The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 240. Why Free Speech is the Antidote to Ignorance and Corruption | Cambridge University Speech

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

Recorded at Caius College on November 22, 2021.Dr. Peterson recently traveled to the UK for a series of lectures at the highly esteemed Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This was the first of said lectures.After some remarks on Cambridge’s beauty and rich history, Dr. Peterson examines the significance and history of clinical psychology. Drawing from the likes of Carl Rogers, Freud, Maslow, and Jung, this lecture investigates free speech, the value of structure, ways to approach mental illness, Jordan’s clinical experience, active listening, relationships, and the golden rule for conflict management.// SHOWNOTES //[0:00] Intro[1:30] Start of speech[3:10] Dr. Peterson reflects on the beauty and integrity of the University of Cambridge and the effort by Dr. Orr to make the talk about free speech possible[4:20] How studying clinicians Carl Jung, Carl Rogers, Maslow, and others helped Dr. Peterson both professionally and personally[6:20] Dr. Peterson stresses the importance of being an active speaker as well as an active listener, and explains how Freud “let people reveal themselves to themselves”[12:30] Dr. Peterson’s approach as a formally-trained cognitive-behavioral psychologist and conflict resolution advice for people who are in an intimate relationship[16:10] Dr. Peterson describes Carl Roger’s technique as it relates to conflict management[23:00] The importance of having an overarching structure that unites a family for peace and harmony within a household[26:00] Dr. Peterson explains why “free speech is not the freedom or right among many”

It's wonderful to be here. This is such a remarkable place for a Canadian in particular with our rather, what would you say, positive history. It's really something to come here and see a place that's so saturated with, I would say, beauty and integrity. I hope you know what you have and that you take careful care of it because it certainly deserves it. I'm going to speak tonight as a clinician I would say about free speech. Dr. Orr gave a bit of an account of the battle behind the scenes so to speak that took place so that I could come here and talk

and that's much appreciated. A lot of people put a lot on the line to make this possible. But I find the debate itself somewhat of a mystery. I can't really understand why it's raging, precisely the way it is raging. And I would say that specifically from a clinical perspective. I'm going to tell you a little bit about a clinician named Carl Rogers. And I learned something. I've studied the people I regard as the great clinicians in some detail and learned a lot

from all of them, regardless of their particular school of psychotherapeutic endeavor, let's say, or their historical background or their genre. I learned a lot from Freud in the psychoanalysis, from Carl Jung, from Rogers, who is a humanist, from Maslow, who was perhaps equally outstanding as a humanist psychologist, the existential psychologists, and the cognitive behavioral types who were much more cut and dried, let's say in their approach than, you know, the more mythologically oriented, narrative oriented psychoanalysts. They all had something to teach me, and I learned it with great, what would you say?

I was driven by a great need to learn what they had to say, and thank God for that, since they were clinicians, you'd hope that reading what they wrote would be helpful, and it certainly was helpful to me personally, practically in the conduct of my profession, but then also in my interpersonal relationships, unbelievably helpful. And I would say the most stellar piece of advice that I ever encountered that was actually both,

I would say, profound in some sense, but also immediately practical came from Karl Rogers. And Karl Rogers did an awful lot of clinical research into clinical efficacy, as well as being a rather admirable theorist. Now, his background is somewhat germane. He was really an evangelical Protestant. Up until the time he became a young man,

he was going to go to China as a missionary and stock because of his developing agnosticism. And then I would say atheism as a consequence of his inability to reconcile the distinction between science and religion. But his clinical thinking is saturated with Judeo-Christian suppositions. And foremost upon them, I would say,

would be something like respect for the word in capital as a capital, a capitalized phrase, respect for the divine word, let's say, but in a secularized phrase, respect for the divine word, let's say, but in a secularized fashion. But Roger was also extraordinarily careful, I would say, to elaborate beyond the word to the act of, the exchange of words, let's say, because for anyone to speak, in some sense, you need a listener.

And what that means is that if you're going to be a participant in a good conversation, or we might even say a therapeutic conversation, that not only do you have to be an active speaker, but you have to be to use a terribly cliché phrase, an active listener. And it stays a cliché unless you understand what it means, but if you understand what it means, then it can stop being a cliché. And I can tell you that if you take nothing else from this lecture, but you practice this, it will completely transform the way that you interact with people. And that's something that's worth noting too, that something like this can, in fact,

completely transform the way that you interact with people, and that it's actually something, in some sense, that's simple enough to learn in a very short period of time. So Roger said that he had noted in his interactions with people, and in the clinical domain that it was very difficult for people to listen and that most people had never really been listened to at all or that many had never been listened to at all, never really attended to properly, let's say, by their parents during their course of development, never had a mentor or a teacher

who really attended to them and listened. And Roger's also noted that you listening, maybe thinking that that's not true of you, let's say, as a person, you had people who guided you. Or as a listener, you're perfectly good at it. And he would say, no, probably not. And so he paused the little experiment that you could run. And I would highly recommend that you run this experiment

every time you talk to people for the rest of your life, because it really works. And it points to something deep that we'll go into after the description of the practicalities. So Rodgers said, there's an axiom of his theoretical stance, let's say, and derived it in no small part from the Freudian revelations. I mean Freud, basically what Freud did in his clinical practice was have people come into his office, his clinic lay down on a couch with him not visible and talk. And the instruction was, say anything that comes to mind, anything and everything that comes to mind.

So completely untrammelelled, revelatory thought. Now Freud's observation was that if you let people do that and maintained an active listening environment, even though you were hidden, he didn't want you to be dissuaded or persuaded in your utterances by any reflection of emotion on his face, that you would just have the opportunity to wander haphazardly through your field of thought. And what Freud came to realize was that the haphazard nature of that tended to transform rather quickly into something that was much more coherent and much less contaminated with excess emotion. And so that if you just let the revelatory process of free speech occur,

that that in itself was therapeutic. And that was a radical claim for its time. But in some sense, it's not that radical at all unless you think that speech is divorced entirely from thought, which it certainly is not, although thought cannot be reduced merely to speech because there are forms of thought that are majestic, let's say.

But certainly much of what goes on in the theaters of our imagination that constitutes thought is in the form of speech. You could say, well, we think with speech and thought is in many ways internalized speech. And so the notion that allowing yourself to notice what you actually think about things by talking about them might be good for you. If thought is in some important sense linked to, well, your bodily incarnation, let's say.

And if it's not, well, then what good is it? And so technically speaking, the part of the brain that produces semantic content, the prefrontal cortex, usually in the left, but it depends to some degree on lateralization and handedness. We don't have to get into that. The prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex in the course of evolutionary history. And so what happens in the theater of thought is that potential actions and perceptions are tried out for potential utility, so they're revealed in a sense, and then potentially criticized out of existence

before you implement them stupidly in behavior and die. And I believe it was Alfred North Whitehead said, the purpose of thought is to let our thoughts die instead of us, which is correct, right? It's correct biologically, it's correct technically, it's correct philosophically, and it's worth thinking about. So, well, Freud let people reveal themselves to themselves. Now, later investigations, particularly by James Panabaker, showed that the Freudian transformation

in so far as it did occur, say in relationship to trauma, was not a consequence of emotional catharsis, which was Freud's part of Freud's essential hypothesis, although he was more sophisticated than that, but actually a consequence of the cognitive reconstruction and reappraisal that occurred, attendant upon speech related, let's say, to trauma, to revelatory speech related to trauma.

Now, there are other ways of engaging in such things. There's the pure revelatory explication. And so one of the things you do do is a clinician, you try your best is so when someone would come and see me, well, first they were very tentative because who the hell wants to go see a clinical psychologist, right? You only do such a thing if you're driven to desperation

in some sense. You have to admit to yourself that you're no longer capable of dealing with your own affairs or that at least something could be improved, and you have to turn to a relative outsider. So it's not, it's a somewhat humiliating, initial endeavor. And I would say if you ever know anyone who needs to be convinced to see a psychologist because things have got out of hand, one way to smooth the way forward to that is just to tell them to try it once. Right?

Because then it's not a long-term command. And I would tell people when they walked in my office, you know, well, we'll see how this goes. And I know you're uncomfortable about being here and disoriented and all that. But let's try it out for one session. And if it works, then you could have another one. And then you could decide again then. So it's a gentle introduction.

And I would never assume to begin with that I knew what was wrong with them. I was never striving for a diagnosis and that was partly because I was trained formally trained as a cognitive behavioral psychologist, and cognitive behavioral psychologists are much more concerned with the particularities of perception and behavior than with such things as psychiatric diagnostic categories. So it was a very strategic approach, and one that was really based on a gentle and facilitating inquisition.

It's like, well, there must be something wrong in your life. I would presume because here you are, or you're trying to make something that isn't so good better, that's another possibility. I wouldn't presume to know what that is because what do I know about you, like nothing? And so a lot of the initial discussion was just, well, what's wrong?

As far as you can tell, how would you describe in his detail of fashion as possible? What's wrong? And then if things weren't wrong, what might they look like? And that's a great thing, by the way, if you're ever arguing with someone in an intimate relationship, right? Because there's some issue on the table, and one of the things you can ask them is, well, what are your conditions for satisfaction? Like, if this was resolved to your satisfaction, what is it that I would have to offer?

What is it that would have to change that I could actually practically implement right now? And one way of doing that, by the way, is sometimes the person wants you to say something, an apology, maybe, and you have to be, agree that perhaps you should utter an apology, but you can say to them, well, what words should I couch this apology and that would be sufficient as far as you're concerned? And they're going to say, well, you have to figure that out on your own, or if you loved me, you know,

and that's like, no, I'm stupid. And I don't know what would satisfy you, and I'm awkward at these sorts of things, and I could use a hand at practice, And so maybe if you just let me stumble through this apology in the manner that you see fit as a genuine actor, that maybe the next time I do it, I'd be a little better at it. But don't expect satiating perfection first utterance because you're not going to get it.

Because you're likely tangled up with someone who's no more sophisticated or intelligent than you are. So that's very helpful. So the clinical sessions were as free and exchange of information as I could manage. And one of the things I did notice consistently in my clinical practice was that if I really, really listened to the person, they were unbelievably interesting. And so I would say, this is rather corrosive bit of self-reflection, but if you're bored in a conversation, you're the boring person, right? Because you're not listening.

Because if you were listening, that person is a strange creature, man. And if they told you what you were, they're actually up to, first of all, it'd be a shock to them, that's for sure. But if they were telling you, you would not be bored. And so there's a high probability that you're sitting there thinking, what you already know about this person, what you're assuming, by the way they're dressed, or the way they comport themselves, or the class, or their social status, or their ethnicity,

or whatever the hell it is, stereotypes that you're using as a replacement for the genuine dialogue. And then you're also sitting there thinking about what you're going to say next when they're talking so that you can impress them and so on and so forth. And you're not doing the kind of listening that Rogers suggested at all because you're treating the other person as an end to a priori-defined instrumental means. And that's a big mistake. And so Rodgers thought you could check yourself,

and here's the experiment. And this works in a lovely manner, and actually Rodgers' work has been used in conflict management, sociology, and management at fairly high levels of governmental intervention, especially in times of war, because it actually does make peace. And so his rule was, well, first of all,

you're going to be afraid to listen, because if you listen to someone who disagrees with you, and you really listen, they're going to tell you things that will reveal your errors and make you change. And now, that might be a good thing if you know that you're so damn ignorant that little humilities in order and that the better you could be given rise to in place of the already totalitarian certainty that constitutes you at the moment. But still, it's especially if you're dealing with someone who truly is different than you. The probability

that they'll reveal things in honest dialogue that will shake you to the core is quite high. And that's very common experience in clinical practice. Well, partly why else would it possibly work if that wasn't the sort of thing that was happening? And so that was another barrier to listening is you don't want the person to reveal themselves in their complexity to some degree because they shake you to the depths of your core certainties. And that's actually a great thing unless you're already living in paradise, right? Because since you're not the probability that you're existing in error is fairly high

and some of those errors are probably pretty severe, but that doesn't mean it's a particularly pleasant experience to have them revealed or to stumble upon them. So Roger suggested this technique, which I said I would get to the technique. He said, the next time you find yourself embroiled in an argument with someone, that's contentious and uncomfortable, say, institute the following rule. You don't get to respond to the person's claims until they've exhausted that particular claim,

and this does presume to some degree that you're dealing with a good faith act, or even if they feel differently than you do. You don't get to respond until you have recapitulated their viewpoint and summarized it in a manner they find acceptable. That's so treacherously sneaky, that rule. Because what it means is you have to demonstrate that you attended to what they say closely enough and carefully enough to first of all act out validation of the idea that they have an opinion worth attending to. That's a big deal. People really like being paid attention to. There is nothing people

like more than that, unless they have something to hide. And even then, there's a part of them that would rather have that paid attention to than fail to pass, what would you say, to go unnoticed. Every cynic is entirely disappointed when his or her cynicism goes unchallenged, because there's a part of them, like a little unwarp part of their soul that's still alive thinking, oh my god, I hope someone calls me on all my foolishness and cynicism, because if they don't, that means that it's valid and generally applicable, and I'm in hell, and what good is that? And so, and I really mean that, I really mean that. And so, so you're called upon to, first of all,

summarize what they said, which is not an easy thing, right? Because it means you have to, and sometimes it's somewhat incoherent and emotional laid, and especially if it's in the course of an argument. So, you have to sort of strike right to the quick. It sounds to me like this is the point you were making, and then you lay out the point, and then you see they have to be happy with your summary. They have to be pleased with it, which means that you're doing exactly the opposite of straw manning the argument, quite the contrary, and you're doing them a favor in some sense

by reducing it to the gist, because that's actually an incredibly complex cognitive operation. I had one client who was extraordinarily seriously affected, and in the final analysis, I don't know if I was of any help to her because the pit of family pathology she was in Sconston was so deep that no matter how far we dug, there was already always a number, a new layer of lies underneath the lies we had already worked months to uncover. It was just awful, like homicidal level awful, literally terrible. But she told me, she went on a tangent

that lasted for four consecutive day clinical sessions, like they weren't the whole day, but they were 50 minutes on four consecutive days. I had no idea where she was going. She was wandering all over in this Freudian associational manner, and she came to the point at the end of it. It was unbelievable. She tied together this, she was very intelligent woman.

She tied together this tremendously long, incoherent ramble into a little bow, right, at the end, like the punchline of a remarkable joke. And so, and she had extracted, in some sense, the gist of what she was saying, as a consequence of the circumambulation, the wandering through all this territory. And when you listen to someone very, very carefully, and especially if they express themselves for a while, and you say to them, well, it

sounds to me like this is what you're saying. What you're doing is taking a tremendous amount of emotionally laden material, a lot of it unnecessary in the final analysis because of the ensuing synthesis and offering them a synthesis, which is a great thing to do, especially if they're happy to accept it, because that also means that you did listen to them, so you signify that they were worth attending to, and then you listened to them enough to actually understand what they were saying to try to understand it. And then you did understand it. And then they're way happier with you, even if you're arguing with them, because at least now they know they can rely on you to be a reliable listener, and that you're not trying to, you know how it is when you're arguing with someone, there's a party that really wants to win.

It's like, I'm right, you're stupid and wrong. And so the best way for me to demonstrate that is to warp and bend your argument and some make it trivial in some way. It isn't, especially if it's directed to some degree, like elucidating my character flaws and to minimize you in doing so. And if you do that, of course, well, that's not a great road to peace unless you're willing to bring a big club to the argument. And many people are, and instead of listening and trying to make peace and sort things out,

they'll use all sorts of subtle forms of suppression in their ensuing dialogue, just to keep everything under the rug or in the closet. I wouldn't recommend that as a medium to long-term strategy, especially if you're trying to bring peace to a household. You have to go through this horribly painful process of listening to the people around you, tell you what they think of their lives. If you do that, then maybe you can all come to a place that is characterized by something

approximating genuine peace. I would say that even psychophysiologically. I mean, when there's tension in a household in multiple, what would you say, systems of value operating simultaneously? There's a tremendous confusion about what should range supreme, right? And you think, well, nothing has to range supreme. We can all have our diverse opinions.

It's, no, you can't. Not if you're going to live together in harmony. There has to be some overarching structure that unites you. If there, I mean, what else is a family? If it's not an overarching structure that unites you. Now, within that, there can be tolerance and even appreciation for necessary individual differences. And obviously, there should be, but that doesn't mean

there's not a higher unity that the entire organization, let's say, is striving for in some manner. And not only striving for in some manner, and not only striving for, but piling for, or even dying for. And I don't use those words lightly. Like the absence of that incorporating higher structures is a felt sense of catastrophe on the part of the members of the family. They're always at each other's throats.

They're interfering with each other's goals. They can't listen. They're in a chronic state of hyperarousal because they don't know what to do ever. They're hopeless because no goals have been clearly defined. And we experience almost all our hope in relationship to define goals. So this isn't some, what would you say, humanity's myth or some reality that isn't as concrete as everything that you see before you. It's quite the contrary. And as far as Rogers was concerned, well, you had to let people talk to find out what

they thought, so they could find out what they thought, so they could move towards something, so they could move away from hell, because that's certainly what you see in clinical practice. I mean, people are suffering in ways you can hardly, well, you can probably imagine, because no doubt many of you have either been there or seen people who were there lived with them, you know, to move away from that is, that's more real than anything else. If pain is more real than anything else, what's even more real than pain is whatever we have to fight off the pain. And that's free speech. It's identical with freedom of thought. It's associated with this capacity and necessity to listen deeply. There are

flip sides of the same coin to use a terrible cliche and all the clinical data we have including the more stringently research-research oriented clinical inquiry indicates quite clearly that the exchange of information like that, the generation of semantic and emotional information in a state of relative freedom, the revelation of those thoughts, and then the discursive analysis of those thoughts, say, and then the implementation into action, and the testing of them, that is the pathway to health, insofar as that can be attained by, say, psychological or spiritual means. And so that's why free speech is not just another That's why free speech is not just another freedom or right among many. It's certainly not a few point diversity or anything like that. It's the mechanism by which we generate the conceptions that allow us to organize our

experience in the world. It's that mechanism. And more than that, it's the mechanism that allows us to reformulate and criticize those conceptions when they've become outdated and sterile to dissolve them into a chaos that we have to contend with while it's occurring, and then to re-animate them in a new form so that we can move into the future. And so if you're concerned with the oppressed, let's say, why in the world would you oppose free

speech? It's the only thing the oppressed have And if you don't understand that I would say well, that's even their in ignorance that's so deep that you should Remediate it as rapidly as possible or a malevolence that's so appalling that you should face it even though you'll face it at your peril And so you come to a university like this that's been a bastion of free speech in a country that's been a bastion of free speech in a light under the world in that regard for a thousand years and all do credit to all of you for that. It's like don't forget this. This is the fundamental thing. Say the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise to this date has been an attempt in some sense to elevate to the highest place the notion of the divine redemptive word.

And there's no truth that's deeper than that, and that's that. So thank you very much. Mae'r ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn dd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddodd yn ddod terms and we're talking a lot about Milton and Mill. But what you've done for us tonight is show us the existential power of being able to speak freely. That if we care about well-being, we care about psychological flourishing, and we care about what Aristotle called you, Dimonia, happiness, well-being, flourishing, then we should prize truth and the free pursuit of truth above all else. Now, the time has come for discussion, for Q&A. This is what we like to do here.

In fact, this is what it's all about. So if anyone would like to kick off, I'm Vincent here is going to traffic the microphone around. If I could just ask you to speak into the microphone just for recording purposes and for amplification purposes. Vincent, you can't miss him. He's in a... LAUGHTER

Mae'n gwybod yn y cymryd i'n gwybod y cymryd i'n gwybod. Mae'n gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn gwybod yn g and we'll have the mic. I'll let Dr. Peterson pick the questions as they are. As they are. Emily. Hello, Dr. Peterson. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. So I have a question sort of personal. So I've recently become convinced that I'm called to work either in politics or at least in the public intellectual space. And I want to do that because I really love my country and I want to try to help preserve

the values that have been at the foundation of our country. But I'm worried that I'm going to be seduced by the lust for power and I was wondering if you had any advice for how to fight the lust for power. Well, that's kind of a germane question altogether, isn't it? Because part of the cultural battle that we all find ourselves enveloped in is partially due to the claim that there's virtually nothing other than the lust for power. And, you know, I would say fair enough in some limited sense, which, and that's, that bears directly on your question, because you see that as a temptation that might be powerful enough to bend and distort you as you attempt to make your way through, let's say, the halls of power. Well, I heard recently from a reliable

source that Putin's conversion to orthodox Christianity might be genuine. And then you might think, well, if you're atheistic, well, that's not necessarily a good thing, or maybe you think it's a bad thing, or maybe you think it's an irrelevant issue, and you may also think it's a lie. But I would say that I would be more inclined to trust someone who thinks there's something higher than himself. And then you might say, well, what is it that's higher than ourselves? And that's worth thinking about. And we all need to think about this, regardless of the

particulars of our religious belief. And I would say, again, from a clinical perspective, service to others is really something. People who are depressed tend to use the pronouns, I and me, much more frequently than people who aren't depressed. And I'm not saying that people get depressed because they're selfish. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that one of the routes out of depression appears to be an increase in service to other people. And I think the reason for that is because we aren't power mad demons at the core, even though we may be tempted by such things,

and that we find the genuine meaning that offsets genuine suffering in the genuine service to others. And I think it's a big mistake to be cynical, especially prematurely, about such things as political activity, because they're necessary, despite, let's say, their adversarial and party-centered nature, partisan nature. You have to be clear about what you serve and why. And that has to be held higher always than mere victory, mere operationalized victory or instrumental victories. A very,

very difficult thing to negotiate, particularly because in the political realm, in some sense, you have to defeat your enemy, right? Because you have to win the election, and the other people have to lose. It's a binary choice. But so often I see in partisan discussion, the proclivity to assume that all the ill will and malevolence resides on the other side of the chamber.

And that's a big mistake. And you can think about that more deeply too, is that we all need a place to place the existence of malevolence, right? Because malevolence clearly exists. And we're all suffer from the weight of malevolent history, right? Because even the grounds we walk on here,

which this is a remarkable and wonderful place, I mean, English soil is soaked with blood, just like the soil of every place in the world. That's part of the human heritage. And all of us bear the marks of that conflict, in some sense, in our souls, partly because of the possibility for us to engage in that. But also partly because part of the reason we're here

and all this privilege is because of all that catastrophe. Well, the best way to localize that malevolence is inside you, right? And to remember that the enemy that you're fighting with, the greatest enemy that you ever fight with is in your own heart. And that'll also stop you from confusing that true source of malevolence,

let's say with your mere political enemies. And that isn't to say that you won't encounter malevolent behavior, although most of it in the political sphere, as it is everywhere, most of it is more ignorance than malevolence, although willful blindness certainly plays a large role. And so you need to know what it is that you're serving. And I would say one of the ways to do that practically, or a couple of ways to do that practically, is you need a good team around you, the people you really trust, and who can watch you, and who do it with a certain degree of impartiality, and who are disagreeable enough to talk to you when you do something wrong.

So you need trusted advisors. And then the other thing I would say is you really need to listen to your constituents, because they will tell you what the problems are if you listen to them. And if you really listen to them, well, then you'll have your feet on the ground, which is where they should be, and you'll know what the problems are, and you will win elections. Because what people really want from their leaders is to be listened to, and then for those leaders to articulate what they've heard in the halls of, let's say, influence and power. And so if you know those things, if you know you need to listen,

you need to get in touch with the people you're representing, as regularly as you possibly can, and mostly to listen. I knew a man in Canada who started a political party, which is a very difficult thing to do, and not only did he start it, but he wrote it to sufficient success, though that he became the leader of the opposition in Canada within about 10 years. And I asked him how he did that, because like, well, really, how did you do that? That's actually really hard. And he said he would go out from constituency to constituency and make his stump speeches, but what he really liked was the Q and A's,

because people would tell him what their problems were, then he knew what the problems were, and out of the dialogue would also emerge the answers that the audience found compelling. And so not only would they tell them what the problems were, but they would tell them the answers they would like to have it have what instituted to solve those problems. It's the same thing that comedians do when they when they finesse their acts in front of live audiences before they practice them in front of a large audience. They tell jokes and the audience see their laughs so they don't. If they laugh, then you keep that joke and if they don't, you throw it out. And soon you're just as funny as the audience can possibly manage. And it's the same thing. You can also do that in a dark manner, by the way,

which is what Hitler did. So he could utter terrible things and wait for a response and collect those. And so then you become the embodiment of the shadow of your people. So I would recommend that you probably don't do that. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

Thank you, Dr. Peterson. My question is, what does this listening posture look like over time? And with your knowledge of personal psychology, I think we can all say we've somewhere encountered one of those relationships where one person does all the work and the other person can't engage in this even if they have been listened to over and over and over again. But at our society level, if that does happen now, let's try it, I totally agree with you. Let's let's listen If we wind up in this sometimes it's always listening and it never turns into listening back

Right what what what you do like over time you do test for reciprocity So children for example when children are investigating investigating potential play partners on the playground, they'll come up to a child, let's assume a child of roughly the same age because that would be the most common situation. Maybe we're talking about kids who are four or five years old, and they'll throw out a play gesture that's rather simple. So maybe that a two-year-old could manage. And then if the person manages a proper response, then they throw it a little more sophisticated gesture. And if the person responds appropriately, then they ratchet up to just above their developmental level. And then they play like mad at that level.

And that'll make them friends. And so partly what they're testing for there continually is whether there's something approximating reciprocal altruism. It's tit for tat in the positive sense. And I would say that, well, we know there's it's tit for tat in the positive sense. And I would say that, well, we know there's actually a literature on this, which is quite interesting. This is also something very practical to know, and I'll get to another practicality here.

So there have been psychologists who've done empirical investigations into what predicts the longevity of a relationship. And so here's one experiment that was conducted multiple times. And I believe this is very reliable data. So imagine you have the two partners in a marriage, each rate, the number of encounters they have with their other partner a day. And it's kind of an arbitrary and subjective measure. But it doesn't matter. You might say, well, I talked to my wife eight times today.

We had eight different interactions. And then you'd say, well, did you rate those for whether they're positive or negative? And then you can calculate, well, did you rate those for whether they're positive or negative? Then you can calculate a ratio of positive to negative. And then you can use the ratio to predict the longevity of the relationship. And the data show that if the relationship interactions fall below five positive to one negative, then the relationship deteriorates and is generally doomed.

And so five to one, it's a proponderance of positive interactions, but we're wired so that negative interactions hurt us more than positive interactions help us if they are of the same magnitude. So for example, people will work harder to avoid a loss of five dollars than they will to attain a gain of five dollars. And you might say, well, why is that? And the answer is, you can be absolutely dead, but there's only so happy you can be. And so it's better to err on the side of conservatism

in the domain of negative emotion. And so, but interestingly enough, if the interactions rise so that they exceed 11 positive to one negative, the relationship also deteriorates. And so what that suggests is that there's some, it's sort of like smiles with teeth, right? You want a fair bit of positive emotion and reflection from your partner,

but you don't want them to be a naive, dependent pushover who's afraid to stand up for themselves. And so you want to, you know, because you're a nasty, horrible human being. And now, and then you poke your partner just to see if there's anything there, because that's what you're like. And if you find out there isn't, you'll run roughshod over them.

And you think you won't, but you will, especially if they're very good at implicitly encouraging that, which dependent people sometimes are. So you do assess for reciprocity. And the basic rule is you want approximately equal reciprocity in relationships that you want to maintain. Now maybe you know you have enough additional resource to be the giver more often the receiver in some relationships. But I don't even think that really works that well with children. You know, I mean, you obviously have to take care of them, but it's not like they don't

deliver the goods to you if you have a good relationship with them. And you want to, you want to some degree to enforce that reciprocity. Now you might say, well, what happens in relationships where that's impossible. And well, I give you a practical piece of a suggestion on that front. And this is another thing you can do in your own household. This is so useful, man. If you get good at doing this, your life will get so much better. You can't believe it is watch the people around you.

And whenever they do anything that you would like to see repeated on a regular basis, tell them exactly what they did in detail with, you know, be positive about it, obviously, and just indicate that you noticed. And because I saw this when I was grading student essays, you know, and so I taught the seminar for a long time, and I was trying to teach kids how to write. They were in their fourth year of university in the honors psych program. You'd think they'd bloody well already know how to write, but they didn't. And so I'd have to write a four-page essay on a given topic,

and then they had to rewrite that to a six-page essay, and then they had to rewrite that to an eight-page essay. And the first essay I graded, it was only 5% of their grade, and I told them, I'm going to cut you into ribbons, but it doesn't matter, because it's 5% of your grade and I told them, I'm going to cut you into ribbons, but it doesn't matter because it's you know 5% of your grade and so they could tolerate that and Generally by the third essay they had written the best thing they'd ever written in their life and they learned so fast it was unbelievable, but one of the things I noticed was that They did a little testing with the first essay they'd hand in something was just like God, formulaic, boring,

they weren't in it at all. There was nothing of the person in there. There was no thought. There was just the kind of cycle babble that they'd learned, especially if they were in faculties of education. And it was dry and dull and everything about it was wrong. And so those are hard to grade, right?

What's wrong with my essay? Well, the words aren't right. The phrases, they're not so good. They're not organized well into sentences. The sentences aren't sequenced well in the paragraphs. The paragraphs don't make a coherent argument, and the entire thing is empty. But other than that, no problem.

It was often easier just to rewrite those essays than to grade them. No, so in any case, though, one of the things I did learn was that even in an essay like that, there is usually one sentence or two sentences buried on page three that was an actual thought and reasonably clearly stated and somewhat gripping. It was like the person popped out

from all the background rubbish and said, well, what about this? And if you saw that and checked it and said, hey, you hit the mark right there, the next essay would be like two thirds of that. And that was really fun to see. And then maybe by the third essay, maybe it was all like that. And then they were really thrilled. It's like, wow, I wrote this. And the sort of the culmination was a fourth year, seven, or was the culmination of their careers, the psychology undergraduate.

So that was great fun. But you can do that in your own household. If the envious part of you isn't jealous of the revelation of the goodness of the person. And so here's the opposite tack if you want to do this. So imagine that you're a man who's managed to attract a mate and he believes he's punched above his weight. So this woman is more attractive, let's say,

more vivacious, more desirable than he deserves. So that's going to grate on his soul a fair bit, right? Partly because her shining casts a dim light on his lack of utility, let's say. And so you can imagine someone like that being prone to jealousy for obvious reasons. And so the best tack to managing a situation like that, if you're that man, is to wait till your wife dresses herself up in a particularly attractive manner, and then either fail to notice by occupying yourself with something trivial while she's attempting to gain

your attention or by criticizing her directly for what she's just managed to do. And if you do that 50 times, let's say you can be sure that she'll never reveal her attractiveness to anyone else for the rest of her life, including you, and you'll get exactly what you deserved. So that's the opposite of watching people carefully. Now, I learned this in part from Skinner, the famous animal behaviorist, because he used all sorts of reinforcement contingencies to shape animal behavior. Skinner was unbelievably good at this. He trained pigeons in World War II to guide missiles by pecking at photographs.

So they could map the photographs onto the missile trajectory, viewing the territory underneath, and peck accurately enough to guide the missile to its destination. That was discontinued as the technology for guided missiles developed. But Skinner could do that and you know we think pigeons, well they're not that bright. It's like they're smarter than you think pigeons. That's why they can live in cities. That's not easy for a bird to pull off, you know. It's not their

natural habitat. And so but Skinner, although he would use punishment, technically speaking, which is the application of a certain amount of pain or threat, which is the use of anxiety, but what he believed was most effective was Reward, but it required a tremendous amount of attention. So for example, if his Skinner was trying to train a rat to climb up a little ladder And then across the ladder and then maybe do a pirouette and come down, which he could do with no problem. He'd wait, he'd just watch the rat, and then when it get close to the ladder, he'd give the food pellet. Now his rats were starved by the way down to three quarters of their normal body weight, so they were pretty eager to work for food. It's not something you necessarily saw in the methodology section of the papers, but, um, well, I'm, and that's not a critique of, of Skinner, it's just an indication of how simplification takes place in laboratory experiments,

but in any case, he'd wait for the rat to get near the ladder and give it a food pellet, and soon the rat would be hanging around the ladder quite a lot. And then now and then, just more or less randomly, the rat would put a paw up on the ladders, food pellet. Well, then the rat would hang around the bottom of the ladder with paw up. Well, if he did that, continually through observation, he could get the rat to do pretty much anything that you could imagine a rat to do. And then maybe some things you couldn't imagine. And this isn't a manipulative technique, by the way, although it can be used that way. It's not effective unless you do it with a certain degree of wisdom.

You wanna think, well, what do you want in your house? How about peace, tranquility, happiness, and humor, something like that? That's not a bad first pass approximation. And you wanna get that in your head, it's like, do you want that or do you want the delights of endless martyrdom? Because you have to make a choice,

and you might think I wouldn't pick martyrdom. It's like, really? Really, you wouldn't, eh? You'd pick peace and happiness and humor, and so everywhere you go, that's all you're ever surrounded with. It's like highly improbable. So don't be so sure you're aiming up,

but if you can orient yourself in that direction, and then carefully, and knowing full well what the hellish alternative is, because you need to know that, then you can watch and see, well, when, when is this manifesting itself in the people around me? And then you can tell them, in detail, I noticed, son, I noticed today, we're having a discussion at dinner, you know, and you made a spectacularly witty remark right at the right time and it was provocative but not annoying and so good work. And then the kid thinks, oh my god,

he noticed it. And then he's like, twice as funny the next day and maybe not in some unbearable manner. And that really works. It really works. But like I said, you have to quell the envy that would otherwise be set you and you have to want to aim up. And then you have to not be jealous of the other person's goodness and you have to be extremely attentive. But man, as a transformation technique, even in extraordinarily difficult relationships, which goes back to your point, there isn't anything I know of that's more effective. And I've been working with moderate Democrats in the United States recently, and with a number of Republicans and suggesting that to the Democrats, that when the Republicans do something that isn't absolutely malevolent and stupid in your opinion,

you might want to just say something. Like, that's not as bad as it could have been. Something at least, and the same for the Republicans in relationship to the Democrats. And that because it's also one of the ways that you can reduce the tit for tap proclivity, right? You want to give the devil as do, especially when you're not actually talking to the devil, but just the person who's sitting across you, let's say in the house. It's an unbelief.

And people, that's another issue. I mean, if you want people to appreciate having you around learning how to listen, that is a skill that is absolutely unbeatable. And this technique of summarizing to their satisfaction, that works like a charm. And it's not, you know, you might be a little awkward when you first try it, and might feel a little manipulated because you're not that good at it. But if you get, if you get expert at it, it's, and you have the greatest conversations with everyone, you know, I had people in my clinical practice who were extraordinarily impaired intellectually and suffering from all sorts of

assorted pathologies in addition to that. And if I was listening to them properly and they were as fascinating as anybody I had on the say more able and competent end of the spectrum. And you learn so much because there is nothing that people won't tell you if you listen. It is absolutely amazing what people will tell you. And so quickly they'll reveal things they didn't even know about themselves. And they need to know those things often. They've been hidden for years. It's so rewarding. And then this use of attentive reward, that's also it's fun in a game like sense once you've learned to play it because you're watching, you think, I'll just wait. This person's going to do something good sooner, later, it's like, path, good work. And people are so thrilled that that little

manifestation of goodness in their heart that managed to sneak out past their cynicism and boredom was recognized. They're so, what is it, what is it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it restores their faith in what's good inside them it really does It's unbelievably powerful and so that can work if you're if you're embroiled in a difficult relationship You know and you can't escape easily or maybe you can't escape on moral grounds that Listening that's that helps a lot you might have to listen a lot But that use of judicious reward man man, that's a powerful technique. So.

Dr. Piecesen, thank you so much for your work and your passionate defensive free speech. In relation to therapy as well, the UK government is currently consulting on banning so-called conversion therapy. And I wondered what your view was as a therapist on that in relation to talking therapy in particular. Well, the first thing I would say about that is that as soon as it's termed conversion therapy, the argument's already over, right? Because this is one of the things, conservative politicians are particularly bad at this, by the way, there.

That's why I mentioned at the beginning that you should never discuss viewpoint diversity. I mean, you think about what you're doing when you discuss viewpoint diversity. You think you're conservative, let's say, that you've just pulled a fast one on the left, it's like you're so gung-ho about diversity, what about viewpoint diversity?

And you don't even notice that you just subordinated the highest value in the hierarchy of values to diversity. You lose, buddy. It doesn't matter what argument you make after you've done that. It's like, I define the terms of the debate. I established the questions. I, you seated the terminological ground, you can flap your lips all night, but you're not going to change that.

And so the conversion therapy issue right there is the way, as soon as that's framed in that manner, it's a lost cause. The guy had a client, a young man who was being pressured quite intensely into a homosexual relationship by someone who was being pressured quite intensely into a homosexual relationship by someone who was attracted to him, and he was genuinely confused about his sexuality and certainly about how to respond. Well, I wasn't going to do conversion therapy. I mean, I don't know what's up with this kid.

I have no idea. And neither did he. And so the goal there is, if someone comes to you who's confused about their sexuality, and like, have you met someone you who's confused about their sexuality and Like have you met someone who isn't confused about their sexuality? It's really complicated, especially when you're 16 You know while you listen and you try to sort them out and if you have any sense You realize that you have enough trouble with your own destiny

To not bother imposing your viewpoint Moral or otherwise on this teenager you want to help them come to their own conclusions. And it's an axiom of clinical practice that only those formulations that come from the client themselves will result in anything approximating lasting behavioral change. So you know, you could come to me and I could give you advice. And you might even think it was good advice, but could come to me and I could give you advice and you might even think it was good advice, but you're not going to take it because you can't even give yourself advice and take it. How are you going to take it from a relative stranger?

But if you go through the process of thinking it through, like really deeply thinking it through, and you draw your own conclusions, and then maybe you practice their implementation. There is some possibility of change, and you just can't do that by what, like, conversion therapy. So, and it's partly because there is enough temperamental variability in people that you don't know what the right answer is for the person who comes to see you, no more than you know what the right answer is for your children or for your mate. And hopefully what you do is in this process of dialogical relationship and mutual revelation, the person's pathway becomes clearer. And I do believe that that the good will exchange of thought does in fact, well, constitutes

that process. So, yeah, as soon as it's conversion therapy, the game's already lost, but there's a fair bit of fluidity in human sexuality, and people have to come to terms with that. You know, you might say has a rule of thumb, and I think this is true, your life is going to be a lot simpler if you adopt something approximating traditional sexual rules.

And so you step outside of that confine at your peril, but it might also be your necessity who's to say? So when you help the per-inhumility, you help the person discover that for themselves. And so I think the talk of conversion therapy, if someone's saying, I'll cure you of your homosexuality, it's like, well, it's not a disease, first of all, and so it doesn't need a cure. And probably you can't do that anyways.

And it's not the proper way to advertise clinical services, let's say, because that isn't really how a clinical relationship works. So the argument, in some sense, is beside isn't really how a clinical relationship works. So the argument in some sense is beside the point as far as I'm concerned. So. Thank you so much for such an amazing talk and the definition you gave of freedom of speech I think is not heard enough. Something I would like you to perhaps talk about is

many people talk about the failure of the university as the failure of the marketplace. And many say the failure of their leaders? Of the university. Oh, yeah. The university setting as the failure of the marketplace. And some say it is because freedom of speech has full out of fashion and is not used enough and being criticized too much.

My question is, do you think the marketplace of Adier, if you believe in such a thing, can be fixed by imposing, I mean, imposing, putting it more up front what you've been really finding as freedom of speech, or is there something in the marketplace of Adier that is broken? And perhaps we should fight specifically some ideas all the time. And it's not good enough to have them on the market base of ideas that are very evil and bad themselves. Well, it might not be good enough, but it's the best we have. That's the thing, you know. And

it's also the case that substitutions tend to make things worse. We don't have anything, well, what do we have except for the free expression of ideas? We have tyranny and conflict because the alternative to politics is war. It's not peace, that's for sure. Peace, that's hard, man, that's a hard thing to attain. And so you have the intense battleground of ideas. And you know, the people who are concerned about, let's say, offense, they have their point, you know, words can hurt and they can hurt deeply, but they don't hurt as much as sticks and they don't hurt as much as knives. So it's a little bit of what ALZU use, you might say, to stave off something far worse.

And that doesn't mean that the intensity of discussion, I mean, you can have discussions that are incredibly upsetting. But the question is, well, what do you have when you don't have them? And if you think that what you have, by not having those discussions is peace, then you're either naive, willfully blind or malevolent. Those are the options. So I mean, I've seen in my clinical practice, one thing I got deeply convinced of,

and it wasn't something I wanted to be convinced of, I would say, I never saw anyone in my clinical practice ever get away with anything, not even once. You know, so they'd come because they were miserable for one reason or another, and sometimes deeply miserable. And we would trace back the genesis of the misery. There's always, almost always, an active deception at its root, either their own deception of themselves, or some other person who putatively loved them, deceiving them.

And so it was unbelievably painful to walk through that in this free speech sort of manner, but the alternative, which was living with the insane tension that accompanies the unrevealed truth, let's say, in the Buza Mabala dysfunctional family, like as terrible as it is, waiting through the monstrosities, living with them endlessly as they grow, that is no solution. And so we don't want to be polyanna about this. There's nothing. Freeze speech does not lack savagery, but compared to the alternative, it's infinitely better. And it's the only valid pathway to peace, except maybe the peace of the grave.

I mean, if you and I disagree and I kill you, well, that's the end of that argument. But it's not so good for you. And it's really not the end of the argument anyways, because the probability that you are revealing in your opposition to my thought, something that will then reveal itself within me in opposition to my thought is almost certain. And so we have to hash through the ideas to make peace.

And you know, the free speech, you say free speech is fallin' out of fashion. It's like was thought fallin' out of fashion? Because they're the same thing. Like most people, I would say 95% you know, 6% of people buy books. Okay, how many people engage in internal, dialogical, critical self-evaluation? 10% maybe?

You, it takes a lot of training. You think what you have to do. A thought has to reveal itself to you in the theater of your imagination. And so that happens to everyone to to a lesser greater degree. You know some people have a thought a month and some people are just flooded with them constantly. It's a temperamental variable and variable associated with intelligence. But once the thought emerges, you can either accept it as a revealed truth, which is the general course of action. You know, a thought occurs to you, and because you're a naive thinker, you just think,

well, that's how it is. But let's say you're a bit trained, you can divide yourself into two avatars. One takes the proside, and one takes the conside, and you can have the debate internally. But you have to be unbelievably highly trained to do that. Now, all of you people, or the vast majority of you do that as a matter of course, but don't be thinking that's the way people work because it isn't. Most of what passes for thought, and I'm not being cynical about this, and I'm not looking down on people. You know, people, all people have their their their talents and

and their abilities, and some people are good at dialogical, dialectic thinking. Some people don't have that skill particularly. The way that most people think is by talking. You know, they, and you see this, if you have a closer relationship with someone perhaps who isn't as intellectually inclined as you, they'll be pondering something

and they'll sort of offer a thought in a questioning sort of manner and it's an invitation. It's like, well, I thought of this and I'm kind of scared of it or I'm doubtful about it and what do you think of it? And then you play the role of what would otherwise be an internal avatar and they play the opposite role and maybe you switch, you know, from time to time if it's kind of playful and you evaluate the thought. Well, that can't fall out of fashion. It's like that's like reading a map has fall. We need to get somewhere but reading a map has fallen out of fashion. It's like, well, we're not going to get anywhere there in our way because that's how you get

places. And there's no, that's what I said earlier, freedom of speech is not just another freedom among freedoms, and certainly not another right among rights. It's certainly not, and that right is certainly not granted to us by the social contract or a derivative of government fear. That's an absolute misapprehension, which is why I think as well, that there has to be something like for atheists and believers alike, a divine hierarchy of value outside the political process, to which the political process refers. And one of the wonderful things about the English law common law tradition is it's grounded in such a metaphysical reality, such that we have all the

rights there are, except those that are expressed, expressly, forbidden to us by the common law tradition. It's like, yes, good work, English people. So, you know, as opposed to French civil law, let's say, so, because there you're granted the rights by the state, and that's just, your rights are not a social construct. That's just simply not the case. It's not the case psychologically or physiologically for that matter. So. Hi, first of all I'd like to say thank you for having the courage to pursue the truth and I'm very proud that your Canadian, especially since truth has been so fraught lately in phaging politics. My question is, what would you say to someone who has been through a traumatic experience

and wants to avoid the culture of victimhood, that encourages people to identify with their trauma and capitalize off of being the most victimized person? Okay, well, there's two things that I address there. People say this courage, they talk to me about my courage fairly frequently and that's not right exactly. I just learned to be afraid of the right thing. And I really mean that.

I mean, I saw an endless repetition in my clinical practice and in my own private life when my eyes were open. The consequences of not saying what was true. It's like whatever hell you might fall into by opening your mouth when you have something to say that isn't popular, it's nothing like the hell that you're going to develop yourself in if you lose control of your own tongue and mind.

And like I said in my clinical practice, I never saw anyone get away with anything even once. And so all you have in a situation like that is what is the truth. Now, you know, of course, you only have your approximations to the truth, but that's better than nothing. And so you need to be afraid of the right thing and you should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deceit. That's what you should be afraid of. That will definitely do you in. And I know exactly how. What happens is, you know, garbage in, garbage out, the old programmer saying goes, and so you'll fill your head with nonsense, and no one will call you on it

except you. But you can still that voice, if you try hard enough, you just wait until you get in real trouble. You know, one day they'll come a point where you have to make a decision, and the decision is the difference between life and death, or worse, between someone else's life and death, or worse between health and the suffering that's worse than death. And because you've compromised yourself to such a degree, you will not be able to rely on your judgment, and you will make the mistake you shouldn't make and then you're done. And that will absolutely happen. So you tell mistruths

voluntarily at your exceptional peril and you avoid the unpleasant truth that you might have to delve into in all their messiness at your absolute peril and the peril of everyone around you. And so if you see that, you become afraid of that, that's hell and hell is worse than death. So what I mean that most sincerely. So okay, and so that's the courage issue. And then you asked about, sorry, I'm sorry, I obliterated the last part of your question. What would you say just in the right hand, you used to be on dramatic experience and wants to avoid the culture of victimhood or identify as a victim? Well, well, the first thing is, well, if you want to avoid that, you're sort of on the right

path already, right? Because you have some vision of what it might be like, not to be traumatized and not be a victim. Well, first of all, I mean, in some sense, there's no shortage of victimhood. I mean, no, the existential psychotherapist in the 50s taking a page from Heidegger talked about thrownness, right? The arbitrary nature of our existence. I mean, here you are, you have the ethnicity and race that was bestowed upon you. You had no choice in that. The victim and the beneficiary of

this particular historical moment, you know, and you're the victim and beneficiary of all the atrocity and the wonders of the past. You deal with your own emotions, you deal with the fact of this specific time and place, all of that, and there is a sense of, well, there's a sense of mortality, certainly that's associated with fineitude and mortality, and you can easily say in some sense that we're all victimized deeply by our own susceptibility to vulnerability and tragedy, and I think that's true,

but then the question is, well, what's the best way of dealing with that? And falling prey to it, when my daughter was young, she was very ill. And one of the things we told her repeatedly, in which I think she did very well to her credit, was often she was too ill, really, to be able to go to school because she couldn't wake up

in the morning and she was in pain. to be able to go to school because she couldn't wake up in the morning and she was in pain. But she needed to go to school. And what one of the things we told her was, don't use your illness as an excuse. Right? Because you're already in trouble, kid. You know, you got your problems and they're serious. But if you can hold on to the distinction between the part of you that can, in spite of this, and the part that can't because of it, and not blur that distinction, then that's one more thing you have on your side while you're attempting to struggle through this. And to her credit, she managed that, and quite pristinely, and that was extraordinarily helpful. It was very difficult at times, after she had had

her hip replaced, she couldn't get around that well. And so we decided to put her in a motorcycle course, which was rather terrifying thing to do since she just had a hip replacement, but she needed to have a scooter to get around. And so she went with her mother to this motorcycle course and they were driving motorcycles, not scooters. And at one point, one of the people who was being trained wiped out on the motorcycle, and you know, it was rather traumatic, let's say. And she woke up the next day and was too afraid to go to the course.

And so we said, well, you know, it's understandable. Why don't you just get in the car and go to the course and see when you get there if you can manage it. And she got herself out of bed and went and managed it. And then she passed the course and then she had a scooter and could zoom around the city for the next couple of years. And so that was really good. But it was very hard to draw that line, right? Because in some sense, she'd been victimized by this arbitrary illness. And, you know, you tend as a parent to have an outpouring of empathy, the empathy that can

destroy under those circumstances because you, you've called the person more than is absolutely necessary, right? And you have every reason too, because they're suffering like mad. But you want to be a victim and be a tragic figure? You know, and you might say yes, but you wouldn't, if you thought it through. So, and then if someone asked me that question, say in a clinical setting, I would do a little analysis of it. It's like, okay, well, you're suffering from this traumatic experience. You want to get over it. We'd have to figure out what the practical steps might be, and that might be finding somebody to talk to or

there's other ways of dealing with it, but you delve into the practical realm to sort of address that. Thank you so much for your talk. On a couple of occasions you mentioned Judea Christian values during the talk and in the recent question you talked of the English Commonwealth which sort of are loosed to the divine. One in every six people in the world live in India today. India has a democratic secular constitution and yet the culture is Vedic and caste is central to society. How would you speak about the freedom of speech

into a culture that has that in its faith and beliefs? And at the same time, in certain fringes of the political movement, certain radical ideological movements, there's a belief that these freedoms are a Western import. So how would you healthily speak into that culture about upholding the freedoms. Well, the first thing I would wanna do if I was doing that practically speaking is I would like to talk to as many people who hold those particular views as I possibly could

to find out why they think the way they think. You know, when they say that it's a Western import, well, what do they mean? Because in some sense, it is a Western import. I mean, India has a body of laws that at least in part is derived from the English common law tradition. And so it was imposed upon or introduced into that culture. Now it took to a large degree.

And I don't believe that you can import a propositional structure without the underlying imagistic ethos and behavioral proclivity. It just won't work, right? Because the infrastructure, so to speak, isn't there. And so the fact that it has worked, at least to some, well, I would say some remarkable degree, because India's really a remarkable success story, indicates that there is some correspondence between the English common law tradition, which emerged gradually and in some sense incrementally and organically out of the will of the English population.

And it matches the same strivings and proclivities that you might find elsewhere. I would also say that the relatively radical comparative economic success of states settled by England in its history of colonization, let's say, also points to a decent fit between the English common law tradition and a whole variety of other cultures. Now, that doesn't mean the match is perfect. And so, to some degree, the argument is correct. It's imposed, at least, as a set of propositions, but it's incorrect, because I think it reflects something that's at least as a set of propositions, but it's incorrect because I think it reflects something that's fundamental at the level we've been discussing today. But if I was trying to mediate those disputes and I've been having increasing numbers of conversations with people on the Islamic side of the world, trying to do exactly that is the first thing I want to do is listen a lot because I don't know what

I'm so ignorant about such things. I just don't know what people actually think. And so you can't begin to address a question like that till you find out why those who stand in opposition to your claims, let's say, why they think the way they think. Now, the probability that there's no tradition, say, within Indian families that approximates free speech in flourishing families, it's like that's zero because it's not possible, you know, and if it's just a tyranny, let's, if it's a tyranny, well, tyrannies aren't sustainable, chimps can't even sustain tyrannies. You know, and I'm saying that for technical reasons, you know, because there is this idea that's quite promoted that complex animals like chimpanzees live in dominance hierarchies, and it's the meanest toughest male chimped

that rules the hierarchy, right? And he's like Stalin, except in chimped form, which actually places him somewhat higher on the evolutionary scale than Stalin. And so, but Franz DeWall has investigated the structure of those societies in great detail, and it's simply not the case that the most tyrannical chimp is on top. In fact, the chimp males who sustain leadership across reasonable amounts of time are unbelievably reciprocal in their interactions, especially with other males, but they're also particularly attentive to the females and the infants. And part of the reason for that is, well, let's say you're, you know, Joe Brute, Chimp, and you're strutting around like a fallback and in Georgia, constantly

showing off your physical prowess. It's like, well, one day you're a little sick or a little tired and two chimps that you've tyrannized will tear you into pieces. And that happens quite frequently in chimpanzee disputes, where a two-terrannical male will be literally torn to pieces because chimps are very brutal when they get their mind to it. And they're just taken out. And so there's a principle of reciprocal altruism, let's say, that's associated with the free exchange of ideas.

And something like mutual evaluation, and it's recognition of the soul, I would say, on a metaphysical level. That's a precondition for peace everywhere, not just in the West. And that's been propositionalized and formalized into law in different ways and different cultures, and sometimes not formalized so much yet, let's say, because in many cultures are governed primarily by ritual and custom rather than a fully articulated body of laws. But the fact that that does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that English common laws somehow purely arbitrary social construction. It's like that. That's such a prop- it's a preposterous claim. So I would

start by listening and find out exactly what the issues are and then well, then proceed from there. Thank you so much, Dr. Peterson, for what you've given us this evening. You've spoken now in a very complimentary way about English common law and I'm very i ddim yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'r gwybod yn ymwch i ddoddau sydd wedi'n gweithio. Ym gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r

gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio'r ffyrddio' invent people who want to repudiate that good thing from invading and corrupting what has taken so long to put together. And spoken like a true conservative. And that's not ironic or denigrating. I mean, yes, absolutely. So how do you reconcile that? Well, there is no permanent reconciliation of that conundrum, right? Because, and I've traced the development of that paradox back, as far as I'm concerned,

back into Mesopotamia, passed through Egypt. The Egyptians had two primary fundamental male gods, and one of them was Osiris. And Osiris was the founder of the Egyptian state, mythologically speaking, kind of like George Washington, but he was also the spirit of stone. And so he was the representation of conservative order. That's a good way of thinking about it.

But the Egyptians portrayed him as old and willfully blind, specifically willfully blind, which is extremely interesting. And subject as a consequence of his willful blindness to the evil machinations of set, and the sun sets, and so that's how you know the Egyptians thought about the sun and set. And so set was the evil uncle essentially, and he cut so Cyrus up into his pieces, which were also, by the way, the provinces of the Egyptian state, and sentences him to the underworld, and then rules, and instead, that's the danger of an unthinking conservatism, because all our cognitive and social structures deteriorate with the passage of time because time changes

all things. And so we're always fighting to maintain what we have. And that includes our categories of perception themselves in the face of a continual onslaught of novelty at virtually every level of analysis. While the second god of the Egyptians, this is a very cursory overview, obviously, was Horus. And Horus was the son of the, he was the rightful son of the true king, raised outside Egypt, and alienated in some sense from the tradition that gave rise to him. But he was simultaneously the falcon and the Egyptian eye, that famous Egyptian eye,

that open eye. So he was the God of attention and his mother is Isis and she's the chaos that arises when order disintegrates, gives rise to the hero. Horus goes to the underworld to rescue his father and the Egyptians conceptualized the soul of the Pharaoh, so that would be the proper source of sovereignty itself, as the union of Osiris and Horus, the living union of Osiris and Horus. So they would celebrate the Pharaoh, like you do when a new king is crowned in the aftermath of the death of a reigning monarch, the king is dead, long live the king, right. The kingship passes, and that's so Cyrus, the tradition passes.

But the tradition has to be living, it has to be allied with attention, and the misabtamings put a modification on that, which was also magic speech. So, tradition always has to be allied with attention. And it's like, you know this is true if you own a house, especially if it's an older house. Well, the four walls are there and they're necessary and you want to protect and preserve them, but you have to maintain them. And sometimes you have to replace them.

And how do you tell? And the answer is with a careful and judicious eye, with some humility and gratitude for what you already have, but with some understanding that in the face of continual transformation, some change is necessary. And then you might ask, well, how do you decide when change is necessary? And the answer is by engaging in political dialogue mediated by free speech. That is literally because this is an insoluble problem. The conservatives are not correct, but neither are the progressives. It takes a dialogue between them to specify the target,

and it's partly because the environment itself shifts and changes literally, unpredictably. And so all we have is, what consciousness itself is the mechanism that mediates between order and chaos, and political dialogue when it's done in good will consciousness itself is the mechanism that mediates between order and chaos and Political dialogue when it's done in goodwill is the manifestation of consciousness in the repair of mechanisms that need to be sustained and transformed And so there's no end to the necessary dialogue because the future differs from the past and that's the limit of conservative thinking right? It's like well the noble traditions is like fair enough, man, if you can walk down a road that's already been walked down successfully, that's a wise choice. But sometimes, you know, there's a flood,

and the road has changed, the underlying tomography has shifted, and then you wander blindly into a clifft or into a pit. So even as a conservative, and conservatives have more of the temperamental preclivity, let's say, to preserve and to respect, but they still have to be open to the transformations that are necessary to keep abreast of the times. And so we try, right? We winnow through the wheat and the chaff of the past, and we attempt to garner the wheat and dispense with the chaff, and the only way we can do that is through continual dialogue with ourselves, honest dialogue with ourselves and with others.

So. You speak about the concept of the soul. Do you associate this with any psychological constructs? No, on any psychological constructs that are more valid than the notion of the soul. I would say what we mean by soul is something like animating spirit. And you might say, well, what's a spirit? And, well, that's actually rather easy to answer. So when a child of four is playing house, let's say when a child of four is playing house,

she acts out the role of the mother. But acting out, that's a strange thing, right? Because she doesn't literally duplicate in her actions or her perceptions in the game what she observed her mother literally doing. So for example, she didn't go into her mother's bedroom when her mother awoke and watched her turn her head in a particular way to awake and encounter the number of blanks so that she could mimic that in her play. And you know, you think that's absurd, but it's not absurd if it's just mimicry.

It's not. It's unbelievably sophisticated. So what the girl does is she watches her mother manifest maternal behavior across a vast array of instances, and she integrates that with the image of the mother. She's received from all the books she's been read in all the little movies she's watched, the Disney movies and so forth.

And she abstracts out the animating principle of the maternal, and then she embodies that in play, and usually with a little boy, and that's practice for what's going to come later. It's unbelievably sophisticated, and she's embodying a spirit. And the spirit there is the abstraction of the central animating principle from multiple embodiments of its manifestation. And if you think children can't do that, well, then you don't know anything about children

because they do that all the time in their pretend play, which is a necessary precursor to healthy psychological development. And so part of what we refer to as the soul is the presence of that spirit, or maybe even the capacity of embodying such spirits. And it's very difficult to know how deep that goes. You know, I had a vision at one point of all the men in my life who've been particularly influential in a benevolent way. And so, and you

think, well, just a mirror notion of the idea that there could be a benevolent way that would unite the acts of benevolence across a series of men. That's all comprehensible to you. You take that as a matter of course when you say that there are such things as good men and you can identify them, right? Something stable about whatever is good across multiple manifestations of incarnation, let's say. And I saw that transform into the father, person of the Trinity as the embodiment of that benevolent spirit. Now, I don't have any idea what that means metaphysically because who does,

but that spirit manifesting itself within is certainly part of what we refer to when we talk about the soul. And you can see that shine through people. I mean, it's part of what gives someone charisma. that's not just the way that we're doing, but the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're

doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're

doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we're doing, the way that we the soccer ball the football ball through the net to score the goal and everybody leaps to their feet in celebration of that Well, that's that's a celebration of the divine capacity to hit the target dead on and it grips you at such a

Low level way down inside your soul that you're compelled to your feet to cheer and you don't even know what you're doing But you enjoy it. That's for sure. And that enjoyment is also a sign of the depth and utility of that response. You see this and all the things that people do that are so-called popular entertainment. It's unbelievably sophisticated.

The soul is participating in that in the fullest extent. And you can say, well, there's no use for the religious, there's no necessary use for the religious terminology. It's like, well, until you come up with a better word, there's plenty of use for it, because it's a very complex and deep phenomena, and to just cast it into the realm of superstition in some casual manner, it's just not helpful Not in any possible is not helpful scientifically. It's not helpful ethically. It's not helpful existentially Try treating someone for a while as if they don't have a soul Just really I mean it just you know treat them like a deterministic machine

If that's your belief Treat them like a deterministic machine, if that's your belief, really act it out. You'll be like the most hated person in town in about 15 minutes. Well, I mean, what do you make of practical evidence like that? I mean, you interact with people as if they're free souls, capable of choosing between good and evil. That's what you do all the time.

And maybe you can addle yourself out of that by some ridiculous rationalist ideology, but that just means you're kind of a gabbling fool. And it's just going to make you trip over things you don't even notice in all of your social interactions. And do you tell me, I don't care how you think philosophically or ideologically, you bloody well know that what I just said is true. So and that's true even when you're interacting with an infant or a small child, it's true when you're dealing with someone who's elderly and virtually incapacitated in every way. You still see that divine spark for lack of a better term

and we do lack a better term by the way. You see that everywhere if your eyes are open and if you're willing to see it and to the degree that you're responsive to that, then your actions are guided by love and your words are guided by truth. Thank you. Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweith been so easy for us speaking tonight, never to set foot in this university ever again. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to go to any of the other hundreds of universities that would have rolled out the red carpet and had him back after his marathon bout with all sorts of difficulties over the last two or three years. And I think it's a testament to the caliber of his character, his generosity, and above all his graciousness

that he was willing not only to come here and speak to us this evening, but to spend the best part of two weeks with us, opening up all his views to scrutiny, to criticism, to debate. I have been going at him pretty much all morning and he's got more of that to come. And this is just a slice of some of the engagements that he's going to be undertaking here.

And I think it's quite remarkable that he's got that kind of resilience, stamina, that raw authenticity that has moved and changed the lives of so many. So it's been a great privilege for me to be part of this and I hope that the same is true for you. Thank you all so much for coming. I believe that Colin Hewlett here will be taking photos with Jordan as he may be tempted to come out so you won't have Mae'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr all if the last few days walking around the streets of Cambridge are anything to go by. Thank you all so much.