if you’re just standing there and you’re
2:15:01 not on fire, things are a lot better than they might be. And I certainly, I know that. And I think
2:15:07 I remember it almost all the time. You gain a greater ability to appreciate the mundane moments
2:15:14 of life. Yeah, definitely. The miracle of the mundane. Yeah. I think Nietzsche had that
2:15:25 because he was very ill. And so I suspect he had it. You know, and he was regarded by the
2:15:29 inhabitants of the village that he lived in near the end of his life as something approximating a
2:15:35 saint. He apparently conducted himself very admirably, despite all his suffering.
2:15:40 You know, but that still, there’s this tension as there is in much of Nietzsche’s work
2:15:47 between the miracle of the mundane, appreciating the miracle of the mundane versus
2:15:54 fearing the tyranny of the mediocre. It’s more the mediocre and resentful.
2:16:00 Yes, but that’s you giving him a pass or seeing the good. Fair enough, you know.
2:16:06 There’s a kind of, I mean, the tyranny of the mediocre. I always hated this idea that some
2:16:11 people are better than others. And I understand it, but it’s a dangerous idea.
2:16:17 This is why I like the story of Cain and Abel, I would say, because Cain is mediocre,
2:16:24 but that’s because he refuses to do his best. It’s not something intrinsic to him. And I actually
2:16:28 think that’s the right formulation because, you know, I had people in my clinical practice who were,
2:16:37 they were lost in many dimensions from the perspective of comparison. One woman I remember
2:16:44 in particular who, man, she had a lot to contend with. She was not educated. She was not intelligent.
2:16:50 She had a brutal family, like terrible history of psychiatric hospitalization.
2:16:59 And when I met her at a hospital,
2:17:07 she was an outpatient from the psychiatric ward. And she had been in there with people
2:17:13 that she thought were worse off than her. And they were. And that was a long way down.
2:17:20 That was like Dante’s Inferno level down. It was a long term psychiatric inpatient ward.
2:17:27 Some of the people had been there for 30 years. It made one flu over the cuckoo’s nest look like a
2:17:34 romantic comedy. And she had come back to see if she could take some of those people for a walk
2:17:43 and was trying to find out how to get permission to do it. And so, you know, better than other people.
2:17:48 Some people are more intelligent. Some people are more beautiful. Some people are more athletic.
2:17:56 Maybe it’s possible for everyone at all levels of attainment to strive towards the good.
2:18:03 And maybe those talents that are given to people unfairly don’t privilege them in relationship
2:18:08 to their moral conduct. And I think that’s true. Like, there’s no evidence, for example,
2:18:11 that there’s any correlation whatsoever between intelligence and morality.
2:18:18 You’re not better because you’re smart. And what that also implies is if you’re smart,
2:18:23 you can be a lot better at being worse. I think for myself, I’m just afraid
2:18:32 of dismissing people because of my perception of them. Yeah, well, that’s why we have that
2:18:37 metaphysical presumption that everybody’s made in the image of God, right? Despite that immense
2:18:42 diversity of apparent ability. There’s that underlying metaphysical assumption that, yeah,
2:18:51 we all vary in our perceived and actual utility in relationship to any proximal goal. But
2:18:58 all of that’s independent of the question of axiomatic worth. And that preposterous is that
2:19:05 notion appears to be, it seems to me that societies that accept it as a fundamental axiomatic presumption
2:19:11 are always the societies that you’d want to live in if you had a choice. And that to me is an
2:19:17 existence proof for the utility of the presumption. And also, if you treat people like that in your
2:19:26 life, every encounter you have, you make the assumption that it’s an assumption of what would
2:19:31 you, it’s radical equality of worth, despite individual variance and ability, something
2:19:37 like that. Man, your interactions go way better. I mean, everyone wants to be treated that way.
2:19:46 Look, here’s the developmental sequence for you. Naive and trusting. Hurt and cynical. Okay, well,
2:19:53 is hurt and cynical better than naive and trusting? It’s like, yeah, probably. Is that where it ends?
2:20:01 How about cynical and trusting as step three? Right. And then the trust becomes courage. It’s
2:20:09 like, yeah, I’ll put my hand out for you. But it’s not because I’m a fool. And I think that’s
2:20:13 right, because that’s the reistantiation of that initial trust, right, that makes childhood
2:20:21 magical and paradisal. But it’s the admixture of that with wisdom. It’s like, yeah, you know,
2:20:29 we could walk together uphill. But that doesn’t mean, and I’ll presume that that’s your aim.
2:20:32 But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to watch.
2:20:41 What’s a better life, cynical and safe or hopeful and vulnerable to be hurt?
2:20:47 Oh, you can’t dispense with vulnerable to be hurt. That’s the other realization. It’s like,
2:20:51 you’re going to stake your life on something. You could stake your life on security, but it’s
2:20:56 not going to help. You don’t have that option. So what do you do when you’re betrayed,
2:21:04 ultimately by some people you come across? Grieve and look elsewhere.
2:21:11 Do what you can to forgive. And not least, so you lighten your own burden.
2:21:19 Maybe do what you can to help the person who betrayed you. And if that all proves impossible,
2:21:26 then wash your hands of it and move on to the next adventure. And do it again.
2:21:34 Yeah. Yeah. Boy, this life, something else. Say, we’ve been talking about some
2:21:39 heavy, difficult topics, and you’ve talked about truth in your Nietzsche lectures and elsewhere.
2:21:45 When you think, when you write, when you speak, how do you find what is true?
2:21:49 You know, Hemingway said, all you have to do is write one true sentence.
2:21:55 How do you do that? Well, I would say first that you practice that. It’s like,
2:22:01 it, that question is something, and Hemingway knew this at least to some degree, and he certainly
2:22:08 wrote about it, is that you have to orient your life upward as completely as you can. Because
2:22:13 otherwise you can’t distinguish between truth and falsehood. It has to be a practice. Now,
2:22:17 and for me, I started to become serious about that practice when I realized that
2:22:25 it was individual, it was the immorality of the individual, the resentful, craven, deceitful,
2:22:31 immorality of the individual that led to the terrible atrocities that humans
2:22:36 engage in that make us doubt even our own worth. I became completely convinced of that,
2:22:42 that the fundamental root cause of evil, let’s say, wasn’t economic or sociological,
2:22:50 that it was spiritual, just psychological, and that if that was the case, you had an existential
2:22:57 responsibility to aim upward and to tell the truth, and that everything depends on that. And
2:23:06 I became convinced of that. And so then, look, you set your path with your orientation. That’s
2:23:11 how your perceptions work. As soon as you have a goal, a pathway opens up to you and you can see it,
2:23:17 and the world divides itself into obstacles and things that move you forward. And so the pathway
2:23:23 that’s in front of you depends on your aim. The things you perceive are concretizations of your aim.
2:23:28 If your aim is untrue, then you won’t be able to tell the difference between truth and falsehood.
2:23:32 And you might say, well, how do you know your aim is true? It’s like, well,
2:23:37 you course correct continually, and you can aim towards the ultimate. Are you ever sure that
2:23:43 your aim is the right direction? You become increasingly accurate in your apprehension.
2:23:48 Is it like part of the process to cross the line to go outside the over-to-window,
2:23:53 to dip a toe outside the over-to-window for a bit? Of course. That’s what you do in part and play.
2:24:00 I was at the comedy mothership, and every single comedian was completely reprehensible.
2:24:06 All they were doing was saying things that you can’t say. Well, but it was in play. What I’m
2:24:11 trying to do in my lectures is I’m on the edge. I have a question I’m trying to address, and I’m
2:24:17 trying to figure it out. I don’t know where the conversation is going. Truly. It’s an exploration,
2:24:22 and I think the reason that the audiences respond is because they can feel that it’s a high wire
2:24:28 act, and I could fail. And my lectures have degrees of success. Sometimes I get real fortunate,
2:24:33 and there’s a perfect narrative arc. I have a question. I’m investigating it. It comes to a
2:24:37 punchline conclusion just at the right time, and it’s like the whole act is complete, and sometimes
2:24:43 it’s more fragmented. But I can tell when the audience is engaged because everyone’s silent,
2:24:48 except maybe when they’re laughing. There’s a kind of sense that you’re arguing with yourself
2:24:51 and you’re lecturing. It’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful and powerful to watch.
2:24:55 Like Nietzsche does the same. There’s contradictions in what you’re saying. There’s a struggle
2:24:59 that you’re saying. But I do think that when you’re doing the same on the internet, you get
2:25:04 punished for the deviations. You get punished for the exploration, especially when that explores
2:25:09 outside the overton window. Look, if you’re going to play hard in a conversation
2:25:16 to explore, you’re going to say things that are edgy, that are going to cause trouble,
2:25:20 and that might be wrong. And that’s another reason why free speech protection is so
2:25:25 important. You actually have to protect the right, let’s say in the optimal circumstance,
2:25:29 you have to protect the right of well-meaning people to be wrong. Now, you probably have to
2:25:33 go beyond that to truly protect it. You have to even protect the right of people who aren’t
2:25:39 meaning well to be wrong. And we also need that because we’re not always well-meaning.
2:25:46 But the alternative to that protection would be the insistence that people only say what was
2:25:53 100% right all the time. I’m also, I guess this is a call to our fellow humans not to reduce a
2:26:00 person through a particular statement, which is what the internet tends to want to do.
2:26:04 Especially if it’s the worst thing they ever said. Because God, well,
2:26:07 anyone judged by that standard is doomed unless they’re silent.
2:26:14 But it also just makes you not want to play. Not want to take sort of radical thought experiments
2:26:17 and carry out to a natural conclusion. Yeah, well, that’s kind of the definition of a totalitarian
2:26:23 state. No one’s playing in a totalitarian state ever. But in this case, it’s an emergent one
2:26:29 with psychopaths roaming the landscape, the barbarians. That might be the general pattern
2:26:35 of totalitarianism. Well, in totalitarianism, there’s usually one psychopath, not multiple.
2:26:38 Yeah, but everyone, well, everyone else is complicit, at least in their silence.
2:26:44 Yeah. Does the study of the pathology of psychopaths online, where on you?
2:26:48 Yes, definitely. Do you ever consider doing less of that?
2:26:54 Yes. Yes, definitely. But you know,
2:27:07 probably I experienced most of that on X. But that’s also where I found most of my guests.
2:27:12 That’s also where I get a sense of the zeitgeist, which is necessary, for example,
2:27:16 if you’re going to be a podcast host, it’s necessary for me to make my lectures on point
2:27:23 and up to date, to get a sampling of the current moment. You have to be of the moment in many
2:27:29 ways to function at a high level. There’s a price to be paid for that, because you’re
2:27:37 exposed to everything in a sense. And you can also oversample the darkness.
2:27:41 Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And it can make you more and more cynical.
2:27:45 Yeah. Well, it’s a danger, right? Yeah. Well, luckily for me, I have
2:27:49 many things that counterbalance that, the familial relationships we talked about,
2:27:55 the friendships, and then also all of the public things I do are positive. The lecture tours,
2:28:03 for example, which I’m on a lot, they’re basically 100% positive. So I’m very well
2:28:08 buttressed against that. That’s great to hear.
2:28:14 Darker element. As a fan in the arena watching the gladiators fight, your mind is too important
2:28:21 to be lost to the cynical, to the battles with the abyss.
2:28:26 Well, you have a moral obligation, too, to maintain a positive orientation.
2:28:34 It’s a moral obligation. The future is, of course, rife with contradictory possibilities. And I
2:28:40 suppose in some ways, the more rapid the rate of transformation, the more possibility for
2:28:46 good and for evil is making itself manifest at any moment. But it looks like the best way to
2:28:50 ensure that the future is everything we wish it would be is to
2:28:52 maintain faith that that is the direction that will prevail.
2:28:58 And I think that’s a form of moral commitment when it’s not just naive optimism.
2:29:06 Well, Jordan, thank you for being courageous and being the light amid the darkness for many,
2:29:09 many people. And thank you for once again talking today.
2:29:13 Thanks very much for the invitation and for the conversations. But it’s always a pleasure to see
2:29:21 you. And you’re doing a pretty decent job yourself about there illuminating dark corners and
2:29:27 bringing people upward. I mean, you’ve got a remarkable thing going with your podcast. And
2:29:29 you’re very good at it. Thank you, Jordan.
2:29:34 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Peterson. To support this podcast,
2:29:38 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you some words from
2:29:45 Friedrich Nietzsche. I would like to learn more and more to see as beautiful that which is necessary
2:29:52 in things. Then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Thank you for listening
2:30:08 and hope to see you next time.
2:30:11 (gentle music)