The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 219. Narrative, Story, and Writing pt. 1

Episode Date: January 22, 2022

As an alternative for those who would rather listen ad-free, sign up for a premium subscription to receive the following:• All JBP Podcast episodes are ad-free.• Monthly Ask Me Anything episodes (and the ability to ask questions).• Presale access to events.• Premium, detailed show notes for future episodes.Sign up here: https://jordanbpeterson.supercast.com/--We use stories to understand the world around us. It’s the reason that we appreciate a beautiful poem, why our breath is taken away during an epic movie, and get transported to another world while reading a great book. Any great piece of music is a story, with the lyrics used, but also even the instrumental arrangements. It’s hard to argue that any of the great orchestral pieces from Beethoven or Bach don’t tell a complex story, even when no words are used.Stories, and Narrative in general, allow us to play games for fun, construct cooperative relationships in business and in life, and help us successfully navigate the most difficult parts of our lives. From birth to death, every day of our lives is inundated by story. Part one of this compilation focuses on season 4 conversations between Jordan, Randall Wallace, Chloe Valdery (released soon) and Angus Fletcher. We hope you enjoy this narrative.--This episode was brought to you by Skillshare. Explore your creativity at Skillshare.com/Peterson and get a one-month free trial. That’s one month free... only at Skillshare.com/Peterson.This episode was sponsored by Audible. There's a 30-day trial for newcomers, Audible.com/Peterson or text "Peterson" to 500-500

Welcome to the JBP Podcast season 4 episode 76. We use stories to understand the world around us. And so the reason we appreciate a beautiful poem, or why our breath is taken away by a movie. Any great piece of music tells a story too, through the lyrics of course, but through the instrumental arrangement too. Personally, I've noticed that parts of life are arranged in stories too, overlapping narratives for different aspects of your are arranged in stories too. Overlapping narratives for different

aspects of your life, relationships, adventures, I find it particularly obvious during trying times. Those times feel like narratives. Part one of this compilation focuses on season four conversations between dad, Randall Wallace, Chloe Valdery, that episode's coming soon, and Angus Fletcher. I hope you enjoy this narrative. Also, if you want to stop hearing my voice reading ads throughout these episodes, check out JordanBPetersand.supercast.com. If you're listening on a podcast site like Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever else you're listening on, after sign up, it'll swap this free podcast

for the paid version, the premium version, and you access it the same way as you usually do. It's a very nice setup. $10 per month or $100 per year. That's JordanBee Peterson.supercast.com. It's also in the show notes. I hope you enjoy this episode. ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"]

["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"]

["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"] ["The Bible"]

["The Bible"] ["The Bible"]? ["The Bible"] ["The while we're certainly still unwrapping the Bible, we're still unwrapping Shakespeare, there's more depth there than we can understand explicitly. And so anything that uses character has that tremendous advantage. And then there's also this strange ability that some people have in spades to create fictional worlds

that are of unbelievable prof profundity and power. And I mean, the greatest example of that in the last 30 years, in terms of sheer imaginative powers, got to be JK rolling in the Harry Potter series, which, you know, gripped the imagination of the entire planet for a decade and produced untold wealth and spread literacy everywhere as well. She had an unremarkably creative imagination and something quite mysterious. And so you're fortunate enough to work at the marriage of ideas and drama. Yes, and you know it's really interesting when you've spoken about Dostoevsky and others in

some of your lectures. I'm fascinated by him and all the Russians. I studied Russian for four years in college and read some of these in the original. My Russian wasn't fluent enough for me to really, I mean, I had to grind through them, but Tolstoy, check off, check of who was a doctor, a medical doctor, as well as a writer, so that congruence of a commitment, not just in terms of literature, but that he used his profession as a doctor to also inform him as a writer. He famously said, medicine is my wife and literature is my mistress, and when I tire of one I spend time with the other. And Pushkin who would write stories that were full of thought, but the story itself was bigger than any thought he could put around it.

It was more resonant. It carried more. By the way, when I listened to your biblical series, it caused me to read through the whole Bible. And just start to finish. And I grew up Southern Baptist. So ever since I could read, I've read the Bible virtually every day of my life. But I'd never read the Bible start to finish. And there were some books that even when I was religion major at university,

I would get to some of the books and go, I can't stay awake for this book, I just got to move on. But when you really go through it, and you see the Old Testament as this incredible saga of the people trying to find the rules that kept them together as a people. And it felt, if you disobey these rules, then it's going to end badly for us all. And the greatest violation is to erect altars to other gods. That's for sure. That's for false idols, yeah. That's the worst one. And then along comes Jesus,

who is completely steep in all at all testament. I mean, he is profound in his knowledge of it. And he lives and does and says these things, but it's not like it's a philosophy, it's a narrative, a narrative which I've studied a great deal and I believe is largely historical, or I should say significantly historical. I believe these things did happen. And then you have St. Paul, And then you have St. Paul, who's trying to make sense of what happened. And it's mind-blowing to me. It's mind-blowing to read it as a whole and put it into perspective and having spent my life in this.

Well, what's mind-blowing about it in part? I mean, I try to speak of the Bible, not from the perspective of a committed believer. And I have my reasons for that. I guess it's partly because I want to concentrate on what everyone can come to see as true, I suppose. Perhaps that's it. But it is remarkable But it is remarkable that the Bible does, in fact, make a coherent narrative, because we don't understand that. It was written by a very diverse range of people over a span of time that we can perhaps not even imagine. It's very difficult to tell how old the oldest stories in Genesis particular are the story of the fall and of Adam and Eve

and Cain and Abel. They bear all the hallmarks of a previous oral tradition that would have existed in relatively unchanged form for tens of thousands of years and perhaps even longer than that. And so they're unbelievably ancient, and then parts of it obviously are newer, and the written parts are obviously newer than any tentative oral tradition. But you have a, you have the bare minimum, an unbelievably deep psychological document that weaves itself over centuries into a coherent story. And Northrop Fry, I would say, he's a Canadian literary critic, has did more for me than any other particular thinker to help me understand the nature of the narrative,

because Fry, and I suppose he did the same thing, or I'm doing the same thing that he did, because he preceded me also at the University of Toronto. He assessed the Bible as a work of literature, as a narrative. And that, to me, was never any denigration because narrative, a powerful narrative, and you talk about this when you talk about Braveheart, for example, because there isn't that much known about William Wallace historically, but you crafted a narrative that's, that was true enough, let's say, to be unbelievably attractive to people and to motivate them very deeply, because it's an affecting movie.

Well, and if it wasn't, it wouldn't have been so popular. And so there's a, there's a truth in narrative that I think is even deeper than historical truth. A truly profound narrative truth is like the average of a whole variety of historical truths. And so it's the essence of historical truth. So it's even more true than what we would consider, say, eyewitness history, because eyewitness history is just one battle, you know? And there's maybe an epic theme in that battle, but then imagine that you could look at a thousand battles and you could extract out from that what was canonical about heroic victory across

all one thousand battles. You see something like that happening in the Old Testament. And the narrative, the narrative thread is really quite deep. The societies emerge, formulate, fall off the path, worship false idols, collapse. And then the same thing happens again. And the collapse happens. And the collapse happens because people become too prideful, the kings in particular. They don't listen to the voice of conscience. They have a prophetic voice arises and says, you're wandering off the tried and true path and you're going to be punished terribly for that. And generally speaking, the kings ignore that and catastrophe breaks free. And you see, and in the Old Testament, in particular, there's the promise of

the ultimate state in some sense. There's utopian promises that run through it, the search for the promised land, and then so strangely, you see that transformed into something that's not really political in the New Testament. You see that the promised land becomes the nature of experience as a consequence of a particular form of moral being. And then perhaps that has political implications, because people who acted like that would produce a particular state, but it's no longer the dream of establishing the state that will solve all problems. It's psychologized and it's unbelievably profound.

And that's, I think, you can derive all of that from the biblical writings without even starting to move on to classically religious territory. That does beg the question, of course, is what does all that wisdom point to in the final analysis? And that's when the question start to become religious. Yes. And well, Jordan, that's the part to me that it takes it into a whole different realm, as you say. There's a quote from Mary Oliver that a friend shared with me recently. It's, uh, keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

And I find that in, in a great story, in any, or any great piece of art, uh, that surprised the central currency of its power. There's an element of, if you will, of revelation, if you will. And I think it was Paul Tillich, I'm not sure who said that religion is man's way to God, and there's always erroneous, but revelation is God's way to man, maybe it's called Bart. God's way to man, and there's always perfect. Well, there's a revelatory aspect to any great story. When you're telling someone a story and they didn't see coming, what just happened, that's what makes them awake. That's what stabs them brought awake. In Braveheart, so many people said to me, it was when the woman that William Wallace loves

when her throat is cut. That's when suddenly they knew they were not in a typical action movie. Even to the very end of Braveheart, there would have been many people in Hollywood and were who thought, well, that this movie needs to end with his friends swinging in on vines and saving him. We can't end an expensive historical epic movie with a guy beheaded and disemboweled. But that was where it had to end for me. But That was where it had to end for me, but how we get there and what it says Surprised me and surprised the audience too and in that I would think is how it becomes Resonant I was doing a

charity screening of Braveheart a few years ago for the first time in two decades to sit in a theater and actually see the movie screened, not on television, but projected in a theater and doing it for a charity in Austin, Texas. And at the end of the movie, I walked up onto the stage to do a Q&A. And the first person who stood up was a young woman in the front row, 19 years old. So she wasn't born when Braveheart had come out. And I was surprised that she stood up first. And she said, Mr. Wallace, I don't have a question.

I just want to tell you something. My fiance died six months ago. And before he died, he told me he wanted me to watch Braveheart, so I would understand the way he loved me. And I did. I had to stop. I couldn't go on for several minutes. It shocked me. It moved me. It surprised

me. You said that you write love stories and I guess you put your finger on that, eh? Yeah, profoundly. And the idea that men want to be courageous, they want to be willing to sacrifice themselves for what's worth sacrificing for, and women want a man like that. And they want to be participants in that story in that same journey for themselves. And to me, it's narrative can give you

that more than any abstract explanation of it. I mean, I don't mean to. There's a lot to unpack in that. I wanna go back to your discussion of surprise. I mean among people who assess information theory, there's a strong association between something that's informative and something that's surprising. If you can predict it technically speaking, it doesn't contain any information. And so information always comes in the form of surprise, technically speaking, and we are wired to attend to what's informative because that's what updates and teaches us.

And so then you said revelation comes in the form of surprise and I would say that's virtually the case by definition, isn't it? Because imagine that you're viewing a narrative through a particular lens. You're in a cognitive perceptual structure, a frame of reference, that you're using to track all the actions and to make sense of them and to make predictions. And if something unexpected happens, that means that you've just learned that that frame of reference is no longer applicable to the current circumstances.

So what that really does mean is that something transcendent, at least from the perspective of that current frame of reference, has in fact occurred. So that's a mini miracle in some sense, right? Because a miracle is something that doesn't obey the laws that you're currently following. That's one way of thinking about it. A surprising revelation is a mini miracle. And maybe it's because of that, it's reminiscent of the fact of the miraculous generally speaking. But I would also say the narrative does something else if it's profound, too. It doesn't just surprise you. It also it also

gives you a new frame of reference instantly within which that surprised now makes sense and if it doesn't then you're left unsatisfied by the movie you think on Could I've seen that often in particularly in movies? It doesn't seem to happen quite so much in novels where the that often, particularly in movies, it doesn't seem to happen quite so much in novels where the director and the writer will throw of whole variety of things up in the air. And you have, it's really compelling. And then about three quarters of the way through the movie, you think it'll be really something if all of that gets tied together.

And then it doesn't, right? It falls flat. It doesn't end in a manner that does justice to what's being set up. So, then that's a classic narrative structure, right? There's a stable state to begin with, and then something that disrupts it and throws everything into a state of chaos temporarily,

and then the establishment of a new state. And a good story definitely does that for us, and guides us through that, and shows us that we're the thing that does that as well. Well, like if you take an agatha Christie movie or story, there'll be all of these clues, and then her cure, parot, or we have a term in screenwriting we call it

Irving the explainer will show up at the end of the movie to explain everything and then it off it's the show at Holmes movies will often be that way too. To me they become much less fun then. The fun is when you don't yet know the answers, but once it's explained, it's no longer has any magic for me. An example would be when I was in college, and I was a singer, songwriter, and I worked with a friend who was a magician, and we would entertain at different gatherings and he was great

at slighted hand with cards. He could do a trick right in front of your face with cards and you'd be gobsmacked. And he would show me how he was doing it and all of a sudden I'd go, oh gee, that's just so simple and how could I miss that and then he would do the same trick to someone else and I would be watching the trick And I would think oh he blew it he he He slipped he showed them the they can see how it's done and They were gobsmacked. They didn't understand how it was done, so they were amazed. But that, to me, is a difference about a story, like you say, the Agatha's Christi,

or they throw up a whole bunch of parts and they never come together. For a great story, it's one that you're left. It's vibrating in you and you can't fully explain it. You just know what happened. I hate to keep referencing Braveheart, but I wanted to make a movie, and it was my first movie.

I wanted to make a movie that would have people walk out of the theaters, the way I walked out of theaters at different times in my life and would say, my life will never be the same after what I just experienced there. I mean, that's always been what I was looked for. And that happened with Braveheart. I had a huge tough Scott.

I mean, a burly brawling head-buddying Scott, come up to me after screaming a brave heart and look at me with tears in his eyes and say, I will never forget that, not ever. And I think of a story like, Tolstoy wrote a tale called The Woodfelling, or The Woodfelling Party. woodfelling are the woodfelling party. And it was about some Russian soldiers who were fighting, I believe they were fighting Afghan, or, you know, Muslim troops in Azerbaijan or in the mountains, but they've been in this cold forbidding place

for a long, long time, they've seen all sorts of death, and they've gone out to cut wood and load it far wouldn't load into a wagon, and a sniper hits one of them in the leg, and he's, or it hits them in the body, and he's bleeding to death. And he knows he's dying, and they load him on the wood wagon to carry him back while he's still alive, but he grabs the lieutenant by the collar and says, there are letters from my wife in my boot. Take them and send them back to my wife, so she'll have them.

And the officer says, yeah, yeah, I will. But the dying man knows he won't, because he's seen many men die and just pitched into shallow graves. And there's just so much death. So he says, no, take them while I'm still alive. And then I know you'll do it. So the officer gives the order and they strip off the man's boot

and cut through his pant and unwrap the wrappings around his leg that he's done to keep warm. And there are the letters, but what the officer sees for the first time in months and months, maybe years, is the bear flesh of a man's leg, this white, sunless flesh. And it's that that reminds him that this is a human being. And Tolstoy says he was struck with a terrible dread of the loss of life. And I thought, even when I remember, it was 18 when I read that, that this is what an artist

does. You hold up to us when we've become in your immune to the certain things like watching women. It's one time it's mini skirts, another time it's no bras, another time it's bare midrifts, another time it's no bras, another time it's bear midrifts, another time it's something else. But you get used to something so nothing, nothing it makes you notice. And the artist looks for, well, why can I do that? We'll make people notice to say, look here. See what you see what's there rather than what you remember. Yes. So there's that interplay with, okay, there's, there is your perception in what you're

looking at, what you expect like the magic trick. If you're expecting one thing and you don't see it or, or now you know the trick, so now you perceive, that's one part of it. The other part of it is, okay, now I have experienced, perceived something. How do I make sense of that? I mean, another thing that I've been doing is working on the story for the resurrection, which I've studied since, well, since I was in school.

The resurrection has fascinated me more than anything else. In part, because I think it's NT right, would say, if you don't think the resurrection is preposterous, you're missing the point. The whole point is that this is beyond anything you could imagine. You said in a few weeks ago, I was listening to your podcast, and I was, believe it was with that brilliant, I think it's Canadian who makes the icons. Jonathan Pazio.

Oh, and mind blowing. I, yeah. That was great. The conversation. Yes. And, and, and Jonathan said that, that there's this outside of what we can imagine that is going on. And you said, yes, you would have never,

you would never make this up. If you make up this Jesus story, I even believe it. Well, that's part of the problem with Marx's theory that religion is the opiate of the masses. It's like, okay, fair enough, I even believe it. Well, that's part of the problem with Marx's theory that religion is the opiate of the masses. It's like, okay, fair enough, I get it. And it's actually a reasonably intelligent critique. You could say, well, if you wanted to enslave people and oppress them, then you could invent a story

and you could use that as a manipulative technique. But then you'd, it seems to me that you'd want a story that was sort of maximally fantasy-like and attractive. And so then you're stuck with, well, why invent hell, for example? And then you can say, well, that's where you put your enemies, so that's kind of convenient, but if you take medieval experience seriously, it's quite obvious

There's a philosopher in in Canada Taylor who wrote a wrote about this in a book called sources of the self Medieval people took the idea of hell extremely seriously and tortured themselves with it believe that the fruits of immorality were infinitely terrible. And while that isn't something that you that you that you use as a childish defense against the world, in fact, fear of hell is actually more intense, I would say, in some sense, than fear of death. And I believe that I I think there are things that are, if the thing you're most afraid of is death, you haven't been very afraid because there are things

that are far more terrifying than death. And certainly, well, hell is among those. And I suppose that's the place that you're eternally tortured for, for your own immorality, maybe perhaps even defined by your own conscience. Anyways, you wouldn't invent that as something attractive to the masses. And there's much of religious thinking that's like that. It doesn't have the aspect of there's too much burden in it for it to be pure, escapist fantasy. And there's too much, and there's too much about it that's incomprehensible for it to be like,

what would a conspiratorial machination? No, it doesn't, it's not a hypothesis that fits the data well at all. Right. Well, it's a limit case also in some sense. Like you talked earlier about, you said something about sacrifice, you said something about sacrifice, you know, in that, well, people don't take the idea of sacrifice very seriously. I've looked

at the development of the idea of sacrifice in the Old Testament, and one of the things I've come to realize is that one of the great human discoveries was actually that of sacrifice because it was the discovery of the fact that you could modify the present so the future was different. So it signals the discovery of the future by humanity, the idea of sacrifice, because you become consciously aware, perhaps after acting it out for God only knows how long, that you can give up something that you're deeply committed to in the present, something of extreme value and obtain something of even more value in the future. And that's the discovery of an entire dimension, the temporal dimension.

It's a cataclysmic discovery. It's on the same order as the emergence of self-consciousness. And then mysteries emerge out of that. While some sacrifices work better than others. Well, why? Well, the reaction of being to sacrifice seems to be reflective of the nature of being. And that's definitely the case.

Some sacrifices work and some don't, just like some games are playable and some aren't. And so sacrifice has value. Well, then the question starts to become, well, what's the highest value that you should sacrifice for? And what is the ultimate sacrifice? Well, you can give up something that you own, you can give up something that you love, you can die for something, or you can sacrifice your entire life to it. And it seems to me that in some sense, the latter, the last of those is the ultimate sacrifice to give up your entire life for the sake of the highest ideal.

And that is the ideal of humanity. And then that is the ideal of humanity. And that is what everyone admires. And that's what we all look for in stories. That's what compels us. You said, well, it's the, it's the basis of romantic attraction. And I believe that to be the case, that associated with generosity, right,

to share the fruits of your sacrifice. And the question arises, well, what is the ultimate sacrifice and what would be the consequences of that? And that's obviously what's being investigated, let's say, in our religious thinking, in the New Testament, there's no doubt that that's what's being investigated, let's say, in our religious thinking, in the New Testament. There's no doubt that that's what's being investigated. Is there a cosmic significance to the idea of sacrifice?

And I agree with that completely. And I believe that that's what is at play when you're making the sacrifice, there's this other element of faith in it. The person making the sacrifice is instead of it just being a negotiation, central to the sacrifice, it seems to me, is a transforming commitment. The person is being transformed and what he is giving is transforming. It's like one of the most commonly quoted lines from Braveheart is every man dies, not every man really lives. And I didn't, by the way, it's that people of mine, the other, another line from Bavaria, besides just the scream of freedom that people do that comes

from the film, but they may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom. And that quote is on the wall of the United States Air Force Academy, but under it is the name William Wallace. So, though, William Wallace never said that. I keep wanting to write the English Department there and say, hey, listen, but the, but where that quote came from was me thinking, okay, is it ego? Is it pride? Is it stubbornness that keeps William Wallace in the dungeon refusing to, to submit to the king refusing to ask the king for mercy? And maybe by time in his life so he can survive a while longer. And the Queen, the future Queen, comes to him with that offer. And then she mercy, then everything that is me is dead already.

And she said, you'll die, it'll be awful. And I was thinking, well, what can he answer to that? And that was every man dies, not every man really lives. And it became that, and it, in thinking of, say, Jesus Edgar Gatha, that if you took a snapshot at Golgotha on the day Jesus was crucified and you said, who's the victor in this picture? You probably wouldn't be inclined to say the guy on the middle cross, but you might, if you stared at the picture long enough, you actually might

see it. Human beings may recognize that this one here in this way was doing something beyond all understanding. And to me, writing a story isn't just me going, what will surprise the audience? It's, I am being surprised by the story. It's coming through to me. The most notable part of that in Braveheart was, I reached the end of the story, and I can see this clearly now, although it was more than 25 years ago, the axe is falling

toward William Wallace's throat, and I wrote that on the page, and then I thought, well, we can't see the axe contact his throat and sever his head. What do we see now? And then I thought, well, what about to look at this from the point of view of him? When he knows he has fractions of a second to live, what would he look for? Where would he turn his eyes?

Would he look at the acts? What would he do? And he would know that his friends were there. So I wrote in the last instant of his life, William Wallace turns his eyes to his friends were there. So I wrote in the last instant of his life, William Wallace turns his eyes to his friends who were Stephen and Hamish. And I did not know Jordan until that instant. There between them was her, the wife he had lost. And I wept. And I had no sense that and I wept. And I had no sense that anybody else was going to relate to that story. I have a friend named Jack Bernstein, who is a comedy writer.

He wrote Ace Ventura, the original Ace Ventura. And Jack is different from me in almost every way if you put our traits on paper where this polar opposites. And he's the one I always take my first drafts to and say, I know this is a mess, but is there anything here? And he read Braveheart and we sat down to have breakfast and for him to give me his notes. And he said, this is the best thing of yours I've ever read. And I was completely blindsided. I had had no sense that anybody would like it, that particularly him, that had any value, but the story surprised me, and I think

therefore that revelatory quality was love. I think it happens in music. What makes music magical is not that it's what we, if it's just the same beat, the same anotony, the same chord changes we've heard, the same lyrics, we've heard, it doesn't open us up at all. But when it's just enough different that we notice the difference and are drawn into it. Now, if it's too different,

you know, when I was in school and took music classes and they were telling us about A-tonal this and that and abstracted it had no life, no heart at all. But when I listened to Beethoven, I can just feel the swelling of his heart and in here hundreds of years later. Yes, well, you hear something great and you follow it and then there's a move of genius and out of that greatness comes something that's even greater. And you're so, you're so satisfied by that because you can see what's greater, emerge from what's great, but you can also see that that's characteristic of humanity. You're participating in that.

Yes, emergence of what's better in this surprising manner. Yeah, one of your new rules is to take a room and make it beautiful. And I love that. I love that rule. I mean, that it seems so simple. But it, that is one of the richest ones for me. I had a favorite chapter of all the, of all of both books, I would say. I'm, I'm happiest with that one. Wow. I would say I'm happiest with that one. Wow.

This episode was sponsored by Audible. Fewer and fewer people are actually reading books. The easiest way to get momentum is to start listening while you're doing chores or working out or walking. You get the idea. Audible has all the entertainment you could wish for in a single app. There's something for everyone on there from best sellerssellers to memoirs to classics like my favorite, The Master

and Margarita. They even have dad narrating the Goulaq archipelago. What a time to be alive. Every month members get access to one out of thousands of audiobooks, plus full access to a selection of audible titles, just download and stream wherever, whenever. There's a 30-day trial for newcomers as well. If you enjoyed this podcast, it's hard to imagine you wouldn't enjoy listening to great books as well. Make a change in 2022, visit audible.com-peterson or text Peterson to 500-500. That's audible.com-peterson or text-peterson to 500-500. That's audible.com slash Peterson or text Peterson to 500-500. This episode is also brought to you by Skillshare. I really like Skillshare. Skillshare has thousands of classes for you creative and curious types.

They have a fascinating and seriously extensive catalog. You can learn about creative writing, film, fine art, business design, photography, freelancing, and more. The classes include video lessons, about 60 minutes each, and a class project that you really involved. Skillshare fits any schedule or skill level, you get unlimited access to thousands of classes

with a huge community of lifelong learners like you behind it. Skillshare is one of the best platforms I've seen that helped teach people new skills. Skillshare can make your 2022 a year of exciting learning and personal growth with classes like Productivity for creatives, build a system that brings out your best. That sounds pretty good to me. So try this special offer and explore your creativity at skillshare.com slash Peterson and get a one month free trial.

That's one month free only at skillshare.com slash Peterson. Why term at the theory of enchantment? You're careful with your words. You obviously thought about that for a long time. And yes, so. So yeah, I mean, this, it's interesting because I feel like the term enchantment came to me almost in passing. I was trying to figure out how to,

and we don't have to get into the details of this. I'm happy to get into it if you'd like, but I was trying to teach people or figure out a framework that could teach people how to love each other in the agopics sense of the word. And then I began to ask myself, what are people already in love with? And so I ventured into pop culture

because pop culture shows us what people are already in love with. And I started to study aspects of our popular culture, which included things like Disney films and Nike and Beyonce and all these brands that have quasi religious, actually not quasi, religious like devotion religious, actually not quasi, religious devotion from their fans. And I was just like, why? What is happening there? That's so interesting because it means that you, you, this is one of the problems I have with the rationalist atheists types,

like spager problems. Like, forget about the ontological claims of religion. I, that, that isn't the issue in sense, as far as I'm concerned. And this touches on your discussion of day cards. People obviously, obviously, have the capacity for religious experience. We have the capacity for awe. And you could say, well, awe isn't a religious experience. Well, that's a matter of definition. And we could play that game. But if the awe is deep enough, and it's a definitional issue, is, for all intents and purposes, deep awe is religious,

or we need another word that means the same as religious, if we're gonna talk about it. And you participate in that in dance and in music, and in these popular stories, which is why I've been so interested in taking a part Disney films, for example, and they're very expensive productions, they're very labor intensive, the people of genius work on them, they have huge cultural impact, and they're extraordinarily popular, it's like what's going on here, exactly, and so it's definitely worth an analysis, and I think your're wise to start with, well, what is it that people are

valuing? And why? It's an empirical observation in some sense. This is where they're deriving meaning and value. And the deep study of that is a religious study. And well, there's just no escaping that. So, okay. So you're looking at pop culture. I'm looking at pop culture. So I'm looking at pop culture and I'm studying Disney and Beyonce and Apple and Nike and all of these brands and I'm looking for a common theme to see if there's a common pattern across all of these and the common pattern I'm seeing is that all these brands are creating content where their audience sees themselves, they're imperfect selves, and their potential reflected in the content,

which is why they gravitate toward it. And so I'm seeing these Disney films that are motifs for the human condition where this imperfect flawed would be hero has to go through a series of ups and downs, and ups and downs, and ups and downs to discover their potential self, and emerge the hero.

I'm seeing almost every Nike ad being this narrative for this junior varsity athlete trying to become better and better at her craft, and then emerge in a spirit of excellence. I'm seeing Beyonce stay things like, herund the world, girls and women gravitating towards that because they see their potential reflected in those lyrics. And... It's a universal, it's a universal ideal that compels us to imitate,

and that's what attracts our attention, and that pattern to identify that pattern is to look for what is truly religious, because the pattern that underlies all of the pattern that underlies everything that compels us is the religious pattern. And it's the religious instinct that orient us towards that, and that is not a nonsological claim about the structure of reality. I'm not saying anything about God. This is a different kind of conversation. Now, that might point to God, and in some sense it most definitely does,

but that isn't the same as the discussion about whether God exists from a propositional perspective. Which would be the wrong question anyway, I would argue, but yeah, so I was seeing all of this emerge from the research that I was conducting and then at the time I also read a book called Enchantment, which was written by Guy Kawasaki, the former marketing director of Apple, and he defined Enchantment as a process by which you delight someone where a person starts to open up to life, to life.

It's enticement and enticement and invitation. An invitation and attraction, so to speak. He said that this can be present in a human being and a product and an idea. And he also said that Steve Jobs used this idea to design Apple products to sort of figure out the aesthetic of what Apple products should look like. And meanwhile, you know, the idea of Enchantment correlates very closely with Disney because Disney is that takes place in these enchanted forests and these magical kingdoms and there's this underlying concept of enchantments. And so I just decided that enchantment seemed like the proper word to define this,

or to describe this phenomenon, by which we start to open up to the complexity of ourselves and us to others, and which can give us a sense of a relational way of being as opposed to a consuming way of being. Eric from the philosopher wrote a number of essays on the difference between having and being and how he talked about how in the West in particular we have become caught up in this need to consume where we define our identity according to how much we possess, according to how much we have. As opposed to our capacity to become wise to be, right? Not to have to be to be wise to be mature. That should also be viewed with a tremendous

amount of sympathy because it wasn't that long ago when we were all like struggling to feed hand to mouth in the face of terrible privation and starvation. It's very well said. Yes, yes. So that's another place to have some sympathy for hyper-consuming human beings. It's like, oh, look, we have enough. Oh, well, that's never happened before ever. So now we don't really know what to do with this. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that, but that's very well said. And it's not like we don't need, you know, we have, we do have to have things, right, to survive. We have to have food and water and shelter. But we fallen into what John Verveki calls this modal confusion.

Where we said, I want to be mature. So I need to have as many cards as possible. Right, so we're confusing the having load with the being load. So enchantment, the objective of enchantment, of the theory of enchantment is to bring people back to this relational way of being. And to be in balance with the complexity of themselves,

which includes the having load, right? Which includes our shadows, which includes our aggression, which includes our angst and anxiety in our melancholy. It's not to the end of suppressing any of those sort of more negative, more darker emotions, but to be in balance with all of them, which is what Young said was the ultimate ideal or the ultimate objective of doing shadow work in the first place. The same thing is happening in literary studies now that happen in the Middle Ages. People read the same book, they come up with conflicting interpretations of them, those interpretations reflect their ideologies, and then they argue about them. And so we just have these sort of endless combustions that don't go anywhere,

just like the Protestants and the Catholics and the Nolages. And so what my work basically says is, what if we just back out of that and what if we just do the same thing that science has done? And we focus on the way that stories can empower us, the way the stories can improve our human performance. Because that's really why they were created by our ancestors.

Our ancestors came to be in a tragic world where they realized they're on a frailty and insufficiency. They said, how do I cope with this life? How do I find strength in the face of my own mortality? How do I lift myself up when I see so much frailty within myself? I see so much frailty in terms of my capacity for anger, for hate. And also my ability to be damaged,

my ability to suffer grief and trauma and loneliness. How do I lift myself up? What tool could help me do that? And so the beginning of that literature with early scriptures, there's a ton of technologies, as I talk about in my work, that we can actually trace their effects in the brain. And then going beyond that healing work

into actually making us into our better selves, empowering us with joy, with creativity, with resilience, with the power to lift up others. And perhaps most importantly, the power to grow, to not stay still, to take on damage and turn that damage around into a source of strength. And so what my work does is my work focuses on how literature does all those things, which all of us know intuitively, all of us have read a book at some time, have read a novel at some time, or watched a movie at some time, or read a poem at some time, and felt healed, or uplifted,

or strengthened. If you have a favorite musician, a favorite artist, a favorite rapper, you know, you will listen to their lyrics and feel the same thing. But the question has always been, how, how is it doing that? And so my work goes into that, but also more powerfully, my work breaks down the technology of literature. So you can identify the specific nuts and bolts, the specific blueprints that are having those specific effects.

And so that's the work that I do, the project narrative. So in Wonderworks, in this book, which I referred to earlier, you list out what you consider 25 inventions, and they basically constitute the chapter structure of the book. And so you examine the manner in which stories do such things as rally courage or stoke romance or help control anger or transcend hurt or excite curiosity. I'm not going to go through all of them, but to dispense with pessimism and banish despair and heal from grief and and heal from grief and decide more wisely. And so in some sense, it's a listing of existential concerns. And so you've broken down narrative in these 25 ways in this book

to discuss the major sources of existential concern that Plagueman kind and then have put forward the notion that we have stories that surround each of these fundamental concerns that help us understand, verbalize, communicate about, and maybe see a pathway through each of these, in the case of the terrible emotions, each of the terrible emotions, or to foster and develop the ones that are more positive. I mean that's exactly right and even more than that. So, I mean, part of what stories do is they give us a plot, a roadmap out of some of these negative emotions and a positive emotions.

But even more powerfully, they can actually shape our emotions once we understand how to use them. Certain stories can just build optimism or resilience or courage. So to take the first chapter of the book, which is about courage, Homer's Iliot, this extraordinary work. When you read the Iliot, it makes you feel braver, it makes you feel stronger, and it can do that even when it's not talking about courage, even when it has no message about courage, even when it's talking about, oh, how does it do that? Well, Homer, he probably didn't invent this technology, but we don't know who did it before him. So we give Homer credit. Homer realized that when he saw soldiers marching into war, they sang songs. And those songs made them feel brave. Why did those songs made them feel braver. Why did those songs make them feel braver? Well, those songs made them feel part of a larger voice. They felt they were bigger than themselves.

And on a deep psychological level, they could feel that strength because they knew that even if their individual body died, the voice would carry on. And that's a scientific power of song. We know that to be the case that when people sing together in choirs, they feel braver, they feel more courageous. And so what Homer did is he said, well, what if I could give you that power of singing without you actually singing? What if I could create a technology, a way of writing so that it tripped your brain into thinking

that you were singing as part of a choir? And that's of course what the Iliah does. It makes you believe that you are listening to the song of a god, sing goddess of the anger. That's how it begins. And it uses all these tricks and techniques which I go through in the book into making your brain believe

that you are singing as part of this larger course. And so when you simply read the book, it makes you feel braver. And that technology, that idea that you had there, that that group singing unites you with the central voice whose existence transcends death. I mean, there's a very deep religious like idea in there that's implicit, right, that there is a voice and there are words that unite and transcend and that supersede death. And so that's some, that's part of that heroic pattern. I suppose that that Homer is referring to that you can step into as, and what would you

say, an active agent in engaging in this literature, just like when you walk into a movie and you embody the heroes or the anti-heroes, sometimes that you see on the screen and experience the emotions that they experience for better or for worse, as I suppose as a form of practice. That's exactly right. And one of the things that is distinct about the Homeric Gods is they're large humans? Homeric gods, unlike sort of an extreme gnostic version of God as the via negative or something that is completely non-human and that we can't access, these Homeric gods are essentially heroes

in the sense of just being bigger versions of us. And so they're gripped with all the same problems that we have, all the same frailties that we have, jealousy, rage, insufficiency. And so when you join with them in this bigger voice, just as you would in a hero in a movie, you feel that you are becoming yourself only greater. You don't feel like you're losing yourself, but you're joining this bigger thing that is your stuff that makes you bigger, that makes more powerful. And that's where the spiritual experience comes from.

And absolutely, one of the basic primordial experiences of literature, which is so basic, I don't even include it as one of the technologies in the book. I just talk about it in the introduction, is spiritual experience. We can actually detect you having deactivation in your pridolobe, as you have it's known as a self-transcendent experience in which you feel the boundaries of yourself and the world dissolving between yourself and the world dissolving, and that's associated with increased life purpose, increased generosity and kindness, because you no longer have the same sense of ego, you feel connected to others, and that sense of spiritual, I mean the word literature and the word scripture are synonyms. They mean that which is red. And so if there's one

fundamental thing, more fundamental even than any of the technologies I talk about to get from literature, it simply is that sense of spiritual experience. And I do think that that is the the basic and most powerful experience that any of us can have in this world because it makes us not only stronger and more purposeful in ourselves, but kinder to others. And really that's ethics, to be stronger in yourself and kinder to others. Right, to be more effective and more useful socially broadly. So okay, I want to ask you a couple of things.

I've done a lot of thinking about narrative. When I read this book back in the 1980s, the Neurosycology of Anxiety by Jeffrey Gray, and that book had a tremendous impact in the field of psychology. It took about 20 years before people, I suppose, incorporated at least some of what Gray had proposed.

And he got a lot of his ideas, although I didn't know it at the time from Norbert Wynner or Weiner. I don't know how to say his name, it's brilliant. A cybernetician who worked on establishing what might be the basis of intelligent abstraction, and so that it could be mechanized. And so I read Gray at the same time and learned about his association with Winer and cybernetics and at the same time that I was reading a lot of analytical psychology, mostly by Jung and his students. And I started to understand that the basic cybernetic mechanisms that Gray was discussing as characteristic of cognitive processing seemed to me to be the same thing

as the fundamental elements of the story. So let me run this by you and you tell me what you think about this. Okay, we'll see how our thinking is meshing perhaps and differing. So I thought that there are basically two types of stories in a functional sense. There's a simple story, and there's a story about how stories transform. And the story itself is actually the frame of reference that we use to perceive the world and act within. So, I don't think we have a...

I don't think we think, and then we think in stories as a subset of thinking. I think that the story is the frame for our thought, and that frame is actually what produces our motivation and our emotions. And so, a lot of this is, again, influenced by this cybernetic work of it, that was developed by Grea, to his tremendous knowledge of animal behavior and cognition, because he was an absolute genius. I think he cited 2,000 papers in the neuropsychology of anxiety.

It took me like six months to read that book and understand it. He was really dense. So imagine that in the simple story, you mentioned literature as a story as a map. And I think that's the fundamental issue. So we're always somewhere, that's our starting point. And we're always moving somewhere else because we're active creatures. And so we have an image of the destination in mind.

And so we segregate up time and space into a functional unit that a that defines the geographical and temporal bounds of our current operations. And we specify a target. And even when when we're when our imagination is free floating, partly what we're doing is playing with different spatial temporal frames of reference. So we might be playing with 10 minutes, we might be playing with an hour, we might be playing with a day, we might be playing with two weeks, we can we can expand and contract that more or less at will. But so the map, the map covers a spatial temporal domain. the map covers a spatial temporal domain. Okay, and then the goal is specified,

and then we feel positive emotion when we see any indication from the environment, environmental feedback that our actions are moving us towards the goal. And we feel, and that's technically positive affect because it's associated with forward movement, left hemisphere activation, dopamine energetically mediated. So we can conceptualize the goal abstractly, interestingly enough, but we have to do that because we can play with these

spatial temporal frames of reference. And then we, if we see a pathway to the goal, a clear pathway that we can implement behaviorally, then that fills us with positive emotion. If we see obstacles in the way, then that induces negative emotion and stops us. And when we stop, we'll play around with the spatial temporal framing, making it smaller, maybe we have to deal with the next minute, or larger, trying to re-conceptualize the territory so that we can continue our movement forward. Okay, so that's that story number one, simple story. I was here, I went there, and here's how I got there. And you might want to listen to that because maybe you're there and you want to get to the goal and you need directions. Okay, the next story is different. It's the transformation of stories. And so it's the typical fall or paradise fall, paradise rekindled story. So you have a frame of reference.

So, you have a frame of reference, you're moving towards a goal, something that isn't modeled within that frame of reference occurs, it's like an alien invader in some sense. It doesn't make sense from within that current frame of reference. It blows the frame of reference into pieces. You enter a land of, in in some sense of narrative fragments. That's the underworld in mythology. You have to sort those narrative fragments up and rebuild them, remap the territory, and then you build another story. So that's a meta story. It's a story about how a story can decompose, collapse into catastrophe, and rekindle itself. And it seemed to me that there isn't anything more basic

to our abstract thinking than that sort of nesting inside of stories. First of all, I completely agree on the overall point. So, I mean, I actually have a book coming out next year on Columbia University Press. And the title is Story Thinking, because basically my belief is that human cognition is largely narrative. And that actually we process the world narratively

in this exact way. And this is actually what makes our brain function different from computers at AI. Whether or not computers and humans can do the same tasks, we do them differently. Computers think in these kinds of logical, correlational sequences and humans, to your point, think in plots and plans and narratives and goals.

And those plots and plans are then associated with emotions because the computer exists in the mathematical present tense, so it cannot have desire. There's nothing missing to a computer because it's always in the same place all the time. It's always the equal sign of the mathematical present tense, so it cannot have desire. There's nothing missing to a computer because it's always in the same place all the time. It's always the equal sign of the mathematical present tense. But we as the humans are able through plotting and planning to imagine a future that is distinct from the present, which creates desire or fear or hope around these other emotions. And so narrative and emotion just go together completely in human experience. And you know,

that's why emotions are both shaped through narrative, but narratives are also shaped through emotion. So, you know, the kind of simple thing is to say, well, you know, we can use narratives to influence people's emotions. I mean, this is the sort of thing that, you know, is it somewhat sometimes positive, but often a kind of cheap political trick. Right. You can kind to scare people or manipulate them into doing things and whatnot. But the real power here is to say, first of all, how can I shape my own emotions with narrative? What emotions?

In other words, I'm not trying to shape your emotions. I'm trying to shape my own emotions. So I'm trying to control my own anger or increase my own hope. How do I do that by retelling my own stories in my own head? And then the second factor of that is how can my emotions come into play and enable my narratives? How can I develop the emotional resilience

to be more likely to carry on my own story? How can I complete my story even though I have these obstacles in front of me? And to me, the function of literature, so literature is related to stories, but slightly different in the fact that literature is really the kind of experimental zone where you're pushing the envelope.

I mean, you know, literary writers are people who are somewhat dissatisfied to kind of, you know, talk, you know, to think about how you're talking about stories breaking. They're dissatisfied with the stories they have, you know, they're not working, you know, and they say, how can I take these stories and somehow make them new?

How can I innovate them? How can I go beyond the stories that I've inherited? You know, how can I push that envelope? And so, what I do in the book is say, you know, here's 25 examples of how stories were broken and then put back together again, and how this technology, just like, you know, any technology the humans have developed,

has been expanded and innovated over time to go beyond that simple, I just have to get to this goal story, which I agree with you, is that I mean, that's a fundamental story, beginning end, you know, the most basic unit, you know, beginning end, and I find myself in the middle. But, you know, the wonder of being on this earth is that there is this possible to tell our own story, and beyond that, to build stories that we can hand onto other people

to empower them to tell their own stories. And it all goes back to this sense of dynamism that you're talking about and also these emotions that you're talking about. And to unite us and to unite us in a collective story so that we can work cooperty together towards the same ends, so that we all come under the same banner in some sense. And that's that shared intentionality that's very specifically human.

You don't see that much manifest itself, much in other animals. Even the higher apes have a hard time with it compared to us. Absolutely, yes. And you know, what's really important about that is that it's ultimately voluntary. Because I mean, again, if we brainwash people that have the same story as us, you know, that's to me, a biological logo, it's not particularly effective and it's unethical. But if we find a story that's so compelling that when we share it with someone else that empowers them and they join in our story, we are most happy when we do not perceive ourselves as inheriting an archetypal story from somebody else.

If I were to say to you, you you, here's the archetypal story, you're going to end up back there. That would be disinteresting to us emotionally. We want to tell our own stories. We want to be particular in ourselves. I would also say that even though human psychology has remained relatively constant for at least 300,000 years and parts fit for over Millian, our world is changed and has changed.

There are real differences between the way the world works now, the kinds of actions of behaviors that are going to function now than there was even 500 years ago. There is this need for flexibility in narrative. Even as what you're talking about, I think Jordan is this fundamental spiritual component of narrative, for way in which narrative can connect us with the eternal a sense of things bigger than ourselves. And that transcendence, sense of purpose is what lifts us. But narrative also has this flexibility outside the spiritual in the material world to say,

okay, how do I navigate this challenge? I'm not going to navigate this challenge as Luke Skywalker or Christ, because Luke Skywalker and Christ didn't encounter it. Okay. I don't think it's, okay. I don't think it's abstracted outside of the spiritual. I think this relates to the issue of the relationship between the conscious propositions and the unconscious under structure. So I think that we think in stories, we frame the world in stories, we see in stories. And this is partly why, for example, our eyes are adapted with the whites of our eyes so that other people can see our eyes.

It's really important for us to see other people's eyes because we can see where they're pointing their eyes. And if we can see where they're pointing their eyes, we can see what they're interested in. We can see what they value and we can instantly infer their motivation. And that makes them predictable. And so, and it's so important that every all of our ancestors whose eyes weren't that visible,

either didn't mate or got killed. It's really important. Okay, so we had, now, the shared narrative, so imagine this is part, this perhaps relates to the particular, the absolute. As you specify the narrative for small scale actions, and those would be particularized, the connection with the absolute, the larger absolute in some sense falls away, but it's nested. So you could say, if you're an integrated person, it's nested. It's so like, right now you talking to, you're listening to me

and sometimes you're talking to me. Okay, so and the story there is what we want to have an engaging conversation and and why? Well, there's a bigger story outside of that because we want to further our knowledge about narrative and we want to share that with other people. And then there's a story outside of that, which is, well, why? Well, because we're both, we're both educators and public communicators. Well,, well, why? Well, because we're both educators and public communicators. Well, why bother with that? Well, because we think education, rationality, and narrative are important for the proper functioning

of human beings. Well, why is that relevant? Because we care about the emotional experience of people, and we want to further their growth, because we want things to be better, and what's outside of that? Well, the idea that, well, it's something like the idea that truthful and engaged exploration is a high value. And then outside of that, well, at some point you get to the ultimate abstraction, right, which is the ultimate good. And if you're an integrated person, the particular of your action is associated

with that broad scale abstraction, but you don't have to refer to it in the moment. And thank God for that.