The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Ben Shapiro

Episode Date: May 14, 2018

See www.jordanbpeterson.com/events Shapiro discussion starts at about 4:20 if you want to skip the tour information. This is an alternate posting of Ben Shapiro's May 6 premiere Sunday Special discussion with me (https://bit.ly/2I4czoU). Ben and I had a very intense discussion about the nesting of human perception and cognition in the mythic world - a better discussion, I think, than I've had with anyone.

music Hi there, I'm in Denver, Colorado today. It's May 7th, 2018. I'm going to give the fourth talk of my American 12 rules for life two or tonight, or maybe it's the fifth. First one was Toronto and Washington and Chicago and Detroit now Denver. So yes, I guess that's the fifth. I'm announcing the remaining venues today in the US where tickets are still available and the dates and places for my Canadian tour. Ten Canadian cities in July. So there's tickets remaining to 10 venues in the United States. On May 23rd, Philadelphia, on May 29th, Houston, on June 8th, Richmond, on June 10th, Charlotte, June 12th, Nashville, June 14th, Louisville, June 15th, Indianapolis, June 16th, Milwaukee, 25th, Portland, 27th, Sacramento.

And in between all that on Wednesday, June 5th, I'll also be in Rick Chavick in Iceland. So tickets are available for those. And then I'm going to be touring Canada and July and August. On the 19th in Toronto, on the 20th in Hamilton, that's July again, 21st in London, Ontario, 22nd in Kitchener, on the 23rd in Ottawa, on the 26th in Vancouver, on the 27th in Calgary, on the 28th in Edmonton, in August on the 14th at Regina, and on August 15th in Saskatoon Saskatchewan. You can find out more about that if you go to JordanB Peterson.com and look up events. That's JordanB Peterson.com under events. Also in this video is a discussion that I recently did last week. In fact, it was just released with Ben Shapiro as part of his new Sunday podcast initiative. And I think

we had a very good conversation. And so the rest of this video was taken up with the conversation that I had with Ben. I think we got farther on the issue of how human perception and cognitive function is nested inside a fundamental narrative substrate. And we related that to modern findings, neuropsychology related to hemispheric function. I think it was an excellent discussion and so I'm very happy to bring it to you. There's some ads in it because I took it directly from Ben's video. So anyways, so that's the tour. Philadelphia, Houston, Richmond, Charlotte, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Portland, and Sacramento and that's all in June and May and then Rick Givic in June as well and then the Canada tour in July and August Toronto, Hamilton, London, Kitchener, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina and Saskatoon and as I said you can find out about that at JordanB Peterson dot com events. Thank you very much, and I hope that you can come to one of the talks.

They seem to be going really well so far. We've sold out a very large number of them, and the people seem quite enthusiastic, and I've been able to get farther in my thinking than I was in my book. And each of the talks is designed to illuminate a different element of, let's say, the 12 rules and the topics that are associated with that. So thanks very much and I hope you enjoy the

discussion with Ben Shapiro. Okay, so I could not be more excited to speak with Jordan Peterson. Well, as Jordan knows, before the show, we talk for an hour before the show just about interesting things we should have caught on tape. But now we're actually gonna get a chance to do it live. So here is the Jordan's new book, the haven't bought it yet. Everybody on planet has bought this book.

I was walking through the office today, we didn't have a copy in the office. The person in front desk had a copy of your book just sitting on our desk. So that's the way this works. 12 rules for life. An antidote to cast a fantastic book, obviously topping all the best soloists all over the world.

Jordan, thanks so much for joining the show, I really appreciate it. Thanks for the invitation. Well, you know, obviously your your prominence has just blown up in the last year and a half when we were talking before the show about why that is and why there are so many people who suddenly are very angry about you. And notice there's an article in Politico suggesting that young angry white males, you are now their their leader. So congratulations. Oh, yes. Yes. And I wanted to ask you about that. Why do you think that number one, your profile has become so big of late?

And number two, why do you think it is that so many members of the left are so angry about that? Why are they characterizing people who listen to you as angry and rage young white men? Well, we can look at the characterization to begin with, you know, because I think it speaks to the pathology of the radical left. Instantly, they're absolutely incapable of viewing the world except through group identity terms. You know, and so if someone comes out and disagrees with them, then they have to characterize

them by their fundamental group attribute, whatever that happens to be. Maybe it's gender because that's a favorite, or maybe it's race. And so angry white men, young, there we go, sexist, ages, and racist, all at once, right? They're angry, young, white men. Well, it has to be that way. If you're going to be the, if you're going to play the leftist game, because that's the only way that you can look at the world. And then if you can't make your opponent reprehensible, in some manner, and it's strange that they would attempt to make them reprehensible on the grounds of race, age, and sex, since that's precisely what they stand against hypothetically. But if you can't make your enemy reprehensible along some dimension, then you have to contend with them seriously. And so, you know, if I'm not an alt-right fascist like Hitler, you know, or Milo-Yanopoulos, which was how I was characterized in Canada because

the radical leftists can't even get their bloody insults straight. He's like Hitler or Milo-Yanopoulos. It's like, because there's no difference between them, right? No obvious difference. It's just another attempt to pillory as far as I can tell. And I think that it's dreadful. I really think it is. There was an article written by the, I believe the editor of the New York Review of Books that was just republished in the Globe and Mail talking about the emergence of hypermasculinity and how I was somehow responsible for that or contributing to it, like Mussolini. And I read that and I thought, yeah, like Mussolini. And I thought, okay, so what are you doing? I see. You're defining masculinity.

You're conflating masculinity and hyper-masculinity at the same time. Then you're virtue signaling by being against hyper-masculinity. But really what you're trying to do is bring down whatever it is that's masculinity and what masculinity is in this frame is something like competence. And so it's part of the radical leftist general war on competence as well, which I think is one of the most pernicious elements of the culture wars. The dissolution of hierarchies, the assumption that every hierarchy has to be based on power and serve the needs of your group, whatever that happens to be, that there's no such thing as competence.

And so, and then the other thing that's reprehensible about it, because that's not enough, is that it's just wrong. Like there's, I've got tens of thousands of letters from people and people come up to me all the time on the street. I'll give you an example. This is a great story. This is really touching. So I was in LA about a month and a half ago, and I was downtown LA and downtown LA is kind of rough, and I was in LA about a month and a half ago, and I was downtown LA, and downtown LA is kind of rough, and I was wandering around, and with my wife, and this young guy pulled a car up beside me and hopped out, and he was kind of a stylish-looking 21-year-old Latino guy, something like that.

He was all excited. He said, he asked me who I was, and I told him, and that's what he had presumed, and so he was kind of excited about that. And he said, look, I've watched all your lectures and it's really helped me. And I've been straightening out my life and trying to get my room clean.

And he laughed about that. But, you know, developing some aims and trying to tell the truth. And, look, I've really fixed up my relationship with my father. And so then he said, wait, wait, just wait a minute. And I thought, sure, what, sure. And so he went back in the car

and he got his father out of his car. And he came over with his dad and like they had their arms around each other. and he said, look, we've really improved our relationship. And they're both smiling away. And you know, that's, man, if you're going to target me for that, just go right ahead. Man, that sounds real white supremacist. Oh yeah. Yeah. And and it's wherever I go now. And this is one of the things, this is the thing that's so wonderful about that. All of this as far as I'm concerned is that people come up to me all the time, and that's exactly what they say. They say, look, I was lost, aimless, depressed, nihilistic, anxious, drug addicted, alcoholic, wasting my time,

masturbating too much, although they don't generally use that particular example. generally use that particular example, you know, loss essentially and hopeless in some sense. And I've been watching your lectures and they've really helped and I've really been putting my life together and I've been trying to say what I believe to be true and develop a vision and it's really helped. And it's so overwhelming, you know, like if I'm doing book signings after a talk, then there'll be a dozen people or more who, and these aren't, like I'm only talking to people for about 15 seconds, but you can have a very intense conversation in 15 seconds. And they'll say, look, you know, like I was suicidal, man, like I was really hanging on to the edge of the earth by my fingernails. And I'm better.

And they have tears in their eyes. It's like that's amazing. Little of that goes a long way man. Well I think that when I look at your rise and look I talk to people who love what you do I mean every time I go on the road and I'm speaking at a campus you're the number one name that gets mentioned people by people who come to my lectures and I think the reason for that that I've that I've seen is is really twofold. One is that one of the things that you really talk a lot about is the notion of self-discipline and purpose in your life and control and the idea that you are in control of your decision-making and your decision-making matters. That's one.

And the other is that you have a unique capacity to say no to things. And when somebody says something to you that is illogical but popular, then you have the capacity to say no. That's what happened in that Kathy Newman interview that somebody was saying something to you that is illogical but popular, then you have the capacity to say, no, that's what happened in that Kathy Newman interview that then somebody was saying something to you that made no sense. And you just said, well, no. And then you just stood on that no. And when you stand on that no, I think it gives people a lot of courage. Yeah.

Well, I mean, the gender issue is really an interesting one because one of my professional domains of expertise is individual differences. I'm a personality psychologist, and so I know the gender difference literature, and it's a very solid literature. Well, first of all, it's very solid. It has a 30-year history. Once, first, psychologists got the personality models down,

so that would be the big five model, all empirically derived, straight statistics, right? Brute force empiricism, nobody had a theoretical axe to grind with the big five, except to say, maybe there are human traits, maybe they're encapsulated in language. We can use statistical techniques

to find out what they are. That was it. That's the whole ideology. So very, very neutral as far as ideologies go, five traits emerge, okay? Are there differences between the sexes? Turns out there are. All right?

They're not massive. Although if you sum them across all the traits, you can separate men and women with about 75% accuracy. So it's not trivial, but you have to sum across all the traits. Then another question comes up. Well, are those differences sociocultural or biological? Okay, we can test that. We'll go around the world, we'll look at cultures,

we'll rank order them in terms of the gender equality of their sociological policies. We can do that with broad agreement from the right and the left. Then the hypothesis would be, if gender differences decrease among more egalitarian societies, then the gender differences are sociocultural, or at least more sociocultural.

That's exactly the opposite of what was found. Repeatedly, that pseudoscience, it's like, no, that's mainstream psychology. Those papers have thousands of citations, and right, the average humanities paper has zero citations, right? And then the next most common one has one, three thousand. That's an unbelievable classic. And here's the other bit of proof, like you say, well, how do you know that you can trust someone's judgment

about a fact? The fact emerges despite their ideological presuppositions. Okay, so it's well known that the social sciences and the humanities have a left tilt and a lot of that's temperamental and the tilt has become more pronounced. But as Jonathan Hites pointed out, there are no conservatives among social personality psychologists or none to speak very few yet. Very few. Vanishingly few. And if the field has a bias, it is definitely and indisputably a left-wing bias. Okay, so you have to fight that if you're a scientist, right?

Even if you're a left-wing scientist, you have to fight that because you want to get to the facts. It was these social scientists who generated the data that suggested that the gender differences not only were real, but that were bigger in egalitarian societies. They didn't do that to grind their ideological acts, because their ideological presupposition was, no, no, you make the society egalitarian, men and women get more the same. It's like, nope, they get more different. Oh, move, isn't that something?

And so then there's a corollary there, which is, all right, you could still say, and they're kind of pushing in this direction in Scandinavia. Boys and girls are different. Men and women are different. It looks biological, but because people are malleable, you could push the sociocultural structure harder and harder to minimize the biological differences. Okay, well, first of all, maybe and maybe not, maybe you'd get a rebound and they'd get even like, the kids would rebel, that could easily happen.

But let's say, okay, you could. The problem with that is that if you seed that much power to the state, like you're basically giving the state the right to socialize your kids. It's like, you really? Really? You really want to do that? I mean, people in Israel couldn't do that with the cabooza, right? It couldn't do that with the caboats.

It didn't work. So people aren't going to give up their children to the state and thank God for that. Well, I mean, this is one of the big questions that we were discussing earlier, is that we're talking about the polarization in politics between right and left. And obviously, you're a psychologist, you're a philosopher, but you've been dragged almost kicking and screaming into this political sphere because everything has been so politicized. And so when you say, when you cite social science statistics and they're scientifically based, you're called a racist, you're called the sexist, you're called a homophob, and

you're not. Exactly. So, so why is it that so, why do you think it is that so many folks on the left who are important to be all about reason and science and objective factor. So willing to throw those out the window, the minute that it becomes politically inconvenient. Well, because you imagine that the cognitive system, so an interpretation of the world has levels, their axiomatic levels, some fundamental presuppositions are more fundamental than others. And you could say, well, the leftists historically,

maybe because of their atheistic rationality, are more on the side of science than say the fundamentalists of any sort. But when push comes to shove, you find out how the axioms are nested. There's deeper axioms underneath that, which is that all hierarchies are based on power, and all power plays are based on group identity, tribal identity, essentially. And that the entire history of the world is nothing but a power play between these different identity groups. It's like, okay, well, if the science indicates that some of that's wrong, then do you alter those beliefs or do you alter the science?

And the answer to that question is, well, it depends on how you've hierarchically arranged those. If the science is at the bottom, then you alter your beliefs. If the scientific facts are the axiomatic substructure, then you alter your beliefs. If your beliefs are the axiomatic substructure, then you alter the science. Well, we've seen how that plays out. And one of the things I've tried to do, so to speak, is to diagnose the axiomatic sub-structure, then you alter the science. Well, we've seen how that plays out. And one of the things I've tried to do, so to speak, is to diagnose the axiomatic structure. It's like, okay, what's the metaphysical presumption

structure of the radical left? Well, what it is is you're basically your group. Your groups are basically engaged in warfare, right? And the warfare is arbitrary, except in so far as it serves your group. Okay, I don't buy any of that. I think that's a root to certain disaster. I think it's a degeneration into tribalism and that we will seriously pay for it, not only because it returns us to tribalism and tribes fight as the anthropological evidence for that is overwhelming, right?

Tribes fight. It doesn't even matter if they're chimpanzee tribes, even chimpanzee tribes fight. So not only do you regress to a tribalism, but you also invalidate the one proposition that's being able to help us arise above the tribal, which is the idea that the individual should be sovereign. And so I think the culture war is about what's the proper framework within which to view human identity and what's the relationship between the individual and the group in relationship to that identity. And the leftist answer is it's all group and it's all power. It's like, okay. So in just a second, I want to ask you a little bit about, you know, some of the, some of the and the leftist answer is, it's all group and it's all power. It's like, okay. So in just a second, I want to ask you a little bit about, you know, some of the more enlightenment minded thinkers

who are out there right now, because it seems like we've been discussing the big gap in Western civilization right now, which is between the collectivists and the individualists if you were to put it broadly. But I want to talk about some of the divisions among the individualists in just a second first. I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.

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between the collectivists, identity politics, and the sublimation of science in favor of subjective politics that favors a power group. But I want to talk a little bit about a division that is also now breaking out among those of us who I think would consider ourselves friends of the Enlightenment. So you consider yourself a friend of the Enlightenment style thinking, at least in the essence, that individuality matters and that the individualist

obra. And the scientific and the scientific and the scientific and the scientific and the matter of the right data matters. That's so useful. Exactly. And in this group, I consider myself as part of this group, people have started to call it the intellectual dark web. Sam Harris is part of this group. There are a wide variety of folks with a lot of broad political differences that are part of this group. But there are some real differences that are broken out even among people

who consider themselves part of this group, right? Steven Pinker has a different perspective on the world than you do. I have a different perspective than Sam Harris does. You and I have our differences probably on some matters of philosophy. So where do you think the vulnerability lies in the possibility of revivifying enlightenment mentality? Because it seems to me that one of the big problems that's popping its head up above the water now is the rejection of the enlightenment in favor of

this old-style tribalism that you've been talking about. That we're now going to repeat history because we've benefited so much from the enlightenment that we forget that things don't have to be this way. We've got so much nice stuff, we live in so much freedom, that we forget, that if we just toss those enlightenment ideals out the window, things get really ugly again. I think that's what unites. Well, that's the question is that what do you toss out the window before things get ugly? Right. And the enlightenment proponents, you could say Harris, you could say Pinker, Charles Taylor in Canada, they trace back the development of the modern self,

let's say, Taylor wrote a book called Sources of the Modern Self to the Enlightenment. And it's quite interesting because if you look at the typical academic psychologists say their historical knowledge generally runs back about 15 years. And so because they're all concerned with the modern literature and there's some utility in that. But the downside is they don't have any historical context.

So you read someone like Taylor and you think, wow, he's stretching it back 500 years. But there's reading that goes way beyond that to look at the sources of the self and the source of the modern ethos. And this is a huge bone of contention between people like me saying people like Harris. And I think between people like you and people like Harris is that my sense is that the enlightenment values themselves are grounded in an ethos that's much deeper and much less articulated. And that would be an ethos of metaphor, image, drama, ritual, religion, art, music. All of that, dance even for that matter. The nonverbal, the pattern recognition. In McGill-Christ is written a book called

The Master in his Emissary, which lays that out quite nicely with regards to hemispheric specialization. It's kind of predicated on alcohol and goldberg's observation that the left hemisphere is specialized for what we know and the right hemisphere is specialized for what we don't know. So that's an order chaos dynamic. And the rough idea would be that the left hemisphere generates parodimatic systems.

So that would be like the enlightenment system. Axiom predicated, even system, axiom predicated, right? Even stateable axiom predicated. But that entire axiomatic system is based in a nonverbal, in the nonverbal domain that's associated with, well, it would be associated with the right hemisphere, but it would also be associated with deep motivations, biological motivations, and emotions. And so because here, here's one way of looking at it, biological motivations, and emotions. And so because here's one way of looking at it, you think, well, how do you validate an axiomatic system

of ethics? And the answer is quite straightforward. Jumpy as Jay figured this out is you play it out in the world, literally, you act it out in the world, and then you watch each other's emotional responses. And if the thing that you're playing out, if the axiomatic system that you're playing out satisfies the motivations and the emotions of the people who are engaged in that system,

then the system is justified. And then you say, well, it's not just that their motivations and emotions are satisfied. It's more complex. It's that the motivations and emotions of each individual are satisfied. But not only now, but now, next week, next month, and next year, so you have to extend it across time, and not only my emotions and motivations, but yours as well, now, next week, next month, and across time. So there's terribly tight constraints,

the arc placed upon an axiomatic system is validity. Now the way Jean Piaget thought of that, he said, well, think about it like a child's game. A bunch of kids get together and they decide to play pretend. Okay, and pretend is, let's model the world, right? And as a place to act, because to pretend you act out, right? So the kids get together and they assign rules and they say, well, you're going to be mom, you're going to be dad, you're going to be the dog, and we're going to play house. And then

they they act it out. And what they're doing is seeing if they can regulate the manner in which they're constructing the game so that everyone's emotions and motivations are so well satisfied that they want to continue the game. Okay. And so that's so cool. So what it shows you is that's how an ethical system is tested and justified. It's like you play it out and you see if everyone wants to keep playing. And so that's a whole different methodology than the scientific domain. So the axiomatic system isn't the ethical axiomatic system, isn't justified by reference to the scientific method.

It's justified by reference to the emotional and motivational well-being of all the players of the game. Now, that game emerges, this is the second part of this, and this is so cool. Then the question is, well, how does that game emerge? And the answer is the same way that children's games emerges. So what Piaget noted is that kids would get together and they'd play marbles. And the answer is the same way that children's games emerges. So what Piaget noted is that kids would get together

and they'd play marbles. And if they were young kids, they could all play marbles, say, six, six years old. They could all play marbles. And if they were in a group, they were playing marbles and it all worked out fine. Squabbles and all that. But, you know, the kids would keep playing, right?

Validating the games. But if you took the kids out of the game and you said, what are the rules of the game? They would give completely disparate accounts. So they knew how to do it. It was like the wisdom was in the group. The wisdom was fragmented enough among the individuals. So if you pulled the individuals out,

they'd give disparate accounts. But if you put them all together, they could play the game. But then if you waited till they were 11 or 12, and you pulled them out of the game, then they could tell you the rules. Then at 14 or 15, they would be willing to, this is with more sophisticated games, they would be more willing to regard themselves as makers of the rules. Okay, so here's how it happens in an evolutionary sense. People going all the way back to our primate forebears,

organize themselves into functional hierarchies. Okay, and the hierarchies are complex, and they're not just based on power, despite what the idiot Marxists say. Even DuWal has noted that chimpanzee hierarchies are unstable if they're only based on power. They don't last, they generate into violence. So you have a hierarchy that works,

but it's acted out, No one knows why it works. It works because everyone seems to be happy with it. Okay, and so those hierarchies get more complex and more sophisticated, and then people start to observe them and talk about them. It's like, oh, well, we've got this hierarchy here. What's it like? And then they spin off dramas about the hierarchy. Here's a hero who climbed up the hierarchy, and here's what a hero looks like. Okay, so then you get the idea of hierarchy, and then you get the dramas about the hierarchy. Here's a hero who climbed up the hierarchy, and here's what a hero looks like.

Okay, so then you get the idea of hierarchy, and then you get the idea of the hero as the person who moves up the hierarchy and generates it. Okay, then out of that, you get the extraction of the idea of the hero, and then you get development of that idea, and it's out of that that you get the monotheistic religions. And so it's like the procedure and the hierarchy come first.

No one knows what the rules are. It's all played out the same way that wolves play it out in a pack or chimpanzees play it out in a troop. Then we wake up and think, oh, we live in a structure. Here's the structure. That would be Osiris in the Egyptian mythology. Here's the structure. Here's how the structure goes wrong.

Here's what the structure does. Here's its tyrannical aspect. Here's what you have to do to generate the structure and to thrive in it. Okay, that's even more important. The hierarchy is important enough, but what we want to know is how to master the hierarchy. Okay, that's where you get the mythologies of the hero. Okay. And so then there's generates all sorts of different heroes because there's different ways of being successful. Then you have a panoply of heroes. Then you think, okay, well, now we've got all those heroes. That's a set.

We can pull back and say, okay, something about all these heroes is what makes them heroes. That's when you extract out the monotheistic savior. Because that's why in Christianity, Christ is the king of kings. It's actually, you can think about it as a literal statement. Forget about the religious overlay. It's like, okay, you got a bunch of people. Some of them are kind of king-like. Okay, so you admire them.

It's like, for whatever reason that is. It's not easy to figure out why you admire someone. That's complicated. But let's say you've got admirable people. You start telling stories about them. That's why you go to a movie. Right. You want to go watch someone you don't care about?

You're bored by? No, you want to go watch someone admirable and interesting, or maybe the opposite of that, but it doesn't matter. It's the same thing. Then you think, okay, well, we've got all these admirable people. They're generating the world properly. That's what makes them admirable. There's a principle they embody.

And that principle is the process by which the admirable world is generated. That's the logos. Okay. That's the thing that's operative at the beginning of time. So here's my question about all this, because now we're really not talking about 12 rules for life as much as maps and meaning,

which is your first book, which you're doing the audio, the media, the media. Yeah, and it's definitely a harder book than 12 rules for life in a much more complex book in a lot of ways than 12 rules for life. So how universal are these systems? Meaning, why is it that the Enlightenment only arrives at one time in human history, who in place in human history, as opposed to if human biology is essentially consistent

across humanity, then why is it that, you know, if at the apex of the levels, you end up with the Enlightenment idea, which is where we started this particular question, then why is it that it only arrives in one place at one time as opposed to arriving in a variety of places in a variety of different places? That's a great question. Okay, the first thing we would say is the process by which this, the hierarchy itself, and success within the hierarchy is generated, that's to be accounted over millions of years, at least hundreds, thousands of years, but I would push it back because you can see analogs in the chimps.

So 20 million years, let's say, that's a long time. On that time scale, the fact that the enlightenment values arose in Europe 500 years ago before anywhere else, it's like, well, who cares? It's five old men long, right? If you put five 100-year-old men in line, it's like, it's yesterday. It's this morning. So, we've evolved these hierarchical structures. That's our culture.

We've evolved ways of maneuvering within the hierarchical structures that are successful. And now we've started to evolve ways of mapping our adaptation, not just adapting, but mapping it. Okay, so how does the mapping occur? First, admiration. Second, imitation of admiration. And that would be drama. It's like you dramatize Shakespeare, extracts out what's admirable and interesting and plays it out. So that's the use of the body as a representational structure of the body.

So we act out what's admirable. We think, okay, now we've kind of got the drama down. We're all captured by this drama. It's like, well, then the literary critics come along, the philosophers, and they say, oh, what are the principles by which the admirable people operate? It's like chimps woke up and said, oh, well, some chimps are more successful than others. What are the rules of success? It's like, well, there were no rules because they weren't running by rules. There aren't rules until you describe the patterns. Then you have a rule.

Okay. That's what happens with Moses by the way. Right. Moses has a revelation. Here's the rules. Right. Yeah. We've been living out those rules forever. But we didn't know what they were. Because they weren't rules. They were customs. Right. Okay. So you start by mapping your customs in drama and story. And that way you can represent them and you can transmit them. Then once you have them in your grip, say, they're represented now, not just acted out. Well, then you can move one step backwards from them, and you can say, well, what's the commonalities among these? What are the general principles?

That would be the development of something like the code of hammer-ab-eye, right? It's like, well, we've got all these customs. What are they? Revelation. It's like, oh, here's how you map the customs. That's the decalogue. It's the, oh, here's how you map the customs. That's the decalogue. It's the same idea. So I took human beings a very long time to evolve their hierarchies, to evolve their structures of success, and then to have

enough people around with enough spare time to engage in the cultural process of the artistic cultural process of mapping the adaptive structure. That only merges in mythology and drama. Then that lays the groundwork for philosophy. Then the philosophers could come in, especially once it's written like in the Judeo-Christian pantheon. It's like, oh, now we've got it written down. Oh, well, we don't have to remember it.

We can read it. And while we're reading, we can think about it. And so then out of that starts to come the semantic codes, well, then you get the enlightenment. It's like, oh, well, here's a bunch of semantic codes. It's like, yeah, yeah, those are great. So this is really interesting because, you know, if you read Pinker or if you read General Goldberg's new book, essentially, they attribute the enlightenment to General Goldberg calls it the miracle.

It's almost as though it accidentally occurred in a certain place in a certain time. John doesn't quite go quite that far, I think, to be fair to him. But I think that that philosophy that this sort of sprang up randomly here is very much embedded in a lot of Sam Harris is thinking, a lot of people are thinking. And you're taking it further back. But I do wonder if this may be an area of actual disagreements, which would be fun. Are you attributing the growth of the Judeo-Christian ethic that emerges into the Enlightenment as also accidentally just pushing timeline further back? No, I don't think it's accidental. Okay.

And I'm not making a reduction to argument. So the first thing is I'm going to say this is how religion evolved. But I'm not saying, I'm not saying that this explanation exhausts the phenomenon because it's a very strange phenomenon. It's very, very strange, but that doesn't mean we can't generate a plausible evolutionary account. It's like, if you have a bunch of motivated, emotional, limited beings occupying the same territory and competing and cooperating for the same resources,

including the resource of cooperation which can generate more resources, not a zero-sum game. There are going to be patterns of adaptation that emerge from that that are similar. So here's a way of thinking about it. If you put a bunch of kids together, they're going to evolve games. Well, which games? Well, a bunch of different games. Yeah, but they're all games, right? So even though, so that's the moral relativist element, a bunch of different games, okay. But the moral absoluteest element is, yeah, yeah, but they're all games and the games have to be playable,

which means they have to continue in an iterated way, right? So that's a big constraint. People have to want to play them. So not only do they have to continue in an iterated way. So that's a big constraint. People have to want to play them. So not only do they have to be games, not, and comprehensible to everybody, and enjoyable, but they have to be self-maintaining and everyone has to wanna play them.

Okay, that's the answer to the postmodern conundrum, a plethora of potential ethical implications of the world. An infinite variety. Yeah, okay, fine. Not an infinite variety of pragmatically applicable interpretations. You instantly constrain the universe to what? Well, this is why there's commonalities in mythologies.

It's like if you put enough people together in enough different places, the commonality of the groups of people, because of the grounding in common motivation and emotion and embodiment, which is we're embodied, means that they're gonna generate hierarchies that are broadly similar with strategies of success within those hierarchies that are broadly similar,

with descriptions of the strategies that are broadly similar. And so you could say in some sense, the ethic that gave rise to the enlightenment is in place more or less everywhere. Now it's tricky because not every hierarchical system is as functional as every other hierarchical system. Some of them can degenerate into tyranny. We're talking about the set of all voluntarily playable games, something like that. And that can degenerate.

Out of that, you're going to get common hero myths. You have to. And then that lays the groundwork. That lays the groundwork for even our ability to communicate. Right, right. And this is the enlightenment guys. They're not getting that. So, and this gets to, I think, the broader question that I know you and Sam went on for

three hours about the nature of truth, because particularly truth in the moral sphere. I think that, um, I'm, would be fair to say that you guys agree on the idea of truth in the scientific sphere that, that, you know, if something is, that there is such a thing as objective truth, or are you more? I would say we agree on a lot of that, that the question is, to some degree, why do scientists accept the idea that objective truth is true? And then I would say, we probably don't agree idea that objective truth is true? And then I would say, we probably don't agree about that, because I would ground that in pragmatism, and Sam would ground out in the idea of an independently existing objective world. Right, which is a leap of faith more like my own actually than the pragmatist view, right?

And if you believe that there's a God who's out there in the universe who created the structures in a particular certain way, then what he created is the truth, and it is apart from you. If human beings didn't exist and they weren't able to utilize the truth, that truth would still exist out there, whereas the pragmatist might say, it's truth is in the use that it has for human beings to exist. Well, well, that's the thing. I don't know if we would consider scientific truth true unless we are also simultaneously accepting the idea that scientific truth is good for people.

So there's one other thing I wanted to bring up that's relevant because you brought up the idea of God. So here's a way of thinking about it. And I don't know what to make of this because this is stretching me, this is stretching my thoughts out beyond where I've been able to develop them. So this is the intuition that I have based on a variety of things, experiences I've had. So imagine that there's a very wide range of human behaviors. Okay. And some subset of those are both admirable and not admirable. So let's call them good and evil at the extreme. Okay. Then we might say, well, there's a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are good, and a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are evil.

And that's a transpersonal pattern because it's not just about you or me. It's about everyone. Okay, and so then that gets personified. That's Christ and Satan, let's say, or Cain and Abel, right? That gets personified. And that's a bad guy and a good guy in a movie. Like it's personified all the time. It's Thor and Loki, you know, in the

Marvel movies, you know. So now you have the, let's say you take the idea of Christ and you think, okay, so that's the abstraction of everything that's admirably good about the set of all human behaviors. Okay, and then you think, well, what sort of reality does that have? And this pulls back into the reality of the idea of the logos and the idea that it was the logos that God used at the beginning of time to extract order out of chaos. So you think, well, it's transpersonal, the goodness, because it's not just characterized, stick of any one person. It's more like something that inhabits a person rather than that a person is.

You can really see this, for example, on the other end too, with the satanic end, because if you read the writings of people who do absolutely horrific things like the shooters, you can see that possession extraordinarily clearly. If your eyes are open, it's like, and it's shocking so people don't usually look at it. And they even say that themselves,

like the Columbine kids, their writings are hair raising, you know, and they were clearly possessed by an evil that you only encounter. If you sit in a dark place and brood on your hatred for months and years, right, you go places that, you go places where all the dark people go. Right. And then that takes you over. Okay. So the good can take you over as well.

Okay. So there's this spirit of good, let's say. And what the spirit of good does is act in the world on the potential of the world to generate the actuality of the world. And the Judeo-Christian proposition is that if you confront the potential of the world. And the Judeo-Christian proposition is, is that if you confront the potential of the world with good in mind using truth, truthful communication, then the order that you extract is good. And then that's echoed in Genesis when God is using the word and he creates cosmos out of potential. And every time he does that, he says, and it was good, which is, I think it's so interesting because there's a proposition there. And the proposition there is that if you encounter potential with truth, the cause most

you create is actually good. Well, that's just an absolutely overwhelming idea. It's like, if it's true, if it's true, it's the greatest idea that river was. Yeah. You're thoughts on this actually from maps of meaning, help generate what we in in Judaism called Zvartora and Hebrew reading the thought about the Bible. But this merged with a little bit of Aristotelian thought led me to the idea that when it comes to the mystical notion

of the tree of good and evil in Eden, what is that supposed to be? What did people do wrong by eating from the tree of good and evil? And my feeling is that what they did wrong is that God created a universe in which the value was embedded in the object. Right? In the same way that you in your book talk about if you're teaching a child about an object, the rules of the object are embedded in the teaching about the object. So you use the example of a vase, we were discussing this earlier, but you use the example of a vase where you teach a child, don't touch the vase because the vase will break. So that the rule is embedded in the object in the same way. In Aristotelian thought, the rules for behavior are embedded in the nature of the universe,

meaning what makes a man good is what makes a man unique, which is a reason. The idea is that reason is what makes a man unique. So acting in accordance with right reason is what makes something is what makes an action good. So if you believe that God created the universe along these lines, and that what natural law is, is just the human attempt to understand the lines along which God created the universe, then where human beings went wrong is when they decided to separate values from the universe. When we decided to take values and say this is a completely separate thing,

so this vase has no rules attached to it anymore, it's just a vase. And we can instruct the rules arbitrarily as to what thing. So this vase has no rules attached to it anymore. It's just a vase. And we can construct the rules arbitrarily as to what to do with this vase. And so eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil changes the nature of good and evil from the universe comes along with a set of rules to human beings think that they can use their own intuition to supplant God's rules and to supplant universal rules

with their own particular vision of what the universe ought to be. And at that point, they have to be expelled. Yeah, well, okay. Okay. So that's also associated to some degree. I would say with Milton's warning and paradise laws, because Milton basically portrays Lucifer, who's the bringer of light, weirdly enough, as the spirit of unbridled rationality, which accounts for, to say, the Catholic church antagonism, the Catholic Church antagonism towards rationality. The idea was, same idea in the Tower of Babel, that human beings have a proclivity to erect their own dogmatic ethical systems,

and then to expand them into a grandiosity that challenges the transcendent and that that's a totalitarian catastrophe. And for Milton, Satan was the spirit that eternally does that, right? Who says, everything I know is enough. And that's a plants what I don't know. That's a plants that transcendent. And that's a catastrophe.

How that's tangled up with the knowledge of good and evil while you're making some headway towards sorting that out. I mean, there is a cataclysm that's explained in, in the story of Adam and Eve, right? The cataclysm is the coming to, to wakefulness. And it's associated partly with recognition of nakedness, which is recognition of vulnerability and mortality and the discovery of death.

And then also the discovery of good and evil that goes along with that. So you said, well, that's partly the, the cognitive division of ethics from the facts of the object. So I have to think that through. I would also recommend to people, I think I mentioned this before, is Ian McGilkess book in the Master of Neumissary because he looks at this neuropsychologically, right?

And looks at the left hemisphere as the hemisphere that's dealing with the explicitly axiomatic systems and the right hemisphere that's dealing with the explicitly axiomatic systems and the right hemisphere that's dealing with what those systems are embodied in. Okay, so part of what happens with the emergence of good and evil as far as I could tell, it took me a long time to think about this is that, and this is different than the hypothesis that you laid forward, which is why I can't reconcile them exactly as you recognize your naked. You know you can be hurt. You know you're vulnerable and insufficient. You hide from God because that's what happens next. And the reason you hide from God, say, God is your destiny or God is the you're walking with God as a manifestation of your ultimate proper

destiny. You doubt whether you're capable of that because now you realize your embodied finitude, your nakedness and insufficiency. So you hide and you're ashamed. So there's that. You also realize that you can be hurt and suffer. And that kind of goes along with God's command that you're going to work in the sweat of your brow and that you're going to die. And that women are going to be subjugated to men, which is put on as a curse, not as a moral imperative, right? Right. But then what emerges out of that is that as soon as you know that you can be hurt, this

is what differentiates us for animals. And you really think that through. Here's all the myriad ways I can be hurt. Then you're angry about that because you can be hurt, but even worse, you can figure out how to hurt other people. And so that's part of that knowledge of good and evil. You associated with this dissociation of the object from its ethical container.

The universe has created by God from our interpretation of the universe, that there is a gap between the two and that once human beings begin to supplant their own rationality for attilos, right? In the Aristotelian theology. You know, we end up doing is creating all sorts of rationality for attilos, right? In the Aristiliology? You know, we end up doing this creating all sorts of

awful systems that end up destroying us in the end of the day. There's something about that that's right. I mean, part of what happens in the new testament, as far as I can tell, is that what Christ says, so he's trying to transcend the rule structure. Right? Not because there's anything wrong with the rules.

There are necessary precondition for discipline, which is actually why wrote 12 rules, right? Like you need rules, but there, but rules conflict and they don't always apply. And so there has to be an ethic underlying the rules, and you should have more respect for the ethic than for the rules. Right. Okay. Christ's idea, and this is part of the idea of the reestablishment of paradise, is that you should orient yourself towards the good. And that's something like an alliance with God and then that you should tell the truth. And that's the ethic that generated the rules to begin with. Okay, and then we could be serious about this, you know, and we could say, well, how do you adjudicate the reality of that claim?

All right, so then we might think, well, we already walked through the fact that the heroes of the past acted on potential to extract out the world of actuality. And if they did that properly, then the world they extracted was good. And that that is a divine principle. And then we might say, well, is it a divine principle? And you might say, well, what is it that's acting through people in the good? Like the Christian's theological answer to that would be the logos, right? That's the idea. That's the idea of the Holy Spirit, roughly speaking. Right. I think, well, is that a real thing?

It's like, well, to me, it's real the same way that consciousness is real. And we don't know the role of consciousness in determining reality, even, but even if you're an evolutionary biologist. And this is so interesting because the evolutionary biologists actually discriminate, differentiated themselves from Darwin on this point. Like Darwin was very, very forthright in his claim that sexual selection was as powerful as natural selection or even more so. And so that, so here's where this, that, those. And because that was, because that brought consciousness into the world as an active player, the materialistic evolutionary biologist ignored that. So like 150 years and only

concentrated on natural selection where they could play, well, this is all chance. It's like sexual selection is not chance. Okay, so here's a hypothesis. Human being separated themselves from chimpanzees. One of the reasons they did that was because human females are sexually selective. Chimps aren't. Chimps will, female chimps in estrus will mate with any chimps. The main chimps, the dominant ones,

chase the subordinate males away. So they're more likely to have offspring, but it's not because of female choice. Right. Now, human females have done this whole different thing. Is that they've, they've, they have hidden fertility, and they're much more likely to go after guys who have climbed up the hierarchy.

So let's say heroes will give the women some credit for intelligence, right? And say that that's what they're after, even if they're using wealth and so forth. And status as a marker, they're actually using those as a marker for competence. Yes, it's standard. And I think that's, I think the evidence for that is clear. Okay, so you might say, oh, well, it was human female conscious choice that selected us. Okay, and you think, well, that's not random. That's not random at all. It's the farthest thing from random that there is.

And that means consciousness is making its choices with regards to what propagates, but then it's even more complex than that. So here's what happens among men. The men all get together in their hierarchy. They posit a valued goal. They all accept that as the goal because otherwise they wouldn't be cooperating, right? Then they arrange themselves into a hierarchy and they let the most competent guys lead because they want to get to, they want to get to the promised land. They want to get the most competent leaders leading right competent defined by that value. Okay, so here's what happens essentially. The men all get together and

vote on the good man and the good man are then chosen by the women and those are the people who propagate. And so it's like men are voting on which men get to reproduce and women are going along with the vote and being even more stringent in their in their choices, let's say. And so then what you get is that the consciousness that through its active expression transforms the potential of the world into actuality, also selects the direction of evolution. Right, and that's where the meme, Dawkins' term, turns into the biological reality. It's not interesting.

So yeah, this is something that's so cool about Dawkins. It's like, I've often thought this about Dawkins is if he would push his thinking to the limits, he would fall right into Jung, well, and then he'd be lost, because that's a whole other universe. But if you take that mean seriously, like, and I mean really seriously, think, yeah, there's some ways of conceptualizing that become so all-encompassing that they, yeah, that's right, they start to become an actual force of evolution itself. And so then, here's the case you can make. Consciousness

extracts the proper world of being from potential through truth and then it's good. It's like, okay, that's our hard one, man. That manifests itself in human beings at the individual level of individual consciousness. That's the logos within. That's the metaphysical foundation of the idea of natural right and responsibility. Okay, that's a bloody killer idea. That's expressed in the hero of heroes, that idea. That hero of heroes is the driving force behind human evolution. So not only do you get the action of the logos metaphysically as the process that extracts order out of chaos at the beginning of time, you also get it as the major driver of evolution.

And so then you ask, okay, then what kind of reality does that have? Because you chase consciousness back, and like it disappears into the mystery of the past, and we have no idea what its relationship is with matter. But it's the force that gives rise to the cosmos and drives evolution. It's like you're getting pretty close to God there. Yeah, even just pragmatically speaking. And you're certainly, you know, not close to, but in the midst of an argument about free will. Because obviously, if you make the hard-determined argument that free will doesn't exist,

and the consciousness is merely a sort of trick that your brain is playing in itself, then how exactly does... how does culture propagate? How do these memes propagate? How are people choosing sexual selection and natural selection become one of the same as soon as you boil sexual selection down to natural selection? Well, and also I think the free will argument,

I mean, I see why Harris gets tangled up in that, you know, because, well, first of all, deterministic arguments are unbelievably powerful. And when we use deterministic models for many things, they really were. Right. So you could say, well, we're going to use that by default. It's like fair enough. We're going to deviate from that with care. But I don't see people as driven like clocks winding down. First of all, we don't wind down in any simple way. We're dissipate of structures to use,

he wrote, trodinger, what is life? A human being is a dissipate of structure. We're not an end-tropic structure like a clock running down. We are in some sense, but as living beings, we pull energy in. And so we're not winding down like a deterministic structure.

We're something other than that. And the way we treat each other is as logos as far as I can tell. The way I treat myself, if I'm going to be good to myself in the proper sense, is that I'm an active agent of choice confronting an infinite landscape of potential and casting that potential into a reality for good or for even. Right. And if I treat myself that way, then I have proper respect for myself and proper fear of myself

because I can make bad decisions and warp the structure of reality. And I think if you read Frankl for example, or Solzhenitsa, and you see how your bad decisions can warp the structure of reality, then that wakes you up, right? Okay, so there's that. If you don't treat yourself like an active agent, imbued with logos, then your life doesn't go well. But more, if you don't treat other people that way, they do not want to play with you. If we set up societies that aren't predicated on the idea that people are like that, then the societies become, they dissolve or they become totalitarian almost

instantly. So then I would say, well, you've got the problem of determinism, it's like fair enough, man. How do you reconcile the fact that if you lay out a society at every level of the analysis on strict deterministic grounds, it fails. So doesn't that mean your hypothesis has a flaw? I mean, maybe not, maybe you can say, no, the facts are independent of the ethical consequences. Right, exactly. This is where the truth pragmatism question

comes back into being right. Because I must say, well, it's true regardless of what the effect is. And you would say, well, it's obviously not true if morals are constructed for a pragmatic reason. And if this pragmatism doesn't work, it falls into nothingness. Well, it also, it also depends to some degree on what you're willing to, how you're willing to test your hypothesis. Because I might say, well, if your hypothesis is factually correct, wouldn't you assume that if people based their, their, their, their behaviors, individually and familial and socially on that set of facts, which is basically what Sam claims about facts to be

been with, if you based your ethos onos on those facts, wouldn't it work? Right. Well, he claims that that's a test. And I would say, well, then it fails that test. It doesn't work. We have to treat each other like divine centers of consciousness in order for society to work. Yes. And I think, well, that's, I can't see any way out of those arguments. Yeah, I can't see their obviously, which is why you and I agree on so much about this kind of stuff. And I think that it's also the reason why people find your work really inspiring.

And while the left wants to claim that you are an angry person, they'll claim similarly that I'm a deeply angry person. I don't think there's been quite an angry conversation. I'm pretty sure it has not been. But I'm horrified by what the radical left is capable of, but that doesn't make me angry. Exactly. And I think that it's demonstrative

of why so many people find what you're doing inspiring because unlike the radical left, which is consumed with the idea of victimhood and victimology and were victims of the system, like Marxism makes the claim that the only way that people suck is the claim that Marxism makes, but the only way to cure people of sucking is by changing the entire system,

which will in some magical fashion transform the nature of humanity in the proper direction. Right, exactly. The claim that you're making, and I hope that I'm making as well, is that human beings do suck unless they decide to stop sucking. Right, and your whole goal is to tell people exactly how it is that they can clean up their rooms with your famous phrase goods. Yeah, well, they might as well start with what's right in front of them.

It's a lot harder than it looks, because to clean up your room means to accept that it's actually necessary for you to take that little bit of chaos that's in front of you, that chaotic potential and cast it into habitable order. And then you have to develop the right attitude towards that. It's like, okay, well, I'm going to put my room in order. Well, what do you mean? Order is in relationship to something. You know, like if your desk is ordered, it means you've ordered it because you're going to work there and you're working there on something valuable. And so the order is conceived of in relationship to a T-loss. It's like, okay, you're going to order your room. Well, what are you going

to do in it? Like, what's your room for? What's the purpose? What's the purpose? You can't order your room without falling into purpose. And I would say, well, if you're going to fall into purpose, it's like, try it out on a local scale first, right? You don't want to go out there and change the system. It's like, what the hell do you know? Leave the system alone. See what you can do locally.

See if you can put yourself together. See if you can put your immediate environment together. And you'll find, if you're in a chaotic household, and a chaotic household would be one where no one has any discipline, no one has any aims, and there's a terrible battle between cane and able going on all the time, right? So, so life sucks and everything's miserable and we're cynical and that's what wisdom is. It's like, and there's no point in trying anything because everything's meaningless

and who the hell's gonna care in a million years, and you're a fool to move forward in any case. It's like, there's your household. Okay, and so now you decide, no, despite all that, I'm going to put my room in order. It's like, you will have a war on your hands. Because the first thing the people around you who are aiming down will do is think,

oh, you really, eh? You think you're so much better than we are, do you? You really think that. You and your fancy goddamn plans. It's like, we're gonna put every psychological obstacle we can possibly think of in your way. Because if you succeed, even in something that trivial, you shed a very dim light on our existence.

And so we're gonna put, we're gonna do everything we can to take you out. And so this people think, oh, we're going to do everything we can to take you out. And so this people think, oh, well, cleaning your room, that's just a cliche. It's like, yeah, really, I just go ahead and try it. You see how much of a cliche that is. And if you've got your room in order, then put your office in order. See, and then you're going to encounter the, as soon as you do that, you step out into the social world, you're going to encounter the antipathy between men and women. You're going to encounter the identity politics in the workplace. You're gonna encounter how you regulate your sexual morality while you're working with people of the opposite sex. You're gonna

encounter the ethics that are necessary to move your business forward. It's like the whole, it's a microcosm. It really is. And so to take those microcosm, cause them seriously, well, that's what I'm asking people to do. And I'm saying, look, it isn't only about you being happy. It's like, yeah, whatever, happy. There's lots of times in your life you're not going to be happy. And so that's not going to work. You want to have something meaningful. That's the, the boat that will take you through the storm, right? When you batten down the hatches. But there's more. It just isn't even that. It isn't even me.

Meaningful, engaged life will see you through the catastrophes, even though that's a big deal, right? That's a great proposition. And I really believe it's true because you can say to yourself, yeah, it's worth it, right? And great. But there's the other part of it too, which is, don't be thinking that your errors aren't linked to hell

because they are. If you look at what happened in the 20th century, the brilliant commentators on the 20th century totalitarian states and all of their atrocities said the same thing over and over. It isn't top-down, evil leader manipulating innocent masses. That's not it. It's the moral failings of every single individual, unwilling to say their truth, unwilling to act out what they know to be right, that accumulate and produce the catastrophic state. And so when you're fussing about with your life,

when you're not manifesting your potential, when you're falsifying your speech and your actions in the service of short-term experience, you are working to bring about hell on earth. And that's true. It's true literally. And then it's true. It's, I suspect, it's also true metaphorically. And that's a real truth, man.

When you get the literal and the metaphorical working at the same time, it's like, that's, that's real. So it isn't just that you have to fix up yourself so that you can have a better life. It's like, who cares about you for a moment? You know, it's you have to fix up your life because if you don't, every time you make a mistake, that you know to be a mistake,

you're leading the world toward hell. And I believe that. I think it's true. Well, Jordan Peterson's book is 12 Rules for Life. Honestly, we could do this all day long and we'll certainly have you back. I really appreciate's true. Well, Jordan Peterson's book is 12 Rules for Life. Honestly, we could do this all day long and we'll certainly have you back. I really appreciate the time. There's a reason so many people follow Jordan.

There's some reason so many people are buying this book, the book is fantastic. And his other book, Maps and Meeting, is also fantastic. So I wouldn't get a copy of that as well. Jordan, thanks so much for stopping by, really appreciate it. Thanks, Ben. This is great.

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