The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 260. Beyond Order: Rule 1 - Do Not Carelessly Denigrate Social Institutions or Creative Achievement

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

This compilation showcases clips surrounding Rule 1 from Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: “Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.” These conversations feature the likes of Steven Pinker, Theo Von, Jonathan Haidt, Ben Shapiro, and more. We hope you enjoy part 2/14 of this compilation series!—Chapters—[0:00] Rule 1: Beyond Order[2:46] The Rubin Report: An Emotional Return [9:09] Juliette Fogra, Illustrator [16:51] Identity Building, Chaos, & Impact Theory[19:04] Ben Shapiro’s Sunday Special[23:29] This Past Weekend with Theo Von[38:30] The Tim Ferriss Show: Psychedelics & The Bible[42:32] Andrew Doyle Speaks Out[49:12] Steven Pinker & Jonathan Haidt On the Enlightenment [54:08] How to Start the Most Controversial Magazine on the Planet[01:03:58] Cambridge Q&A 

Welcome to episode 260 of the JBP Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. We've created a compilation episode for every role in Beyond Order, so this episode discusses Rule 1, do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement, and features Steven Pinker, Jonathan Height, Ben Shapiro and more. I've also released my 150th episode on YouTube featuring my dad. If you want to check it out, look it up on YouTube. He talks about his response to the recent sports illustrated cover on there and more. Without further ado, please enjoy Rule 1 of our not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. This paragraph is from a section entitled, What Should We Point To?

It is worth considering deeply just how necessity limits the universe of viable solutions and implementable plans. First, a plan must in principle solve some genuine problem. Second, it must appeal to others, often in the face of competing plans, or those others will not cooperate and might well object. If I value something, therefore, I must determine how to value it, so that others potentially benefit. It cannot just be good for me. It must be

good for me and the people around me. And even that is not enough, which means that there are even more constraints on how the world must be perceived and acted upon. The manner in which I view and value the world, integrity associated with the plans I am making has to work for me, my family, and the broader community. it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, I'm making it, to an important problem must be repeatable, without deterioration across repetitions, iterable in a word, across people, and across time. These universal constraints manifest biologically and imposed socially reduce the complexity of the world to something approximating a universally understandable domain of value.

This is exceptionally important. Although there are an unlimited number of problems, as well as an unlimited number of potential solutions, there are a comparatively limited number of solutions that work practically, psychologically, and socially, simultaneously. The fact of limited solutions implies the existence of something like a natural ethic, variable, perhaps, as human languages are variable,

but still characterized by something solid and universally recognizable at its base. It is the reality of this natural ethic that makes thoughtless denigration of social institutions both wrong and dangerous. Wrong and dangerous because those institutions have evolved to solve problems that must be solved for life to continue. They are by no means perfect, but making them better rather than worse is a tricky problem indeed. Well, so this book, the first chapter is, do not casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. And I picked that quite carefully

because again, the liberal types are more likely to criticize social institutions. You don't want to do that casually because they structure things and protect you in a way that you are likely not even aware of. And the conservative always says, look, be careful when you change something because you're changing a bunch of things and you don't know what's going to happen. So be careful, but social institutions can become corrupt even just as a consequence

of aging. And so they have to be updated. So they can't stay static, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't respect them. And then creative achievements on the other side. And conservatives, for example, they have a harder time with open people, creative people. You know, the best personality predictor of liberalism is high openness, which is creativity dimension. Well, it's easy to dismiss art, for example, especially if it doesn't exactly speak to you,

but it's through artistic endeavor, it's through creative achievement, that the process of update occurs. So regardless of your political temperament, you need to see these forces, you need to see the value in these forces and have some respect for them. I think what happens if you get educated,

hopefully, is that you get educated beyond the confines of your temperament. So. So that's why I thought you're the ordering. It's so interesting that you said you intentionally, of course you intentionally did it, but that so do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievements.

So that's chapter one. And I thought it was interesting because one of the things that I've been talking about for the last couple of years, but especially in the last year, and our friend Ben Shapiro wrote a whole book about it, is the disintegration of so many of our institutions. And that I think the great debate right now is can some of these institutions survive or do we need all new institutions? Now, I know you're talking about social institutions, not just academic institutions or, you know, we're talking about cultural institutions.

What do you feel in that argument? Whether can some things just be left to disintegrate and we rebuild or do we constantly end up in a destruction and a rebirth? Because right now we're watching so many institutions just crumble. Well, I tend to start local when I'm thinking, you know, so the, because it simplifies things, well, the first institution is the sovereign individual. We don't want to let that crumble. And the more that you're able to live in a relationship with truth, I would say the better job you're doing

of protecting your integrity as a sovereign individual, start with that. It would be a shame to lose the family. People derive a tremendous amount of the meaning of their life from their family and those intense relationships. I don't think we can get beyond that. I think you have to knit your family together to the best of your ability. And I know that people often have terribly fractured families, but we don't have a good substitute for that. You need to exist in relationship to your culture.

You need a job or a career or something like that. We need political institutions. I think part of the problem, of course, is that everything is changing so rapidly that it's very difficult to say what should be kept and what shouldn't be. And we're not in control of it to some degree as well. I mean, there's in this all-out assault on the integrity of cultural structures, but there's also a technological assault on everything. And so what do you do in a situation like that? Well, I think my sense is you revert to the individual.

How much of this... Try to make better people. How much of this do you think has to do with the speed? Because actually, I remember, on sort of the last maybe quarter of the tour, one of the things that you talked about a lot was how the internet was changing us, with the speed. Because actually, I remember on sort of the last maybe quarter of the tour, one of the things that you talked about a lot was how the internet was changing us, how the speed of information was changing us, how you as a random person, no matter where you are in the world, you might be able to send out a tweet or create a meme that could change the world like that.

So how much do you think the speed is all part of this in ways that were literally unimaginable three decades ago? I think it's a tremendous part of it. We don't know what to do with any of the new technologies that we've produced and by the time we adapt to them, they'll have transformed into something completely different. So you know, my kids are in their late 20s and they're more a part of the internet generation than I am, but they're being supplanted in their knowledge by younger people already. They can both feel it. It's changing unbelievably quickly. So that puts a tremendous amount of stress on everyone. When you talk about the creative achievement part of this, one of the things I've been thinking about lately

is that I don't remember the last time I heard a new musician that I really loved, or saw a piece of art that was new that I really loved. It seems so rare because of what's happened with cancel culture, the people that should be showing us things are not showing them. What do we do about that? How do we make the artists brave again?

How do we make the people who will give us the creative achievement? How do we make them see that star again? Well, you do whatever you can, by example, that's the best you've got. So hopefully you try to bring integrity to your endeavors and hopefully that has a salutary effect. You don't have a better option than that.

This was the first rule. The first rule. Yeah. You not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. And I sent out suggestions, right? The suggestion was a tarot card. Yeah, you sent one tarot card. From the writer deck, I believe it was the writer deck. So I would create that and then I would just start searching the web. And that could be a photo that could be part of the painting. I would just collect in very chaotic way, very neurotic and chaotic for three, four hours. I'll just pick up the stuff.

Everything I see, everything I see useful, everything I see fit, I'll just pick up the stuff. Everything I see, everything I see useful, everything I see fit, I would collect. Then I see a plane page that is scary. And I knew that I'm gonna sit 12, not one, usually I see one. I would have to deal with 12. And I knew I can do it, but usually I'll drop myself into the well. I'll just drop myself into something impossible and see if I can survive. That's what I do.

So I photomontage this out of pieces just like the mosaic. That's why I spoke of making a mosaic from center out. I would find the heart of the image and I'll work towards the edges. Then I'll have to flawlessly integrate them into each other. There are probably hundreds. Yeah, there are a hundred pieces here from all sorts of sources. And why did you decide to use a photo montage rather than draw? My thing. It's my thing. He told me just do your thing.

I see. That's how you see things. Okay, so show, bring the image up again. Let me make some comments about it. And I can tell you you okay, so I like the melody of the main figure There's something musical about it and about the way that I Guess it's the it's the lines of the

Standing figure and the dog and the butterfly it it fits harmoniously together and you got it right to have him looking up into this guy like he's preoccupied. And even though he's hypothetically about to step off this cliff, the way that you produce this is similar to the way that I write because I collect all sorts of things and then I array them and then I edit them and edit them and edit them and edit them and edit them until I and until I can't edit them anymore and then I'm done.

So when I saw this, the first thing I believe I thought was that it was beautiful and that was a necessary criteria for for for my satisfaction. And it was there's nothing about your drawings that are foolish or trivial. And so, and I liked the classic element. And so when I saw this while I was very happy, I thought, well, that'll be a beautiful addition to the, to the book. So you sent the fool.

You speaking my language, first of all, every word toward that's exactly how I feel. I had to create shape-wise something harmonious, perfectly harmonious. It has to be balanced out perfectly, otherwise it's junk. That's very difficult to do. You see people often when they make a portrait,

even very talented people can't array the multiple, if there's multiple figures, they can't array the multiple figures together so that they look either Like they're dancing, let's say like they're related to each other properly They look like separate figures sort of stuck on a page and certainly that isn't the case with your illustration of the fool and Often people will ask me Who I'm inspired by.

No one. They would not believe me. It's definitely look like that. It's definitely look like door. It's definitely look like this guy. And the guy is definitely look like my brother. It's not all those things. I never get inspired by visuals. I get inspired by music. So here we come a full circle because I always knew that I have to choose either music or drawings two things and I knew I have to choose because when you're little grown ups would say what do you want to be when you grow up which implies you have to choose and I didn't want to be when you grow up, which implies you have to choose? And I didn't want to choose.

But it's so interesting that you think of your drawings musically given that that's how they struck me. And that's how they struck you. Exactly. The words were words. So what I do is I put my music and I work only to music, nothing else. I have no ideas. And I'm trying to put my music and I work only to music, nothing else. I have no ideas and I'm trying to turn my head off.

I'm not thinking. During this chaotic picking, I have to analyze, like, good, bad, bad, bad. Right, right. But then when it's all done, it's pretty much like, what actors do, master actors with method acting. They just collected all this information to know everything about they dressed up and they just being.

And I can't control this. When I attach those things, I'm just the tool. I can't think. Once I started thinking, I'm ruined it. Right. Well, yeah. Thinking is perhaps reserved for critical judgment rather than creative production. Yeah. You have to open yourself up to a kind of attention.

And it's interesting that, you know, you say you collected a very large number of items to work with. It's initial overproduction followed by selection. And that's another thing useful for people who are listening to this or watching it might want to know. When I write, I write way more than I keep. And then I can select. And so I don't constrain myself to begin with.

I can write down whatever I want, knowing full well that I'm going to modify it or throw much of it away. So I sent, like I had images in mind, photographs, paintings that captured the theme of what I wanted to portray in the illustration for the chapter. And so as we progressed through the 12, I had sent an image or two or three, perhaps. I don't exactly remember that sort of hinted at what I was looking for. And so then you worked off that initial suggestion. But you produced something that was in that vein,

but not by any means the same thing. So let's go through, let's go, let's show everybody the illustrations one by one and talk about each of them. So we saw number one, the fool. Yeah, I had much more, obviously. I had much more. I had mountains, I had access to stuff. I always minimize it.

Not necessary out, not necessary out. I simplify that completely. In rule number one, don't denigrate social institutions or creative accomplishment. Reading that title, I didn't realize what you meant until I read the chapter and what that is ultimately incorrect me if I mistake anything, but cultural institutions are the order. They're the stability and the creative. But what you've granted, these identities that are handed to you ready made

and thank God for that. Marriage is one. It's like, well, you can critique marriage, fine. But what game are you gonna play? Try coming up with one on your own. Maybe you can, maybe you're like avant-garde Picasso, maybe you are, and maybe you have a right to make your own arrangement. Maybe you have the psychological fortitude to craft your own social institution, but I bloody well wouldn't count on it. You're lucky that there's such a thing as a job or a better yet a career. You're lucky that there's such a thing as friendship, as marriage, all of these social institutions.

You know, and and and you And when you criticize the Nietzsche, put as one question of conscience, and I think it's in twilight of the idols, whether you're a leader, whether you're running away, you're outside the pack and moving in a different direction in either case. Are you a rebel because you can't fit in? Or are you a rebel because you could fit in, but you see a better way. It's like people in that category are not that common. And the first question of constant should be, well, which of those two are you? It's highly probable that you're the first one and not the second,

because that would mean you'd be intensely disciplined, plus creative on that dimension. Maybe that is you and God, then we need you, you know, like you're an avatar of the Savior under those circumstances. And maybe everyone has some of that in them. The first rule that you talk about, Jordan, is not to carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. And here, this is really a postpartisan message. It's a recognition that conservatives respect for tradition, respect for the past is really a respect for institutions that have been built up over the course of thousands of years in conjunction with an increasingly good understanding of human nature.

And that has to be balanced with a recognition that we can't get so tied up in these rules that it becomes impossible to extricate ourselves from them. We can't fossilize these rules and turn them into something that is unchangeable in any way. In essence, we should be cautious about changing the rules of society. They should be changeable, so we shouldn't obliterate them. But we also have to know the rules of the game before he can change the rules of the game. If you're playing, if you're playing Calvin ball and Calvin and Hobbes and the rules of the

game change every second, that's not a game anymore. That's just an exercise of power. But you also have to recognize that sometimes the rules do have to change. How do you balance those two things? Well, I think the first thing you do is vow to tell the truth so that you don't follow yourself up. And then I think you pay attention to what manifests itself to you as meaningful, because I think that meaning I literally think, and I think this empirically as well as spiritually, let's say, I believe that the instinct of meaning signifies the optimal information processing function

of the nervous system. So when you're balanced properly between order and novelty or order in chaos, that manifests itself to you as deep engagement. And that's a signal. And it's not merely cognitive. It's way deeper than that. It's a signal that you're in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time.

And everyone wants that. And everyone wants that all the time. Like images of paradise are representations of that state of being. So it's there for you, but they're preconditions. And one of the preconditions is that you strive to do the best, to aim at the best. And that has to be your fundamental ethos that, and it's a decision that despite all of the calamities of being, that your primary ethical obligation is to work for the betterment of yourself and others.

And that's a very complex decision because there's so much of you that's twisted and turned against existence itself because of its suffering and complexity. It's very hard to get your head straight about that. And so you get warped and twisted by resentment and and and deceit and and temptations of various sorts. So that has to be straightened out so that you are aiming in the right direction. And and once once you manage that or perhaps in conjunction with that, you have to watch what you say. You have to say what you believe to be true, not because you're trying to accomplish something specific with what you're saying, but because you're attempting to represent what's happening

in front of you as accurately as you possibly can and let go of the consequences. And so, and then you search for this, you search for this engage, you search for the engagement that that produces. And this is one of the things I love about long-form podcasts, is that when a conversation takes off properly and it's dynamic and unscripted, both of the participants are striving to keep that sense of engagement constantly at play. And if they do that, then the conversation is engaging and deep and gets as deep as the people involved can manage. And they'll pull the entire audience along for the ride. And everyone is thrilled about that. That's logos. That's the manifestation of logos.

And it's deeply meaningful. There's nothing more meaningful than that. And that's a sign that you've got that balance right. You want to be there all the time. That's the goals to be there all the time. Of course, that's a lofty goal and very difficult to attain. But that's that's the end game. First of all, let's not get too casually critical about the idea of conformity. I cover that in chapter one. Do not casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. It's like, it's really hard to get everybody on the same page, and it's really hard to get everybody to conform, especially when they're doing it voluntarily. And there is not much difference between that and peace. And if you

don't think that that's a good thing, then you should think really hard about failed states where no one's on the same page. And you get an instant proliferation of warring gangs of armed thugs. And if you think the utopians are going to win the armed thug battle, you've got another thing coming. Because they'll be the first ones on the chopping block. And so, you know, you're a comedian and an open person and not likely to have a great taste in some ways for pure conformity.

And I'm someone who enjoys artistic creation not likely to have a great taste in some ways for pure conformity. And I'm someone who enjoys artistic creation and revolutionary ideas. But by the same token, I'm not someone who despises conformity. You know, when you said in the book, I mean, you said that we're always going to have as humans, we're always going to be searching for revolutionary ideas. It's something that is constantly the way that we've always been, and it's the way of like just a liberal way of thinking is to keep moving forward and progress and try foundation of comfort to be able to do that from, because some of that is a luxury of being comfortable, or at least being stable enough. A lot of tremendous amount of videos.

And when things get really uncomfortable, that feels a lot scarier place to be creative from almost. Well, the first thing we should point out is that being a conformist isn't the highest of moral virtues, but being unable to conform is worse. Now refusing to conform, that's in a different category. You might have valid reasons for, especially if you're exceptional. And you know, you could say, well, virtually everyone is exceptional in some regard and should perhaps not be conformist there. And we could say fine. But the rest

of the 95% of them should go along with the crowd because that's going along with peace. And we also don't ever want to confuse the inability to conform with the ability to produce revolutionary ideas because just because you can't conform or are rejected doesn't mean you're a genius. What it most likely means is that you're just incapable and then you're going to be highly motivated to confuse your incapability with creativity. And that's not helpful. And then you pointed out something that's also very important. Just how many dimensions do you want to be exception

along anyways? You know, you're a comedian and you have to take substantial risk to do that. And it's quite threatening. Wouldn't be such a bad idea if the rest of your life was, well, maybe secure enough to allow you to tolerate that. Yeah. Yeah, to have some more sense of, yeah, like, I guess I worry on like a bigger like picture

as a nation that like if we start to like, if the fabric of some of the textile of the past, if some of the tapestry kind of, I guess, or tapestry of the past starts to come apart. Like I'm all for making new tapestry, but I just feel like I just get scared. I don't know if I feel, but it's more a fear. I get scared that if we do that, that things could just tear and I just don't know what's going to happen. I guess I'm scared a little bit. I don't know what the future of this country

that I live in looks like, and I used to feel like I had a little bit better idea, but I don't know if the idea of what I thought it looked like was just a comfort based upon my skin tone and growing up with at least food in my house. You know, some stuff like I just don't know if, I don't know if maybe my idea was just a luxury or something.

I don't know. Do you know what I'm kind of saying a little bit? I'm just gonna say. Yes, well I think that's a question, that's a question that everybody's being driven to answer partly because there's intense moral pressure to ask yourself that question, you know, to what degree was your privilege unirred? Well, there's an easy answer to that, actually. Lots of it. But the same holds true with virtually everyone else. You know, and so, who's got privilege depends a lot on what group you're willing to use

as a comparison. So even impoverished people in North America are rich by world standards. They're in the top 1% generally speaking, and they're certainly in the top 1% by historical standards. Yeah, yeah. They're in the top 1% generally speaking. And there's certainly in the top 1% by historical standards. The problem with with hammering home the idea of undeserved privilege is that there's no one who can't be crucified on that particular cross. Right. Right. You know, unless you're born naked in the middle of a field with nothing. Yeah. Everyone is the undeserved recipient of of the fruits of the past. The fact that you have a mother is is a privilege. You didn't earn that. And so when you say you deserve nothing because

of your privilege, what makes you so sure you're not saying that to everyone for all time, in which case no one ever gets anything that they are that they can have for their own So it's a very dangerous game. Well, I don't see where it can end. It's not it's not obvious because Imagine each person is multiple has multiple identities. That's intersectionality. We all have multiple identities. You're privileged along some of those identities and relatively speaking and less along others. So if you're young and and black and female, well, you're young. Right. So, that's not deserved. It's not like you earned being young. And so how much?

Right, there's always gonna be some way of, there's always gonna be some form of privilege in every regard. Yeah, I certainly didn't feel privilege growing up. I mean, I feel like a lot of what I've had in my life has certainly been earned. I felt disadvantaged in a lot of ways, emotionally, and some, there's always, yeah, I think everybody would have their own discussion, their own, like, not their own parameters, but yeah, I could

see how everybody would have pluses and minuses. Well, that's why I think the right level of analysis is the individual. And when you move away from that, it gets that, it gets dangerous quickly, and it gets dangerous for everyone. And the reason why is the reason that you just laid out, you take any individual person, you can point to the advantages that they had. Now look, I understand that some people, I mean, I was a clinician for a long time, and I saw people who had lives that were so hard that you could barely even imagine it.

You know, I had one client who was impaired intellectually. She lived with an aunt who was schizophrenic, who had an alcoholic boyfriend who was extremely violent, and also schizophrenic, who used to bother her about being possessed by Satan. She was so, ah, I hate saying. Shamed, ashamed, that she couldn't look anyone in the eye. She would walk down the street with her hand like this,

sort of bowed down down because she felt so, so unworthy. She wasn't an attractive person. She looked like a street person, so people treated her badly, all things considered. Now, look, I saw her at this hospital that I was working at, where the inpatients were people who were in even worse shape than her.

They were people so hurt that they couldn't be deinstitutionalized. And I saw her because she had decided that she wanted to take one of these institutionalized people for a walk when she was out walking her dog. So despite all her catastrophes, which were plenty, you know, she could still see outside of herself to someone who had it even worse. It was really something, you know? Yeah. So, this privilege game, it's like, well, look to your own privilege.

And that isn't, I'm not saying that there aren't historical injustices, but. Of course. There are, there are many of them. Right, there are for everyone in a lot of ways, yes. But if we only look at the victim side of things anyway, even as a human, if I only see myself as a victim, I'm really gonna have a tough time. I can see myself, I can respect that I'm a victim

of some things, but if I only see myself as a victim, it's gonna make the rest of my life pretty tough, I feel like. Well, it also matters what you want to do about the fact that you're a victim. You want to take away from other people? You know, it isn't that... You know, it isn't that, and that, I don't know, I kind of put us on a lot of different planes here at once. Oh, that's okay.

Well, that's a very complicated problem, and it's one that, you know, I think is particularly relevant to your particular country at this particular time and place, because the tapestry is under assault, and the thing is, it's a lot easier to burn something up or to cut it up than it is to knit because the tapestry is under assault and the thing is, it's a lot easier to burn something up or to cut it up than it is to knit a new tapestry. It's really hard. And has there been times as I mean, is it okay where we are right now from an outsider's

perspective? Is it scary like based on like historical civilizations and stuff, like, do you think we're in a place that is like, still kind of safe judging from an outside, like, or from a, you know, I mean, you're still in Western civilization, Canada is not extremely different than the US. Do you feel like we're in a scary place,

or do you feel like it's just a lot of pomp and circumstance and at the root of things were still at a very realistic place. I think there are always dangers that threaten the stability of societies. I think that those dangers are real, but I think they're always there. I think that I have faith in the robustness of, say, American institutions, all things considered. It seems to me that your country has weathered crises of at least this magnitude and often far worse many times in the past and that's worked out.

So I think there's reason to be alert but not hopeless. I mean, on the broader scale, the broad scale, world scale, let's say, it's hard to make a case that things were ever better than they are now. And it's almost impossible to make the case that there was ever a time in the past where things were getting better faster than they are now. time in the past where things were getting better faster than they are now. So it's reasonable to assume that everyone on the planet will be out of abject poverty as defined by the UN by the year 2030. Wow. It's halved. Well, it already halved from 2000 to 2012. And so, and that was the fastest transformation in human history by a huge margin. Yeah, I've seen less poor people I feel like honestly.

Well, there's there's there's variance because in the Western countries that the working class hasn't kept up as well as they were in the 60s, let's say in some ways, but globally speaking, there's lots of reasons for optimism, but it's a difficult problem to settle because there's always the possibility that any given problem will get completely out of hand. That's the case that people make with regards to climate change. While there's a small percentage of complete catastrophe, a small probability of complete catastrophe, well, we probability of complete catastrophe. Well, we don't know what to do with a problem like that,

because it's impossible to calculate how many resources you devote to something that's absolutely catastrophic, but that has a small probability of occurring. Right. Right. You know, like what if the Greenland ice sheet melts? Right.

Well, then the oceans rise, you know, multiple feet. And that's a catastrophe. Well, how much is it worth to stave that off? It's very, very difficult to calculate. Yeah, and plus we're still, a lot of people are still surviving. A lot of us, I think there's still that heavy survival instinct in a lot of people where it's more of a short-term survival that I don't even think it's our fault for thinking that way. It's just built into our limbic system,

or our brainstem, or something like it's hard. It is. Yeah. I agree with you. It's an archetypal story. That's the apocalypse. Yeah. You know, the end of the world is always upon us.

You know, I go on, sorry, Doc. Well, it's because things can fall apart for us completely. And they do in our own life, there's illness waiting, there's death waiting. Like, we have a built-in sense that things can come to a cataclysmic end. And that also makes us prudent and careful and able to look at the future and first-all catastrophes. But the problem is, is that we can also generate false positives and be unduly worried about things that are very unlikely to occur.

Yeah. So what is the template for constructive criticism of a social institution? In other words, if there's a wrong way to do it, where you're creating a void and not offering a better solution, what is the better approach or what might be? You know, I got well-known, I suppose in part because of my injunction to people that they clean up their room.

My closet, by the way, is a mess. I haven't been able to clean it up for like three years. So there's this English common law principle with regards to the distribution of power. I think it's English common law that there are certain responsibilities of the family and the community and the town and the state and the federal government and the international organizations. But you want to have the most proximal level possible take responsibility for a given enterprise. And I think that's a good philosophy. Personally, you want to make changes.

Start with what's under your control. Start with changing those things that will hurt you if the changes go wrong. There's a good one. You know, and it's better, I think, to put your life together than to go worry about parading around and being a social activist. I think most of that's fraudulent. And I think it's appalling that students learn or people learn to do that mostly at universities. I think it's appalling. Fix up your own life. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't be involved in the community. But I believe that you have to earn that right. Not only because there's something more wrong with you than wrong with anyone else, it's just that you don't want to...

If you operate at a level that's beyond your competence, all you're going to do is make catastrophic mistakes. Practice locally until you're competent. And then if you dare, we'll move out a little bit, you know, as you mature and you gain some, when I, when I used to work for the NDP, the socialists back when I was 14 or 15.

One of the things I came to realize, I think I realized this when I was 16 and went to university. I was like, well, I woke up one day and I thought, I have this ideology in my mind, you know, about how the world should be structured. I woke up one day and I thought, I have this ideology in my mind, you know, about how the world should be structured. And I woke up one day and I thought, what the hell do you know? You don't have a family? You don't have any experience. You don't have a job.

Like, you're a pop. I mean, I was smart enough. I verbally could hold my own. And my head was full of ideas. I could defend them. my own and my head was full of ideas, I could defend them. But you know, at the same time that I was a socialist kid, I was I sat on the Board of Governors for the local college. And almost all the people on that board were local businessmen. Most of them immigrants because Northern Alberta was an immigrant. I could have was only 50 years old. Everybody had moved there. It was a new place. It was the end of the frontier. Literally, we were at the end of the railway, the northern most tip of the North American prairie. And the result of these conservatives sitting on this board and me, and what I found was I actually respected these people. Like, I didn't, I wasn't my ideology. My explicit ideology was antithetical to theirs, but when

I interacted with them one-on-one, I thought, hmm, these people have made something of themselves. And when I talked to the activists, I never got that impression. I thought, you guys are resentful as hell, and you don't know anything, you've never done anything, but you're noisy and self-righteous. So that put a lot of cognitive dissonance, that filled me with cognitive dissonance. One of the things that disturbs me constantly about ideological representations of the world, broadly speaking, is that their fundamental danger is that they always contain a two-convenient theory of evil and malevolence. And for me, any theory that locates the fundamental

problem of evil somewhere other than inside you is dangerous. Now, that isn't to say that social structures can't be corrupted and aren't corrupt. That's an existential problem in and of itself. It's always the case that our social institutions aren't what they should be, and they're outdated, and they're predicated to some degree on deceit. And people who use power can manipulate them sometimes successfully. That problem never goes away and it never will. But when the evil can be easily located somewhere else, then you have every moral right to allow your unexamined motivations to manifest themselves fully because you can punish the evil doers and always remain on the moral side of the fence. It's a huge attractiveness in that.

I think, I mean, this is something you've explored a lot with the idea of a soul's units and the idea about that good and evil cutting through the hearts of every human being. Because that, to me, it really gets to the heart of what I would call a kind of infantile culture. I think this is a symptom of childishness. Whenever I was learning about literature and what constituted more sophisticated literature and what didn't, Disney films, childish films, let's take Tolkien, for instance, bad people look bad, they look like orcs, they're ugly, and there are villains, and then there are heroes, and they are good.

There isn't complexity, and if you have a more complex novel, like a Mervin Peak novel where people aren't necessarily good or bad, they're both, they struggle within themselves and with other people. That is a mark of a kind of adult novel, as opposed to a childish novel, right? And that's quite an important distinction. And I think most of the political and ideological battles that I find myself in the middle of and I'm sure you do as well are because people are just reducing everything to this binary of good versus evil and putting themselves on the side of good. It is a very infantile, almost almost like a caricature of religion. You know, it's it's it's and I see it again and again, we had it in this country with the Brexit vote effectively. What happened in the vote here and the reason why it became so toxic and families fell apart and peeped, you know, you wouldn't believe. I know it wasn't reporting very much elsewhere,

but it was like a kind of ideological civil war here, but not a very sophisticated one, because it came down to this narrative that if you voted to leave the EU, you were evil, racist, stupid, and if you voted to remain, you were good and progressive and all the rest, and noble and virtuous, right? And of course, there are all sorts of good reasons to have voted either way and this kind of caricature, and it happens again with middle gear. Well, you described it as a caricature of religion, and I think that's what an ideology is. And I think that's what an ideology is. And this is one of the reasons that I've been inclined, let's say, to go to have my shot at the Russian latheists,

much as I'm a fan of enlightenment thinking. I mean, I was convinced as a consequence of reading young as primarily, but also Dostoevsky and also Nietzsche primarily. And Solzhenitsyn, I would say, as well, that and then biology as well as I studied that more deeply, there's no escaping a religious framework. There's no way out of it. And if you eliminate it, say, as a consequence of rational criticism, what you inevitably produce is its replacement by forms of religion that are much less sophisticated. I mean,

let's not think about it. Well, it's not religion. It's a fundamentalist. If I look back to my Catholic upbringing, actually, acknowledging your own capacity for sin is at the heart of Catholicism, That's why we have the confessional. That's why you sit there and tell this stranger all these things you've done wrong. Right, well, it's reckoning with it. Well, that's far from trivial. It's unbelievably not trivial. And because it was so common, like a common part of Catholicism, it can be passed over without notice. And so religious, the religious structures that we inherited, I'm going to talk about Christianity most specifically,

because it's the dominant form of, it's the form of religious belief that primarily undergirds our social structures. It's our operating system. My producer came up with that term the other day and I thought it was apt. And it does localize the drama between good and evil inside and makes you responsible for that. And it makes you, encourages you, let's say, to attend to the ways that you fall short of the ideal. And when you criticize a structure like that out of existence, you don't criticize the questions that gave rise to it out of existence. And the questions might be, well, what's the nature of the good? What's the nature of evil? Those are religious questions. What's the purpose of our life? How do you orient yourself if you're trying to move up, rather than down? How should you conduct yourself, etc., etc. Those questions don't go away, and they can't not be answered.

And so the way that a traditional religious structure answers them is in a mysterious way. It uses ritual, it uses music, it uses art, it uses literature, it uses stories, all these things that are outside the realm of easy criticism. And then some of that's translated into, you know, comprehensible explicit dogma, and that's the part that's most susceptible to rational criticism. But when that disappears, I've been thinking about this a lot this week because of what happened to Richard Dawkins Recently, you know, and I have my differences with Dawkins and the rest of the Roush and Lathies because I think that they underestimated the danger of dispensing with what they were attempting to dispense with and I see the influx of

religious fervor associated with political ideas as a direct consequence of the lack of separation, let's say, between church and state psychologically. There is a claim, quite common at the moment, that the central animating principle of western culture is power. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay, it's a popular claim. Yep. Okay. It's a it's a popular claim. Yeah. Okay.

I'm sure that we do. Right. What's the appropriate counter claim? If there is no central animating spirit or that that's not it. That I face this a lot. And I think the response is to say, sometimes power matters. And there are those who believe that everything is sexuality. And sometimes power matters. And there are those who believe that everything is sexuality, and sometimes sexuality matters, and there are those who believe that everything is money, and sometimes money matters, and sometimes self-esteem. People are complicated.

Sometimes pain, sometimes joy, and sometimes jealousy, right? Exactly. So that's the people who's first response to everything is power structures, power structures, power structures, you kind of know what they think. Because it's a... Yeah, you might know how they act too.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, if you think that anything, whether it be the Western tradition or college, is all about power, I mean, that's just sad. Well, it's also completely... I've thought this through, and then I thought about all the people that I've admired in my life who are successful. And so those would be people that I'd like to imitate, or at least I respect, and that seems to be a reflection of something like, you know, a low level of awe. They were, they were driven by power. That's right. They were driven by competence

and generosity. That's right. And so this is actually one of the hallmarks of a religion is people are committed to something that's obviously not true on its face. And the people are really committed to this religion that everything is power, this sort of human-wishelf-fu-co religion. They even interpret family life as being about power. You know, that my relationships with my kids is primarily about my power. I mean, that's just bizarre. The marriage.

Yeah. That's right, because I'm a man and my wife's a woman, therefore, I must be motivated to have power over my wife, and I must feel something in common with other men, because we're all men. We're all trying to maintain the power structure. I mean, this is far whackier than saying there was this guy, and he was killed, and he came back to life three days later.

I mean, you know, this is just a matter of faith, and so the fact that it is intruded so deeply into the academy now. Again, not in most departments, but in, you know, some of the departments that you and I both know, this is the religion, everything's about power. Yeah, well, we don't seem to have been able to put forward a very good counter claim. But I think it's as we're talking about with Steve, the good counter claim is something which you have to sort of reason through and it's about process more than any particular person.

And we need equal treatment by the front of the law. And we did all these things. and it's not as inspiring. Oh, yeah, but there's another problem with it too. It's not like I don't have sympathy for that viewpoint and there's nothing wrong with a reasoned argument. But look, whatever is at the bottom of the woke movement is critical of the processes of reason themselves. Right. Everything is white supremacy. bottom of the woke movement is critical of the processes of reason themselves. Right?

Everything is white supremacy. Well, everything is up for grabs at least. Right. So it's a radical critique of enlightenment thinking. It's also an attempt to identify enlightenment thinking specifically with Western European thinking, which I think is a great mistake, but it doesn't matter. I don't think that those, it isn't obvious to me that those merely rational responses are going to do the trick. No, in general not, but something that I've begun to think a lot

about is the importance of specifying the institution or the domain before you say anything else. And so we can talk about will a rational argument persuade people? And if we're talking about like on planet earth, you know, or just, you know, out on the public square, not, your odds are not very good. And so the trick to having a good society is one in which there are domains within which people have a set of the professional norms or norms about how we do things. And so the norms in a college seminar class should be very different and much more generous and much more about building on each other's arguments

and can critiques than it is on Twitter. And part of what's changed, part of why I keep saying the world is so different after 2012 than it was before 2009, is that social media knocked down all the walls between different domains. And now the norms within which a reason discussion among people who have basic respect for each other and are tied together, at least as fellow students or fellow jury members or whatever,

when that goes away and everything is just the public square, well, then yeah, we're not really able to have reason conversations anymore. I'm not saying all activism is bad by any means, but it can create a community that can become fanatical, basically, which is a day too. I'm not so sure that activism isn't just bad. Oh, together. Well, it obviously, the idea that you need to pay attention to your institutions and that sometimes they need criticism

and reform, it's like obviously, institutions ossify and they become corrupt. And everyone has to be alert to that. And there are steps you can and should take, and are morally obligated, I think, to take. But the thing about activism is that it's almost always predicated on the idea that you're right, you're morally superior, and you've identified the people who are wrong. And to me, that's one step away from mob, and it's one step away from punishment. And one of the things that appalls me and makes me ashamed in relationship to the universities is that universities are pretty good at

teaching young people that being an activist is a good thing. And I'm not so sure at all that it's a good thing. I think it's pseudo responsibility, especially because it always comes with the easy identification of just who the enemy is. That's exactly right. No, I think you're right. And I think that if you're going to attack, if you're going to be on the attack, you have to also build.

It's your responsibility and it's your duty to build. So I, you know, I think- Yeah, well, you built an alternative? That's what you did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, if you're going to attack our institution, institutions, you know, I have a lot of problems with establishment institutions,

but you can't just attack them. What are we going to have left when we've got no institutions? We've got to have new institutions, but it's not building them now. Well, we can have rubble and everyone could be equal in the rubble. That's happened many, many, many times. And that's the risk. That's the risk. That's, you know, that that that's why I think a, you know, attacking institutions has to go hand in hand with building new ones and and lots of people, you know, I know quite a few people who are trying to build new institutions, but about social media and social media enabled activism that makes finding an out group dehumanizing the out group and attacking them very easy. Well okay, let's dive into that for a minute. Okay, so how many times have you sworn at somebody when you're walking down the street versus how many times have you sworn at someone when you're in your car and they're in their car? I don't think I've sworn at anyone if I

Okay, well then you're very you're much more polite than me, let's say, but yeah It's much more probable when there's a barrier like that that that people will manifest aggressive behavior You know, we don't know exactly what inhibits aggressive behavior, but one thing that does is rather close personal proximity, real proximity. Now, when you take the person and you place them in a shell, let's say that's a car, you place yourself in a shell, well, all of those cues that subtle and complex cues

aren't there. And so, online, well, you don't even have an avatar. You only have your hypothetical fantasy about the person that you're attacking. You don't even know them. And so, and we don't know what that does to people at all. I mean, we see some of that on Twitter, and we have no, if this hypothesis that you laid out is true, you know, is if there's a tendency for those who are more committed to dominate certain types of institutions because

the moderates bail out. And then if it's also true that that's sped along by a social media, which is a possibility, not a certainty, but it could be. And then it's also easier to dehumanize people in social media circles, particularly if you're so inclined and maybe even if you're not, then well, that can be a perfect storm. I mean, I just read an article by Jonathan Height today where he, I've been noticing what seems to be developing into something like a runaway positive feedback loop

in the political landscape, particularly in the US. And I spend a fair bit of time thinking about what a mental disorder actually was. And the most common description now, I think it's from Wakefield, I think, is that it's the deviation of a complex mental function from its evolutionarily-signified path. And I don't like that at all, because it's very difficult to specify the evolutionarily-signified path, and it violates the is-aught distinction, right? Just because that's how it evolved.

Assume, why did the hand evolve? It does a lot of things. Okay, but one of the things I did notice that a lot of mental disorders are positive feedback loops. Depression's a good example. So you start feeling bad. Well, then you reduce your social contacts and you're less effective at work.

Well, that makes you feel worse. Well, then you're more irritable, so you start fighting with your wife or your husband. That makes you feel worse. Well, then you're more irritable. So you start fighting with your wife or your husband. That makes you feel worse. And then a way it goes down spiraling downhill. Anxiety. You start to avoid. That's how agrophobia develops. Alcoholism. You drink to get rid of your hangover. Well, positive feedback loop. Now, not every mental disorder is a positive feedback loop, but plenty of them seem to be. They have that element. And you have to fight, figure out how to stop that spiral from continuing. Well, we're getting into a situation. Imagine this domination of

the radical groups on both sides, and they have an outsized voice and outsize ability to utilize punishment effectively. And now they're upsetting the hell out of each other. And so they're more and more set in their ways. And now the moderates are pulling over to that side. This is the process height outlines in part in this in this in article that that he I believe he released it today. It's October 30th, by the way, this will be put up later. And he thinks that at least in part, this was driven by Facebook like and Twitter adoption of like.

And you know, this is, we were talking about conservativeism and liberalism. You know, one of the things conservatives always say to liberals is don't be thinking that your stupid invention is only doing what you think it is. I am. Right. And I suggest this in fence concept. Yes, and if you've done any sort of laboratory experiments, you get very, very sensitive to that because things don't go the way you predict they will.

Yeah. You're with your stupid hypothesis. And so, who knows what the like button did? Facebook is a, it's not nothing, right? It's just a like button. No, no, it's, it's like 300 million like buttons. Yeah. Oh, I think we vastly underestimate the impact that social media is having on our societies and political culture. And you know, people will say, oh, it's simply magnifying what's already there. And that might be true.

But what if what's already there is quite fragile? What if United States was on the pathway to extreme political polarization? I mean, it's not a small thing to speed that up. Like it's a very dangerous thing to speed that process up. Yeah, well, it's harder to think things through and put on the brakes when it's happening really, really fast. And you're not sure why. I put a fair bit of the responsibility for this mess that we're in on faculty members at universities who let the administrators take over by

cow-towing 300 times over a 30-year period. So and then what happened? So the administrators took over the universities and then the DIEI people took over the administrators and yeah Well, I know that's an oversimplification, but, but, but, and then these ideas, these poisonous ideas, just way they go out into the culture. And, yeah. And I think Hyde is probably correct when he says that these bad ideas, so we're talking about the postmodernism, the intersectionality of those rubbish ideas. They would have stayed enclosed within the walls of these quite marginalized university departments. They would have stayed enclosed

if it weren't for social media. Yeah, the IAT had a fair bit to do with that too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the release of that. So because it did what you said with regards to consultants, it gave them this scientifically valid quasi-clinical tool where they could go into institutions and claim, hey, we can fair it out your prejudice.

It's like. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so it's not, it's not wholly because of social media, but it's certainly allowed bad ideas to spread very quickly. And we could see that with, I mean, there's so many. Yeah, there's the pandemic we should really be worried about.

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. o'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r ddoddau'r or civilization. You just have to think about how dissenters and Catholics were treated in this country not too long ago. You couldn't go to this institution if you were not a communicant of the Anglican Church. I'm not an Anglican, but I sympathize with them because if you've got something good, you want coercive and directive measures to protect that thing. And in fact, you might be committing a very serious injustice if you don't put the context and structure in place to prevent people who want to repudiate that good thing from invading and corrupting what has taken so long to put together.

And it's broken 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 sent 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 phase of a continual onslaught of novelty at virtually every level of analysis. While the second god of the of the Egyptians, this is a very cursory

overview. Obviously was Horus. And Horus was the son of the who's the rightful son of the Egyptians, this is a very cursory overview, obviously was Horace. And Horace 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 Hararas, 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. 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 misoptamians 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, you know, especially if it's an older house. Well, the four walls are there and they're necessary and you want to protect and and 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, well, consciousness itself is the mechanism that mediates between order and chaos and Political dialogue when it's done in good will 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, into a pit. So, even as a conservative, and conservatives have more of the temperamental perclivity, 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 went 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. Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. I like I like that one because you're more prone to carelessly denigrate social institutions if you're liberal on the left side of the spectrum, let's say, because you're interested in lateral thinking and spontaneity and novelty and leery of what would you say, structures that constrain, and then if you're more on the center or the right,

you're more likely to denigrate creative achievement because while the creative types, they're always moving laterally and breaking things apart. I mean, they genuinely creative types. The ones who are on the avant-garde, and they're a bit of a threat to social institutions, but the truth of the matter is that you need both. There's this line in Ellis in Wonderland when Ellis goes down the rabbit hole underneath

the structure of things, and she meets the red queen down there. Red queen is basically Mother Nature, and she's red because Mother Nature is red in blood, you know, and that's why the red queen is always running around yelling off with their heads You know, she's she's the queen of mayhem and murder and one of the things she says is that in my kingdom You have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place and that's really set that's the fundamental flaw of rigid conservatism

Is that you cannot stay in the same place because everything around you shifts, and so you're forced to update. And so if you're a conservative person, you can't denigrate creative achievement because a certain amount of it is necessary just to keep things stable. And if you're a conservative, you're interested in stability, you think, well, I wish things could stay the same. It's like, nope, not going to happen. You know, I mean, you don't even stay the same, right? You sit there and you think, I'm just going to stay the same. And you don't, you get old. And

it, right, right? I mean, it just happens. And because of that, you have to, you have to update. And it's the creative types that do the updating. Now, you know, that can get out of hand and things can, you know, you can get so many people, creative people destabilizing the current situation so that nothing is reliable. And that untrammeled creativity can be a destructive force. That's its danger. But it's necessary to respect cultural institutions and also to respect the process that updates them.

And so that's what that chapter is about. you