The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 200. Exploring the Pareto Principle

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

In this episode, we investigate the principle set forth by Vilfredo Pareto (an Economist born in 1848) which specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. This principle serves as a general reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is not balanced. The Pareto Principle is also known as the Pareto Rule, the 80/20 Rule, or the Matthew Principle. Jordan often uses the principle to demonstrate the harsh reality that inequality is not a simple issue, and therefore has no simple answer.Sections:[1:20] - 2017 Maps of Meaning 01 (Context and Background)[10:45] - 2017 Personality 13 Existentialism via Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag[17:01] - Biblical Series VIII The Phenomenology of the Divine[21:34] - 12 Rules for Life Tour - Melbourne, Australia.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. We're moving to one interview per week, released on Mondays, and a compilation podcast surrounding interesting topics on Thursdays. In this episode, we investigate the principle set forth by Velfredo Perrito, an economist born in 1848, which specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. This principle serves as a general reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is not balanced. The Pareto principle is also known as the Pareto rule, the 80-20 rule, or the Matthew principle. That often uses the principle to demonstrate the harsh reality that inequality

is not a simple issue and therefore has no simple answer. The final section of the podcast is taken from Dad's 2019 lecture titled The Deeper the Abyss, The Brighter the Light. And it makes up a long section towards the end of the episode. Please note that even though it moves away from the direct discussion of the principle, the remaining section of the lecture is how we can move forward, now that we can see the Pareto principle at play. I hope you enjoy this episode. The system in Russia, the Soviet Union, which was a collection of states, an empire, and the system that Mao established in China and the Cold War and systems in Southeast Asia and in Africa.

We're all predicated on Marxist presuppositions, presuppositions that were utopian in nature, and that posited a utopian future where property was held in common, and everyone had enough, and everyone was called upon to do what they could, right, from each according to his ability to each according to his need, which is a lovely sentiment. And you can imagine how it would be attractive even intellectually, because, of course, other systems, all other systems produce vast disparities in income. It's like a natural law.

It's actually governed by, you can model it with a distribution called the Pareto distribution. And the Pareto distribution looks like this. It doesn't look like a normal distribution. A lot of you guys have been told about normal distributions and how many things follow on normal distribution, most things, but that's really a limited case. You can understand a pre-dodistribution if you

evolved plate monopoly, I presume. At the beginning, everyone has the same amount of money. We'll include property, the same amount of wealth. Then what happens is the game progresses and really as a function of chance. I mean, I know you have to use your head a little bit monopoly, but the basic rule is just buy everything you can get your hands on. And then trade meanly, something like that. So at the beginning, everybody has the same amount, and then as you begin to play, if you

had enough players, you would develop a normal distribution because some people would win relatively consistently, and some people would lose relatively consistently. And so the money starts to be distributed in a normal distribution. But the thing about money and the thing about lots of things is that zero is involved. And zero is a weird place. Because if you're playing a trading game and you hit zero, then you're done.

And it's very hard to recover from zero. And, you know, it's really hard to recover. You know when you're doomed in monopoly. You know, you can tell. You've got some resources, but there's going to be some crisis when you land on some hotel. And you're going to get wiped out. You know it. So, there's a point at which you're headed for zero,

even if you have something. You know, and you might be rescued by luck. But you know when you're doomed. So what happens is that as you continue to play monopoly, more and more people stack up is zero, and fewer and fewer people have more and more money. And when the game is over, everyone has nothing except one person, they have it all of it. Now, the funny thing about that is that, in some sense, that's how trading games work, you know.

You might wonder why there is inequality in a society. And it's easy to consider that it's because the society is corrupt and perhaps society is somewhat or horribly corrupt. That's the variation. There's no society that's without its criminal element and fixed element. Anyways, trading games tend to produce a pre-dodistribution

so that very many people have very little and a tiny minority have a tremendous amount. That's the 1% that you hear about, right? And the thing about that 1% is that that's happened in every society that's ever been studied. It doesn't really matter what the governmental system is. And it certainly happened under the Soviets. That's for sure.

And there was a lot of people who had enough zero, so they just died. So, you know, the utopian dream was completely unimplementable for a variety of very complex reasons. One is that it's very hard to fight against that distribution pattern when people are trading, because mere statistics will do that. And then there's other things that, and I should tell you as well, that the pre-dot distribution governs a lot of things.

So if you look at books, if I remember properly, last year there was something like a million English language books published. And I think 500 of them sold more than 100,000 copies, which is none, right? That's none. And of that 500 you can be sure that one of them was by Stephen King, and he took half the money because there's like five authors in the English language who are on every airport paperback stand occupying the top rung and that's massive real estate,

right, because it's replicated everywhere. And because they're so prominent and because there are known names when people are in a hurry and they just want something to read, they just grab that and then more money goes to those people. So success breeds success and failure breeds failure and it's not necessarily linear. That's a really difficult thing to deal with. And it's hard on societies because one of the things we do know is that, you know, as you stretch out the inequality, you make men, particularly, on the lower end of the distribution, more and more likely to be aggressive. It's sort of like, you imagine every man has a threshold for violence. And status is important to men, not that it's not important to women, but it's a different, it's a different

kind of status. It's status is important to men because it's one important to women, but it's a different kind of status. It's status is important to men because it's one of the things that makes them marketable as partners to women, so it actually turns out to be quite important to men, to men, to compete with one another for status, in a hierarchy position. In a really unequal society, if you're like a low-run guy, then, and you don't have any opportunity to rise, because the society isn't structured so that there's mobility, then the more aggressive guys tend to turn to criminality.

And, you know, and so you could say, there's a threshold for criminality, and the more inequality pressure you put on a particular area, the more inequality pressure you put on it, the more men slip past that threshold and into criminality. And, you know, there's been pretty good studies done of drug gang in Chicago. That was the best one. A sociologist actually went and hung out with a drug gang for he got into it. I guess the drug gang leader was, you know, I wouldn't say,

necessarily narcissistic, but that might be a reasonable way of thinking about it. And he was kind of happy with the idea of maybe being the subject of a book. And so this guy was able to associate with him, got to know them quite well. And then the housing project in which the gang was housed was slated for demolition and the gang broke up.

And he got the books, because they kept books. And what he found was the average street drug dealer. First of all, was employed in another job as well, and was making far less than minimum wage. Now, but the guys further up the chain, of course, followed the pre-dodestribution. And so there was a tiny minority of them who were raking in a tremendous amount of loot.

And the guys at the bottom were just waiting around for the possibility that they could rise up the hierarchy. And it's pretty violent game. So the chance is that someone's going to be taken out is pretty high. And then a little slot opens up for some opportunistic second raider, and perhaps he can move up the hierarchy. So the Pareto distribution governs all sorts of other things,

too. I mentioned it governs the popularity of books, the sales of books. But it also characterizes the distribution of everything that people produce. So if you think of creative production of any sort, artistic production, industrial production, it doesn't matter. Almost everything fails, and a few things succeed beyond anyone's wildest imagination. See, because the Western leftist intellectuals, all the right from 1919 forward, turned a blind eye to what was happening in the Soviet Union.

Now and then they were invited there, even people who were very well regarded in the West, were often invited, and who were sympathetic to regarded in the West were often invited, and who are sympathetic to the Soviet Union. We're often invited there for a visit, and the Soviets would do the same thing the North Koreans do now when they invite foreigners to visit, which is that they would set up fake places for them to visit, called Potemkin villages, where everyone was thriving and doing well. The Nazis did the same thing with the concentration camps to begin with, especially the ones they established for children. And then would invite dim-witted leftist Western intellectuals

to come to the Soviet Union and see the wonderful paradise that had been set up for everyone, which was a complete and utter facade and sham. And then they would go back to the West and report on how the utopia was progressing, precisely according to the Marxist doctrines. And we knew from the 1930s forward, because Malcolm Muggoridge did this to begin with, who investigated what was going on

in the Soviet Union, I think, for the Manchester Guardian. And he started reporting in the late 1910s, and then the early 1920s, if I remember correctly, it was approximately in that period, maybe a bit later. He recorded what was happening when the Soviets attempted to collectivize the peasant farmers. And so what they did was take all these people who were previously served, right, only a couple of decades previously, which was not much better than being a slave. You were basically property, and that was happening until about 1880 or thereabouts. The serfs who were emancipated, many of them

ended up holding their own land. So the land was distributed from the nobles to the peasantry. That was something that Tolstoy was, Leo Tolstoy was involved in. And by the time the Soviet revolution came around, which would be at the latter part of the 1910s, after the First World War, the peasant class had actually established farms, of course, varying productivity. Some of the peasant farmers were very, very good at being

farmers and produced a huge proportion of russians and the Ukraine's food. Because one of the things we'll talk about this later as the class progresses, one of the things that you'll find if you look at creative production in any domain. It doesn't matter. Artistic domain, food production, novels, written, novel sold, money generated, number of companies generated, number of goals scored in hockey, etc.

Any or number of paintings painted, number of compositions written, anything like that, where the fundamental underlying measure is human productivity. What you find is that a very tiny percentage of people produce almost all the output. It's called a Pareto distribution, P-A-R-E-T-O, and it was studied in detail in scientific productivity by someone named Dissola Price. It's a square root law, so here's the law, fundamentally. If you look at the number of people who are in a given domain,

who are producing in a given domain, the square root of the people produce half the product. So that means if you have 10 employees, three of them do half the work, but if you have 10,000 employees, a hundred of them do half the work. Right? It's a very, very vicious statistic. And you won't learn about that in psychology for reasons. I have no idea about because you

learn about the normal distribution and not the Pareto distribution, but Pareto distribution's govern, for example, the distribution of money, which is why 1% of the people in the general population have the overwhelming amount of money. And 1 1 1 1% of that one percent has almost all of that, right? So I think it's like the richest hundred people in the world have as much money as the bottom two and a half billion. And you think, well, that's a terrible thing, and perhaps it is,

but what you have to understand is that that law governs the distribution of creative production across all creative domains, right? It's something like a natural law, and we'll talk about that more, but imagine what happens when you play monopoly. You've all played monopoly. What happens when you play monopoly? One person ends up with all the money, all right? Then you play another game of monopoly. What happens?

One person ends up with all the money. It's actually the inevitable consequence of multiple trades that are conducted randomly. So if you take 1,000 people and you get them to play a trading game, each give them $100, say, or $10, and they have to trade with another person by flipping a coin. I win the coin to us, you give me a dollar, you win, I give you a dollar.

If we all play that long enough, one person will end up with all the money, and everyone else will end up with zero. So it's a deeply built feature of systems of creative production. And no one really knows what to do about it. Because of course, the danger is is that all the resources get funneled to a tiny minority of people at the top. And a huge section of the population stacks up at zero.

But to blame that on the oppressive nature of a given system is to radically underestimate the complexity of the problem. No one actually knows how to effectively shovel resources from the minority that controls almost everything to the majority that has almost nothing in any consistent way. Because as you shovel money down, it tends to move right back up. And it's a big problem. Anyways, the reason I'm telling you about that is because after the peasants were granted

their land and started to become farmers, a tiny minority of them became extremely successful. And those people produced almost all of the food for Russia and Ukraine. So what happened in the 1920s when bloody Lenin came along and collectivized the farms was that they defined the Kulaks, who were these tiny minority of successful farmers, who maybe had a brick house and were able to hire a couple of people and had some land and some livestock, and were very productive people. They defined them as socially unfriendly elements, and they sent groups of intellectuals out into the towns to collectivize the farms.

And so the idea was that while you would pull your land, and everyone would farm it collectively, and the land was taken away, of course, from the tiny minority of people who are actually productive and had actually managed to own much of the land. So you have to imagine how that would occur. You know what, back in 2008, when we had that economic collapse, the strange idea emerged politically, and that was the idea of too big to fail. And I thought about that idea for a long time, because I thought there's something deeply wrong with that, is one of the things that made Marx wrong was, Marx believed that capital would flow into

the hands of fewer and fewer people, and that the dissociation between the rich and the poor would become more extreme as capitalism developed. And like so many things that Marx said, it's kind of true. It's kind of true in that the distribution of wealth, in fact, the distribution of anything that's produced follows a Pareto pattern. And the Pareto pattern basically is that a small proportion of people end up with a bulk of the goods. And it isn't just money.

It's anything that people produce creatively ends up in that distribution. That's actually the economists call out the Matthew principle, and they take that from a statement in the New Testament, and the statement is, to those who have everything more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. And it's a map of the manner in which the world manifests itself, where human creative production is involved, and the map seems to indicate that as you start to produce and you're successful, the probability that you will continue to be successful or accelerate increases as you're

successful. And as you fail, the probability that you will fail starts to accelerate. So your progress through life looks like this or like this, something like that. And the reason that Marx was right was because he noted that as a feature of the capitalist system. The reason that he was wrong is that it's not a feature that's specific to a capitalist system. It's a feature that's general to all systems of creative production that are known.

And so it's like a natural law. And it's enough of a natural law, by the way, that the distribution of wealth can be modeled by physical models using the same equations that govern the distribution of gas molecules in a vacuum. So it's a really profound, it's a fundamentally profound observation about the way the world lays itself out. And it's problematic because if resources accrue

unfairly to a small minority of people, and there's a natural law-like element to that, that has to be dealt with from a social perspective, because if the inequality becomes too extreme, then the whole system will destabilize. And so you can have an intelligent discussion about how to mitigate the effects of the transfer of creative production into the hands of a small number of people. Now the other reason, however, having said that,

the other reason that Marx was wrong, there's a number of them. One is that even though creative products end up in the hands of a small number of people, it's not the same people consistently across time. It's the same proportion of people. And that's not the same thing. You know, like, imagine that there's water going down a drain, and you say, well, look at the spiral.

It's permanent. You think, well, the spiral's permanent, but the water molecules aren't. They're moving through it. And it's the same, in some sense, with the pre-dodistribution is that there's a 1% and there's always a 1%. But it's not the same people. And the stability of it differs from culture to culture,

but there's a lot of movement in the upper 1%, a tremendous amount of movement. And one of the reasons for that movement is that things get large and then they get too large and then they collapse. And so in 2008, when the politicians said too big to fail, they got something truly backwards as far as I can tell.

And that was a reverse, the statement was reversed. It should have been so big it had to fail. And that's what I think the story of the Tower of Babel is about. It's a warning against the expansion of the system until it encompasses everything. It's a warning against totalitarian presumptions. We figured out how to not have zero-sum games a very, very long time ago. And it turns out that if the game you're playing isn't zero sum, right?

Which means that there's only a finite number of resources and everybody has to fight to the death for them. And some are going to get the lion's share and others are going to starve. If you're not playing a zero sum game, then you can learn to cooperate and compete in an intelligent, civilized manner. And all of a sudden, there's more than enough for everyone. Now still some people are going to have more than others, you know, but there's nothing done. How are you going to stop that? And do you want to? Like do you want to only know what you want to only be allowed to know what everyone else knows? You don't get to know anything that no one than anyone else knows because it's got to be equal. You want everyone to be exactly the same amount of attractive, which in if you average detractiveness

overall and you only allow each person to be as attractive as the average person, there would be not much attractiveness left in the world. And it seems to me that that would be quite the loss. And strength, you're not allowed to have any additional strength, or ambition, or talent, or athletic ability. It's like, or artistic ability. I mean, aren't we kind of happy that there's massive inequality in the distribution of talent?

I know it's harsh and hard, but you can't expect everybody to have every talent that there is, and it would be a hell of a sacrifice if no one got to have any talent because it wouldn't be fair. And so I don't get the whole equality of outcome thing. It isn't going to work. There aren't that many geniuses, you know. We want to exploit the geniuses and get them to work for us. And if the price is, is that somebody has more than you do of something, well, suck it up for Christ's sake. Well Jesus, seriously man, it's like, look, how much more do you have that most people have?

You need to make $30,000 a year to be in the top 1% of the socioeconomic distribution worldwide. You know, you always hear about the 1% right, at the evil 1% and they churn by the way, because it's not the same people all the time. It's like all of you here are in the evil 1% and you think, well, that's not very fair because I was really only talking about within my country.

Well, that's convenient for you. It makes it really, really convenient argument for you. It's like, well, all those other people, those foreigners, they don't count if they're poor, who the hell cares. It's the Australians that matter. And so, no, that's a non-starter. And by historical standards, you're doing a hell of a lot better than the top 1%.

I can tell you that. I read a nice article by a coalition called Human Progress the other day. And they were comparing the typical middle class person who lives now with Rockefellers in the 1919s and say, well, would you rather be a middle class person now or Nelson Rockefeller in 1919? And the answer seemed pretty damn clear that, well, if you were Nelson Rockefeller, then you

would have been richer than anyone else. And there's something to be said for that status, right? Because people do like to have more than others. It's a it's a I don't know if it's a good thing or not But it is one of the things that we like and so you'd have that you'd be richer than everyone else but there'd be all sorts of things that you have that now that Nelson Rockefeller wouldn't have had a Hope of purchasing like the antibiotics that he would have needed to stop his son from dying, for example, just as a start. And so I think this complaint about inequality,

look, no one likes inequality exactly. You walk down the street. This is why I always get a kick out of people who protest. I'm against poverty. It's like, really? You're against poverty. And you think that's a unique enough attribute so that it was worth your time to make a sign that said that you were against poverty and show other people. It's like I've never met anyone that was for poverty. You know, you walk down the street with someone who's pretty well off. You know, and they've got 1920s spats on and the bowler and they're feeling pretty damn

rich and the stalkster's certificate sticking out of their back pocket. And you know, there's a homeless person there and they give them a good kick and they say, the more poverty, the better. It's like, no. You know, when people walk down the street and you see homeless people and they're often, homelessness is a complex problem. Like you think, well, homeless people are poor. It's like, yeah, yeah, man.

That's like one problem they have out of 50. And like I worked with poor people, in my clinical practice, and poor in multiple dimensions. And many of them, you gave them money, they were just done, especially if they were like alcoholics and cocaine addicts. As long as they were broke, they had some hope of living through the next month.

But as soon as their unemployment check showed up, man, they were faced down in the ditch three days later, right? Nothing but cocaine and alcohol with all their idiot friends for three days. And then they'd show up back in my practice saying, you know, God, I relapsed again. This is what happened. Well, my money came in. It's like, yeah, money's really going to do you a hell of a lot of good. It just kill you faster than poverty. Now not that there's anything good about poverty, but it's not like these are simple problems. You know, walk

down the street and you see someone who's been in alcoholic for 20 years and maybe they're addicted to methamphetamines as well or maybe there's schizophrenic. It's like, it isn't unequal distribution of monetary resources that are, is the primary cause for that problem, and it isn't going to be some sort of straightforward redistribution that's going to fix it because it's way more complicated than that. And so, and then the whole power thing, too. It's like, look, I get it. I get the left wing, I get the left wing issue, and I really do.

And I think I get it better than the damn left wingers get it. Because, you know, most of the radical types, they follow marks and they say, well, one of Marx's dictums was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people. And that's right, that's true. Wealth and capital, income for that matter, but not only that.

Whatever it is that you might like to have, accumulates in the hands of smaller and smaller numbers of people. It's a principle that was discovered by an economist named Pereto, Vilfredo Pereto, and he pointed out something that had been pointed out in the gospels by the way, thousands of years earlier, which was, to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away. The rule being, once you start to succeed at something, the probability that you will continue to succeed ever more rapidly

increases. So there's an exponential function with regards to success. But there's also an exponential function with regards to failure. So failure and success aren't like this. They're like this. Fail, fail, die. Seucceed, succeed, succeed ridiculously. Like it's this weird curve. And it's funny because it doesn't just characterize economics.

It's a really fun, it looks like a really fundamental economic law. It was actually quite shocked what I first learned about this, which was only about 15 years ago, because I thought most things were normally distributed. And it turns out that that's not true. What people produce creatively isn't normally distributed. A small proportion of people produce most of what's of value.

It doesn't matter what it is. And you know this, it's like, how many books does Stephen King sell? It's like half the books, right? And then there's the next guy after Stephen King, and no one even knows who he is. And he sells like one tenth as many books as Stephen King. And then there's author number 50,

and out of thousands and thousands of offers. And he's barely scraping by. And then there's the bottom 99.9%. And they can't make a living writing. And that's how it is. And it's the same with musicians. And it's the same with musicians. And it's the same with athletes. If you look at a number of goalscored, for example,

in hockey, I'm a Canadian, so I'll use that. There's a small percentage of absolutely phenomenal hockey players, even in something as amazing as the National Hockey League or any professional sports league. You have to be one hell of an athlete to make it in a professional sports league. And still, you get this tiny group of superstars who are way better at it than anyone else. And so there's this weird rule that as you get more, getting even more gets easier.

And who knows why it is exactly, partly its practice. And it characterizes all sorts of situations. Like, I characterizes the size of planets. A small number of planets have almost all the mass. It characterizes stars the same way. It characterizes biomass in the Amazon jungle. It characterizes city size. A small percentage of cities have almost all the people. It's like, what, what's that? Then you go back 10,000 years.

You look at a paleolithic gravesite. You see what people are buried with. There's one guy, there's two guys there. Is this covered with gold? Gravesite is insanely rich, and everyone else has like a bone, and it's theirs. And that's it, you know? And so you analyze paleolithic gravesites,

you see exactly the same pre-dodestribution. A small number of people are buried with all the wealth, and almost everyone else has none. And so it's this unbelievably deep proclivity of resources to distribute themselves unequally. And you know this, too, because you play games like monopoly. You've all played monopoly. What happens when you play monopoly?

You all start out equal, right? Exactly 100% equal. And you all have an equal chance of winning because it's basically a game of chance, not entirely because you can play stupidly, but you can only play so intelligently because you're at the mercy of the dice and what happens inevitably is that some evil capitalist ends up with all the money and all the hotels and all the houses and just like takes you out And yet you play and you don't think oh my god, you know There's something fundamentally unfair about that or maybe you play non-competitive monopoly where after every round

You redistribute the money so everyone So everyone. Right, so there's no fun in that. And so the problem with Karl Marx, as far as I'm concerned, is that he was nowhere pessimistic enough. It's like, no, you can't blame inequality on capitalism. In fact, capitalism is pretty good at ameliorating inequality. Like there's still plenty of inequality in capitalist societies make no mistake about that, and you can make some claim, although it's a tricky one, that some indices of inequality have increased over the last 20 years. It depends on how you measure it,

because it's complicated, because, you know, even poorer people now have access to, well, let's say iPhones, which have more computational power than the entire system that put the Apollo 11 on the moon, which is, you know, for $600, which isn't a bad bargain. So it's not that easy to do those economic calculations. But one of the things you can say about capitalism and about private property and about the idea that people have a right to what they earn and a right to what they own is that it's pretty damn good at generating wealth. And the wealth isn't equally distributed by any stretch of the imagination, but a fair bit of it goes to the bottom, and that's why we're seeing, well, a relative of a tremendous deprivation. And you might say, well, we want to squeeze out

that last bit of inequality, and it's like, well, maybe we do, and maybe we don't. It's not so obvious. First of all, because even if we did want to, we don't know how, and we certainly do know that if there are some ways that if we go about it, then things really go to hell in a hand basket really fast and everyone ends up equal because they're all starving and dead. You end

up in a situation like Venezuela not that they're all starving and dead but the average Venezuelan lost 17 pounds in the last year and that wasn't from voluntary diet right And that's a very rich country. And so we do know that there are ways of emeliorating inequality that just don't work. And so it's a dangerous thing to mess with because we don't understand it. Now, you know, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand it. And that also doesn't mean that the left doesn't have a point, you know, if your society becomes too unequal and too many people stack up at the bottom and they don't have an opportunity to move forward, that seems like it's bad for everyone. And so we could agree on that and we could try to set up our hierarchies so that they're not too brutal for the people who end up at the bottom, right? That would be nice if we could be sensible and figure out how to do that,

but I think we're not doing that bad a job of figuring out how to do it. We build infrastructure that everybody can use. We have the universal education systems and so on. And they're not perfect, but they're far from catastrophic. And they're a hell of a lot better than they were 100 years ago. So we are making some progress on that. I think the problem with the radical leftists is that they don't take the problem of inequality

seriously enough. They blame it on capitalism. It's like, sorry, that's wrong. It's a way deeper problem. It wasn't capitalism that produced inequality of gravesite wealth distribution in Paleolithic Europe 10,000 years ago. And it's not capitalism that makes some stars have all the mass, right?

It's a different order of problem. And so we have to be more sophisticated than economists were 150 years ago when we talk about inequality. And when we talk about hierarchy, we also have to be more sophisticated because we have to start to understand what it means for there to be a human hierarchy. And the basis upon which hierarchies actually establish themselves, if they're going to be playable, iterable, civilized, productive, sustainable, what, voluntary, that's an important

one. What are the characteristics of such things? And I think that if we use a little bit of sense, we can figure that out too. And I like to use the example of plumbers, because I actually happen to like plumbers, partly because I don't like it when my basement is full of sewage. And that's happened once or twice, and you call a plumber, and then that doesn't happen. And I'm pleased about that. Like I'm sure most of you are, you know, and plumbers have done an awful lot for the world. And there's a big difference between a good plumber

and a bad plumber. I've had two bad plumbers. And the first bad plumber was in Montreal, and my tap was leaking a little bit. And so he came into fix it, and I don't know what the hell he was doing, but he was using a torch, and he was burning something, maybe taking some solder off, some pipes underneath the sink,

but he lit the wall on fire, which wasn't helpful, because the wall wasn't on fire before he showed up. And so, and then, and then he forgot to shut the water off at the main pipe when he took the tap apart. And so then apart from the fact that my wall was charred,

my bathroom was completely covered with water. And then he sort of panicked and he put the thing back together, the tap back together with the washer, which was now extraordinarily damaged. And he shut it off and he had figured out to turn the water off at the main valve by then. And he turned it back on and he left. It was like, now the wall was on fire

and the floor was covered with water. And there was five times as much water running out of the tap. This was not an improvement. I joked with my wife that he was an anti-plumber. You know, like an anti-matter plumber. And if he ever met a real plumber on the road and shook his hand, they'd both disappear in a puff of light. So that was one plumber. And then another plumber, we were redoing our house in Toronto, and it was the day before the drywallers were supposed to come in.

And so we were working like mad, because drywallers, like, they're fun to watch, man. They zip in, they lift up their piece of drywall, they zip it up with their screws, and they're really fast at it. And it's quite a skilled operation, but they're really fast, and they don't muck about. And so you have to be ready for the drywallers. And so this guy had redone all our pipes, PVC pipe and you put this that together with a kind of solvent A so you just put solvent on one end of the pipe the male end and you put it into the female end with some solvent and they stick together and Hopefully it it seals and he said my joints leak, and so we tested them. We went up on this roof, three floors up, and filled the pipes up with water, and his

joints leaked. It's like 32 joints leaked. And four inches of water in the basement, and this was the day before the drywallers were supposed to show up. And then also, we found that he had put a lot of the pipes outside of the wall where the drywall was going to be, which actually also constitutes a mistake, right? Because I don't know about your house, but my house isn't a house where there's plumbing

sticking randomly out of the walls. So we had to spend the whole night redoing all the joints and cutting the pipes and putting the way they were supposed to. And so that's a bad plumber. And so we're gonna make the case that there are bad plumbers. And they don't know what they're doing. And so they don't have any skill, or maybe they're worse than not skilled.

They make things worse, because that's worse than just not skilled. And then you could say, well, maybe they lie to you when they deal with you and maybe they overcharge you and maybe they overcharge you and maybe they don't treat their employees very well. You know, and maybe they're not good to live with at home either who the hell knows, but they're not good plumbers.

And so we're gonna say that just in the plumbing domain, which is an important domain, skill matters, right? That seems reasonable. And then we might say the same thing about, well, what? Probably matters in law. Like, if you never need a lawyer, I would recommend that you get a good one. Because if you get a bad one, it's gonna cost you a lot more than if you get a good one. Like, like everything. And, you know, there are good teachers and not so good teachers. And they're a good massage therapist, and they're good nurses,

and they're a horrible nurses, and there are great surgeons and then there are surgeons that will definitely kill you. And you want to go to one that won't kill you. That's the, and you'd assume difference in skill. And whatever your occupation is, you know, bloody well. Maybe you're a shorter to cook at a diner, and like some shorter to cooks can whip up a pretty damn decent breakfast in three or four minutes

and you're pretty bloody happy to sit there and eat it. And other shorter-erder cooks can produce some god-awful mess of burnt eggs and wretched toast and rancid bacon and orange juice that's like had a crayon dipped in it for the color and with a really ordinary waitress and coffee that's been cooking since like 1953. And that's a big difference in short-order cooks. There's qualitative difference in skill. OK, and so one of the things we might point out is that part of the reason that we have hierarchies

in the West is because people actually differ in skill, not power, skill. Some people are better at whatever it is they're supposed to be doing than other people, and we think that what they're supposed to be doing is important so that it matters that they're better at it. And what are we going to do? We're going to deny that skill plays a role. All the evidence suggests that it does.

Like if you look at what predicts long-term success from a psychological perspective in a given occupation, conscientiousness is the best personality predictor. Conscientious people are dutiful and hardworking and they have integrity and they do what they say they're going to do. And so that's the best predictor, second best predictor, and the best predictor is intelligence. And so it looks like in a relatively complicated occupation, if you're going to be successful in a Western culture, the best predictors of your success is whether your intelligence, skilled and conscientious. And that's pretty good, like how else would you want it to be if you're going to set it up?

And it isn't power because agreeableness is another dimension, you can be disagreeable, men are more disagreeable than women, by the way. And if our society was fundamentally based on power, then the most disagreeable people would be the most successful. And they're not. They're the ones that are most likely to be in prison. So, so that evidence just doesn't support that. And then you know, the other thing is, you don't have, you imagine, well,

our society is fundamentally an oppressive patriarchy, and everything's based on power. It's like, okay, so you need a plumber, and so what you do is you go out in the street, or maybe you don't, maybe you'll power at home, and these like gangs of plumbers come to your house, and they're armed to the damn teeth with their pipes. And they say, look, I don't know whether you need some plumbing work done or not, but maybe we'll come in here and break a few things so that you do need it, but even if we're not going to do that, it's like, where are the plumbers that are going to take you out unless you call us? And so the next time the toilet overflows, man, here's the number and you better put it on your fridge, or there's going to be hell to pay, or the case of like gang-affiliated

massage therapist, exactly the same thing, tattooed to the hill, right, arm to the teeth, and roaming the streets, making bloody sure that if you have a stiff neck, that the most powerful massage therapist is the one that you're going to call first. It's complete bloody rubbish. It's absolutely not the case. Now, it is the case that even in a hierarchy that's functional, the thing can go sideways, and it does. You know, you get companies that get too big, they start to get corrupt.

People who play politics and who are going at manipulating start to rise up the hierarchy. The structure stops performing its function. It's useful function in the way that it should. It starts to degenerate. But generally then it dies. You know, like the typical Fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years. And the typical family fortune only three generations. It's not that easy to keep a functional enterprise going.

You have to be awake. And so, no, it's not an oppressive patriarchy, our culture. That's wrong. It's based on competence, fundamentally, imperfect as that is. It's not like we don't make hiring mistakes. It's not like there aren't people who are foolish and blind and hire and fire based on attributes

that have nothing to do with competence, but that's a sign of the deterioration of the system and the corruption of the system, and not an indication of its fundamental function. And it's also the case that, and this is partly what I tried to outline in rule one, which is pretty much the rule we're going to discuss today. Um, part of your goal, if you want to take your place in the hierarchy properly,

is to be a good person. And that was the argument I was trying to make in the chapter. Not that you're supposed to be like the most brutal crustacean on the block, you know? It's so foolish. It was Kathy Newman, I think, that asked me in the UK. So you're saying that human society should be organized along the lines of lobsters. It's like, look, lady, if you're gonna, if you're gonna insult someone, you might want to try accusing them of something, of believing something, that someone somewhere believed at least once in the entire history

of the human race. And not that, yes, absolutely. Lobsters for everyone, you know? That's how, what I was trying to make the case was that we have this very old system in our nervous systems, which is very old, which keeps track of where we are in hierarchies, and that regulates our emotions because of it, because it's really important to you and you and you and you. If you're not completely bloody psychopathic, that you have a place in a social hierarchy

and that you're admired and respected and valued by other people. And it's so important that the neurochemical system that keeps track of that regulates your other emotions. So that if you're low on the totem pole because, well, for whatever, the reason happens to be, sometimes you deserve it, sometimes it's accidental, sometimes you've been hurt, there's lots of ways that this can happen.

Your serotonin levels plummet like a defeated lobster, and then you feel way more negative emotion about everything, and way less positive emotion about everything. And that's absolutely dreadful. It's clinical depression and it's a terrible, terrible condition. And so it's absolutely crucial that you maintain a tenable position in a hierarchy. And not at one of power, but at one of competence. And at least even if you're not in a position that's tenable, you're moving upward towards one that's tenable, because that at least gives you hope. You know, because maybe you're young and useless and you don't know what the hell you're doing, you're young and useless and you don't know what the hell you're doing.

You're just getting started. And so you're a low man on the totem pole. But it's not like you're stuck there forever. You do some decent work. I had some kid tell me the other day. It was really nice. It was just last night. It was at a comedy show I went to here.

And a lot of the comedians knew us. A day of Rubin and I went in there. And so a lot of them knew us, which was quite interesting. One of them said, God, I was in a rough shape two years ago. I was just getting married. I just got married. I was nihilistic as hell and depressed and bitter and things weren't going well for me at all. I was unemployed and one of my friends got me a job.

He said, I'd really like to bloody job. I didn't want to have the job. I was kind of dragging my ass to the work and not doing it well. And I listened to one of your lectures and it said, look, if you haven't got anything going for you, but you have a job, don't quit your job. Whether you hate it or not, it's like, man,

that's what you're hanging on to the edge of the world with your fingertips, Don't let go. If you can find a better job, okay, fine. But you don't just quit, because then what, you're done. And he said, and another thing that I had mentioned was, why don't you just try to work as hard as you can at your damn job for like six weeks, right? All flat out.

You know, if you work 10% longer hours, you make 40% more money. That's something worth thinking about. You've got a job, if you work 10% longer hours, you make 40% more money. That's something worth thinking about. You've got a job, maybe you show up 15 minutes early and you leave 15 minutes late. You know, and you actually work and your boss notices because he would probably notice and then maybe someone's gonna get promoted

and maybe it'll be you because something's gonna tilt the scales and that little extra bit of work done without cynicism and resentment might be enough. Well, he said he started at 21 bucks an hour and in six weeks he was making $37 an hour and it's not a king's ransom, man, but it's a hell of a lot more than zero and it's quite a lot more than 21. He said his life had turned around substantially because he learned if he put some damn effort into it. And I'm not trying to be Joe optimist here. Like I know that people hit runs of bad luck and that things can take you out of life, right? Unfortunate illnesses and and and be trail and like there's no shortage of randomness and horror that can wipe you out even if you're doing your best, but you don't have a better bloody plan than to do your best, and it tends to

work a lot better than you think. And what's so interesting about the hierarchies that people set up is that that's how they're set up. They're not set up on power. They're set up on reciprocity and skill and trust. Not always. And if you're in a job where you work hard and you're a good guy and you're doing your best and your boss is a bloody tyrant and you never get a break, it's like, okay, fine. You're in a Foucault

world. Get the hell out of it. Get your resume set up, write your CV, fill in the educational gaps that you have, send out your 25 resumes a day and prepare to make a lateral move because you're in a bad place. But almost everywhere, and this certainly means the case, virtually everywhere I've worked, and I've had like 50 jobs. If you go above and beyond the call of duty and wake an intelligent way, interpersonally, socially, with regards to the diligence of your work, with regards to the truth of your attitude and your courage and all of that, that will work. And you know, if you try it for a year and it doesn't work, then go somewhere else because you can,

right? You're free. I mean, it's not easy. You can't just walk out the door and instantly find another job, but you're not enslaved. You could make a move. You could even decide that you're going to make a move and double your salary. You know, it's not a bad goal, and it's certainly a possibility. It's like, it isn't hierarchy. It's ethics that determines success in a functional society.

It's ethics that determines success, not power. The rest of it's a bloody lie, and that doesn't mean that all our systems are perfectly ethical. You know, you've got to be awake if you're in a system, there's going to be some corruption in it. Part of what you're supposed to do is keep your damn eyes open for the corruption, and your mouth speaking truth, so when the corruption starts to take root, you object to it so the whole damn system doesn't turn into a pathological power play. And that's part of your ethical responsibility as a conscious being, an ethical being, a

religious being for that matter, and a citizen, you know, and you're charged with that. That's why you vote. That's why you're the cornerstone of your state, man. You're the what would you call? You're the wellspring of the ethical actions that replenish the dying world. That's what you are. And if you act, that's really that's what you are. And if you act that out properly, then things work. And that's why that's always been described as ethical behavior. It's not because you're supposed to be good.

You know, and being good isn't that easy anyways. And it certainly doesn't mean being nice and harmless. It's not an easy thing to be good. You have to be tough as a damn boat to be good. Because you have to stand your ground when you need to stand your ground. And you have to be able to say no when it's time to say no. And you have to mean it. And so then you have to think and plan strategically so that when you're going to say no,

you can mean it and it will stick. You know, and that takes a certain amount of, that takes a certain amount of integrated malevolence, I would say. And once it's integrated, it's not malevolence, it's strength, it's strength of character, it's integrated it's not malevolence. It's strength. It's strength of character It's the ability to stand your ground and you have to cultivate that and you cultivate that at least in part by telling the truth And so you take your place in the world as a decent person and as a decent citizen and then and you play the high Oracle game properly and that is to stand up straight with your shoulders back

It's like the world's an onslaught. You've got the tyranny of culture to deal with. You've got the catastrophe of nature. You've got your own damn malevolence and ignorance, right? All coming at you, plus the incredible, complicated, indeterminate potential of the future. That's all coming at you, and it's all your responsibility, and you can cringe away from it and be afraid of it and be victimized by it and be bitter and cynical about it and and no wonder because it can be painful or you can turn around and you can say, man, bring it on

because there's more to me than there is to the catastrophe and this is what I discovered from looking at what I looked at I looked at the darkest things I could look at, really for 30 years. I was really a lot of fun to be around, I can tell you. I looked at the darkest things that I could think of, right? Not only what happened in Auschwitz and what happened in the Gulag, but personal issues. You know, it's like I wasn't so much interested in the totalitarians as a group. I was interested in the people who undertook the terrible acts that the totalitarian's required. You know, the people who I was just rereading ordinary men and it was a story about a police

battalion in Poland that trained ordinary policemen to take naked pregnant women out into the fields and shoot them in the back of the head. It takes a lot of training, by the way, before you can bring yourself to do that. And you aren't the same person by the end of it It's pretty goddamn horrific, you know, and I was trying to figure out what would it be like to be that person? Because we are that person and then what would it be like to not be that person, right? To refuse to do that to not participate in that. You know, and what I discovered by making that totalitarian proclivity personal was that there was more to us than there is to the horror.

These nature is bent on our destruction. Bad as culture is, tyrannical and bloody, back as far as you can look, as malevolent as you are in the darkest part of your heart. And that's plenty malevolent. The possibility that's within you that can well up the courage and the truth and the ability and the skill and the willingness to set things right if you are willing to set them right is more powerful than all of that. And so it's so interesting. It was it was proof for me of an old saying. I read from Carl And so it's so interesting. It was proof for me of an old saying, I read from Carl Jung, it's an alchemical motif in stir-quilinus inventor, which is what you most

want to be found, will be found where you least want to look essentially. And it's so interesting because it means that if you're willing to turn around and to stand up straight and face the darkness like fully what you discover at the darkest part is the brightest light and not something that's so much worth discovering because there's going to be terrible darkness in your life and it's going to make you cynical and bitter and it could easily be that you're just not looking out at enough because if you looked at it enough and you didn't shy away and you brought everything you had to bear on it, you'd find that there is more to you than there was to the horror. You know, I watched my father-in-law. I'll end with this. And you don't know it because you're not bringing your A-game to the table with all that cynicism,

bitterness, and resentment, and willful blindness, and avoidance. Maybe you're playing at 60%. It's not good enough because there's too much of what's bad for 60% to be good enough It's like you need 90% or 95% or 100% My when when when about 15 20 years ago my mother-in-law developed pre Frontal temporal dementia, which I wouldn't recommend You know, it's one of those degenerative neurological diseases like Alzheimer's, and those bloody things

are... Like they're in the top echelon of awful. You watch a person deteriorate before your eyes. It's a lengthy, lengthy death. And it was slow. And her husband, he lived in this little town that I grew up in, about 3,000 people. He was quite a character, man.

Everybody knew him. I bought him a foghorn, leghorn, t-shirt once, because that's kind of what he was like. He's loud and sort of bombastic, but he stood up straight, I can tell you. And he played the fool a little bit, mostly for the amusement of people, but he was no damn fool.

And I always admired him and liked him. And the feeling was mutual, thank God, since I married his daughter. And he drank a lot with his crazy friends up in Northern Alberta. And he wasn't at home a lot, because he was working a lot. And he was kind of a party animal about town, but a good businessman and a good man. And then his wife got sick, and they moved to another town.

And, you know, he took care of her for like 15 years. It was unbelievable as she deteriorated, you know, and she got more desperate to have him around. Her love for him never, never went away. Even as she lost herself almost completely, she would always light up when he came into the room. And he took care of her right till within weeks of her death. He had to finally put her in an old folks home

because he was no longer strong enough to lift her up from the chair. And we interacted with him a lot, because we were trying to help him figure out how to cope. And we had signs put up in the house electronic signs that would tell her when she when he was leaving so that she would know where he went. And we had recordings in the bathroom so that she knew what to do and she went into the bathroom. And we tried to do everything we could to not make this absolutely bloody, atrocious experience complete hell. And he participated the whole way. You know, and it was really something to see.

It was really, I left it with a tremendous sense of admiration for him, but not just for him, but for people who can do that. You know, and if there was a new decline, he took it on. And he didn't complain about it. And he tried to do what he could. And it was no picnic. Don't get me wrong. But it wasn't hell.

And then we were all gathered around the deathbed. Her mother's wife's mother's deathbed. And the family was there. They got along pretty well. You know, her sister's a palliative caraners and the other ones a pharmacist. None of them are particularly afraid of illness and death.

You know, they're a pretty tough group. And so, you know, they made sure their mother's lips were wet. Well, she was no longer eating or drinking and tried to make her comfortable and they're around the death bed and they were kind of getting along, you know. It wasn't family-fue that mother's death time and that was kind of nice and she died and that was

that and but it wasn't just that because the fact that the family had coped with it well and nobly and honorably I would say brought them together they were closer afterwards than they were before and they all had more respect for their father and in the old old getting from the old folks home he met another woman who had a husband there who had Alzheimer's and they got to know each respect for their father. And then in the old folks home, he met another woman who had a husband there who had Alzheimer's. And they got to know each other. And he died after a while.

And she died after a while. And then a few months later, they started going out. And then eventually, they had a relationship. And now they lived together. And so he gained something. It wasn't that he replaced what he lost. What I mean, because he still has pictures of his wife up in his house and she was the love of his life.

And that's not going away. But, you know, his family respected him more and everybody pulled together more. And it wasn't hell at the death that it was just tragedy. And the family pulled together more. And that was a good example of how you can extract at least a certain amount of light out of what's dark even at a personal level. And it's worth asking yourself, it's like

drop what you're doing that's foolish, that you know is foolish. And pick a name that's worthwhile, you know, to make things better for yourself, like you're worth taking care of, like you're worth something, and to surround yourself with people who believe the same and who are rejoicing in your accomplishments and unhappy when you fail. You're comparing yourself to your accomplishments of yesterday and not to someone else today so that you're not jealous and bitter, and you put your own house in order so that you're not cursing the world when some of its disarray might be your fault. And you're trying to pursue something meaningful and you're doing your best to tell the truth and all of that.

And then you see what happens? Who the hell are you? You know, you think you're a miracle of some bloody bizarre sort? We've been around for three and a half billion years. You know, every single one of your relatives propagated successfully. And here you are against all possible odds in this world of hell in some sense and bitterness and tyranny and malevolence. And yet God only knows what's inside you,

this capacity for consciousness, the capacity to confront potential and to turn it into something good. That's us, man. That's the Western story. That's the individual as the cornerstone of the state. That's our responsibility. And it really is who we are. And so we need to know that

and we need to remember it and we need to act it out. And then maybe we can see what we can do about it, you know, and see how good we could make things. And maybe that would be the purpose of your damn life, right? Not to be happy. It's like there's problems to be solved. Be happy after you solve the goddamn things, right? So I learned because I looked at dark things, that I learned that the light was more powerful than the darkness as far as that I was concerned and that people were capable, each of us, of remarkable things, and that we need to know that that's what we are. We're this consciousness that confronts potential with all its catastrophe.

That's what we are. That's what makes us in the image of God. That's what gives us our intrinsic value. And that idea that we have intrinsic value, that's the bedrock presupposition of our state. We're going to question that, or we're going to live it out, better to live it out, and find out who you are. Thank you. you