The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Defense Against Ideological Possession

Episode Date: January 12, 2020

Here is the first episode of 2020. A Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life lecture from Australia. Recorded 02/082019 Thanks to our sponsors! https://www.butcherbox.com/jbp https://www.capterra.com/jbp https://helixsleep.com/jordan http://trybasis.com/jordan/

Welcome to season 2, episode 41 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator. Happy New Year! We took a much needed two week break, but we're vaguely back at it. Peterson updates. Andre and I are back together. That makes me incredibly happy, and life could certainly be worse. I'm recording this from Moscow, Russia. We're here for the next month or so with Dad.

It's beautiful and completely unlike what I was expecting. It's much fancier than anywhere I've seen in North America, and the food and culture is amazing. Today's episode is a 12-year-old's for life lecture recorded in Perth, Australia on February 8, 2019, named Defense Against Ideological Possession. If you guys haven't checked out Dad's E-course, Discovering Personality with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, it's available at JordanB Peterson.com slash personality and has over five hours of university level video lecture material. Check it out at JordanVPeterson.com slash personality. Enjoy the podcast. Defense against ideological possession.

A Jordan V. Peterson 12 rules for life lecture. Nice, welcome and it's also not 35 below here. That's a good combination of events. It was really, really horribly cold when I was in Toronto, like two days ago. Yeah, I don't know why people live there. So, well, thank you all for coming. I'm very happy to be here. The Australia tour looks like it's, well, it's just starting. So we'll see how it goes.

But people seem enthusiastic. The venues are selling out, and some of them are very large. So I don't know what it is about you Australians, but you seem to be starved for whatever it is that we're going to be doing tonight. So I guess we'll see how that goes. So I've got lots of things I'm really interested in talking to you about tonight.

I thought what I would do to sort of warm up is because it's been a little while since I've spoken to a large audience. And I thought I'd just walk through the rules. And then I want to go underneath them and lay out a conceptual structure that I've been working on for a very long time. It's a psychological structure.

And I think it's unbelievably useful. I've often thought about it with my classes. What I've thought, the way I've conceptualized what I've been doing for 30 years is to provide people with a defense against ideological possession. It's something like that because the possibility of being possessed by an ideology is extraordinarily high. I mean, first of all, we tend to be trapped by our own biases. Some of that's just temperamental, right? Because you have a particular way of looking at the world.

And you're going to be trapped by that. Now, there's advantages to that, too, because there's advantages to looking at the world, the way you look at the world. But it also lays you open for blind spots. And then there's the fact that you just bloody well, don't know anything, right? I mean, there's so much of the world you don't understand. It's amazing that you can even walk across the street, you know, because it's so complicated and it's worse than that because

you don't even know how much you don't know. Because the expanse is so vast and so you're trapped by your own ignorance as well. And then you're trapped by your willful blindness because, well, maybe you know you need to learn things, but it's really hard to learn things and it's really easy not to learn them, right? Because to not learn something all you have to do is just sit there and not learn things. And that's really, my man, some of you did that

for like 12 years in school, right? And so it's really easy not to do that. And then there are more subtle reasons that you might get hijacked as well too. I mean, one of the things that struck me is that one of the ways you can distinguish between a genuine, I think, religious view of the world. I don't mean one that's necessarily predicated on a belief in God. I mean, I'm thinking about a religious viewpoint

from a psychological perspective. That's a reasonable thing to do, because we know that religious experience is part and parcel of the universal human experience. And we don't know what that says about the metaphysics of reality. You know, there's no way of determining it, but we certainly do know that people are prone to religious beliefs and that they are definitely biologically capable

of a wide range of religious experiences. And a religious viewpoint presents a certain view of the world. It's a comprehensive view of the world. And what happens in the case of ideologies is that ideologies hijack parts of that. So they take a complete story that's very compelling in its fundamental essence, which is, of course, why religious stories have potency

and why they last for a very long time, and they take a piece of it and make it the whole thing. And so that's a lot of reasons to be possessed by ideology. Now, the problem with that is that as far as I can tell is that you really have to deal with the whole world, you know, because there it is, it's right in front of you, the whole world with all its complexity. And if you've simplified it in a biased manner, which means that you inappropriately ignored some arbitrary proportion of it, you're going to get flattened because of that.

Because you're going to have blind spots. Like, this is a stupid example, but it's the best one I've been able to think up in like 25 years. I mean, imagine just for the sake of argument that you didn't believe in white vans that approached you from the left. You believed in everything else, but not that. You know what I mean? That means that you've comprehended a lot of the world, but now and then you're going to step off the curb and you're just going to get flattened. And you're going to wake up wondering,

like what the hell is going on? I just, I just ended up flattened, but you don't believe in white vans approaching you from the left, so you never learn, and then you're okay for another five years and then you step off the curve and smack, you know, and it's this small blind spot, well, it's not that small, but it's this blind spot that's characteristic of the way you're thinking. And because of that, the world, which contains that thing that you're blind about takes you out on a regular

basis. And then you can imagine you'd sit up in your hospital bed all bandaged up in your in your in your in your casts and your and your intravenous drips and you'd think, Jesus, this is one miserable cosmos. Always doing this thing to me and I've done nothing to deserve it. It's like, well, you know, you have a blind spot and this is something that's really, like I said, it's a foolish example in some sense, but it's a concept that's really worth thinking about because you never know how much the reason that you're getting taken out by reality is because you have a blind spot. And it's sad to think that way because you think, oh my god, I've got a blind spot and

you know, there's real serious repercussions that are associated with that and isn't that unfair. But on other hand, it's actually a really optimistic idea because it could be that the reason you keep getting taken out is because you have a blind spot. And that's actually unbelievably optimistic because what it means is that if you could just figure out what the blind spot was and then go through the work

of fixing it because it's not just that you recognize it and then it's fixed. It's more complicated than that, but maybe, maybe, and this is like the only optimistic thought I know. Maybe the reason that you keep getting taken out is because there's some important things that you either don't know or refuse to know. You think, oh my God, that could be the case if I, if I just knew more, or if I was just willing to know more, and maybe even in a radical way, that

a lot of the terrible things that are happening to me, that are undermining my faith, let's say, and myself and in other people and in the world, maybe even in existence itself, maybe that would, well, maybe not vanish, but maybe it would be ameliorated. And that's something, right? It's like there's always the possibility that there's something about your own ignorance that's actually causing a substantial proportion of your misery. And God, that would be so wonderful if that was the case because there's this story in a book called The Cocktail Party, which is by T.S. Eliot. It's a play.

And in the play, there's a woman who talks to a psychiatrist at the party asking for free medical advice to some degree. And she tells him, like you might tell a psychiatrist, that she's having a pretty damn miserable time of it. You know, and there's real reason to have a miserable time of it. And some people have some real reasons to have a miserable time of it, man.

And she said, I'm having a bad time of it. And she says, I want to talk to you, because I hope there's something wrong with me. And the psychiatrist is kind of taking it back. And he says, well, why are you hoping that there's something wrong with you? And she says, well, this is the way I look at it. I've got two choices here. I'm having a pretty damn brutal time of it. And so on the one hand, it's because the world is the way it is, and that's just how it is,

man. I'm stuck with it. And that's just not good, because what am I going to do? I'm not going to change the structure of reality. Or maybe you change it a little bit, but you probably just make it worse. But if it's me, if I'm doing something wrong and it's sort of systematic, and I find out what it is that I'm doing wrong, and I fix it, then maybe things would get better. And like that's a hell of a thing to think. Because, you know, and here's what makes it so believable,

I think, is that, yeah, bloody well-know that there's a bunch of things that you're not doing as well as you could be doing. I don't just mean not putting in as much effort as you could. That's common as hell, you know, or maybe not putting in any effort, or being cynical, you know, or having rationalizations or lying to yourself, all of that.

There's God, there's a thousand reasons why you're not putting your best foot forward, you know, and just in terms of inaction, but then there's also all of the things that you know that you're doing wrong. I don't mean by some arbitrary ethical standard, although you can use that. It's not such a bad idea. I mean, if a hundred people think that you're doing something wrong, maybe you are, maybe not, like maybe you're the one guy that's right and they're all wrong.

Sometimes that happens, not bloody well very often. And I wouldn't assume it as a rule of thumb, but sometimes it's true, but I'm talking more about those errors of conscience, let's say, that you, that you are judged jury and executioner with regards to yourself for, so that if no one said anything and no one asked you, you would still know in your heart of hearts that there were things that you were doing that were wrong. And you're still doing them. And so then that open question is,

what would happen if you stopped doing them? You know, and what would happen if you stopped being willfully blind? You know, and so, and started to look at the things you know you need to look at. That's a big one. That's a sin of omission. I really think those things do people in. You get a hint from your nervous system.

It's low level, embodied, something's wrong here. And that's a call to action, right? That maybe that wakes you up at three in the morning and a bit of a sweat, and you think, something's wrong. What? Well, who knows, man? Who the hell knows what's wrong? Maybe you have to argue with yourself for a month before you figure it out, or maybe

you have to have a fight with your wife and your kids, and all your family before you have any sense of what's wrong. Like, figuring out what's wrong, even if you know that something's wrong, that's not easy. Getting that question formulated is very difficult. But man, if you went through all that work, especially once you know you have to, because you feel guilty or because you feel ashamed or because you feel afraid, because you wake up in a cold sweat or because you don't want to go to work or because you're avoiding things that you know you should be doing or because you're bitter or because you're cynical because you want to turn away

because the joy is going out of your life. You know something's rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak, and then you know that if you dug into it, you'd find something you have bloody well, don't want to find because of course when you really have something to learn, this is one of the terrible things about life, when you really have something to learn, this is one of the terrible things about life. When you really have something to learn, it's always something that you really don't want to learn. And the reason for that is, well, if it was easy to learn and you wanted to learn it,

you already learned it. So of course, all that's left over are the things that you don't want to pay attention to and you don't want to learn. There's this old idea from the story of King Arthur. King Arthur and his knights, they're all around the round table and that kind of makes them equal. You know, there's a king and all that, but they're still equal. And they're knights, they're tough guys, man. You know, you think about those knights? I don't know what was with those people.

They were completely out of their mind. I mean, in case themselves at Iron was heavy, they had to use some sort of ratchet system, get themselves up on their horse, because they were so heavy they couldn't get on their horse by themselves. They had to use stirrups. You know, you couldn't have knights without stirrups. Stirrups actually changed the world, because they allowed armored men to be on horses.

And that's bad, you're armored. And the reason being armored is bad is because, well, you need to be armored, right? There's a reason you're armored. That's not so good. And then, you know, they used to run at each other with these massive bloody horses, with these huge sticks, like solid rock hard sticks, and try to knock each other off the horse. Can you actually imagine doing that? Jesus, we're so pathetic.

Modern people are so pathetic. Well, God, that's just so. It's completely, it's almost completely beyond comprehension that you would not only do that, but maybe look forward to it. It's like, oh good, another jostling match, you know? Maybe I can get my head not clean off this time. So, anyways, ways back to facing what's difficult. You know, this is what I wanted to talk about tonight. It's about all about this optimistic idea that there's an... I see in my work, in my psychology work, my intellectual work,

I've always tried to do one thing. If I have an idea, I try to take the bloody thing apart because I know that you use ideas to act. Ideas are the guidelines to action. This is a good thing to know too about ideas because you might think about ideas as representations of the world. You know, we tend to think of ourselves as scientists, and we tend to think of science as the only

way of thinking, but we don't really think like scientists. We really think like engineers. We're much more interested in how to act in the world than we are in how to represent the world. It's part of the reason why we had engineers way before we had scientists, right? So an engineer is concerned about how to act in the world. And an idea is an abstract representation of how you might act in the world.

And we even know this neurophysiologically. One of the things I like to do, you know, if I have an idea, I like to see if the thing stacks up from a variety of different intellectual perspectives, you know, like if it works anatomically, well that's one bit of evidence, if it works neurochemically, that's another bit of evidence,

if it works behaviorally, that's another bit. If there are mythological or dramatic stories that represent it, that's another bit. If there are mythological or dramatic stories that represent it, that's another bit of evidence. If it works practically in the clinical realm, then that's another bit of evidence. And now, and then you get lucky, and you find an idea that stacks up across all those levels, and you think, God, there's got to be something to it.

It's just too much triangulation. It's like all five of your senses are saying the same thing. It's probably there. Well, and so it is with this idea, the one I'm trying to lay out is that it's an idea and some sense of radical ignorance and sin, strange word, sin, that's an old word. It's from a Greek word, hamartia,

sounds nothing like sin, by the way. And it's an archery term, and it means to miss the target, which is a lovely way of thinking about it, especially if you're thinking about it in terms of action, right? There's a target you're supposed to hit. You wouldn't be moving forward in the world if there wasn't a target you were supposed to hit. You might not know what the bloody target is. You might not have it specified very well, which is a target, you were supposed to hit. You might not know what the bloody target is. You might not have it specified very well,

which is a mistake, by the way, because your target, you should specify it to miss the target is to sin. Well, how do you miss the target? Well, you don't have a target. There is problem number one. You're not aiming at anything. And problem number two is that it's vague. Problem number three is you don't have a bow.

Problem number four is you don't draw it back. Problem five is you close your eyes when you shoot. You know, or maybe you're afraid of hitting the target because then people expect you to hit the target, you know, another time, right? Because you build up expectations that way. God only knows there's all sorts of reasons to fail to do it. Anyways, I've been looking for ideas that constitute solid ground with regards to moving forward in the world. Things that I can't undermine, you know,

no matter how hard I question, I can't get underneath them. And I'll tell you, it's very difficult to find a set of ideas that's more believable than that you are more ignorant and malevolent than you could be if you were operating optimally in the world. I just can't believe, I don't think I've ever found anyone in my life just can't believe, I don't think I've ever found anyone in my

life who doesn't believe that. You know, like maybe in casual conversation you'd deny it, but if you have a serious conversation with someone for like a week or a month about the way their lives are going, you know, it's pretty clear. Here's a bunch of things I'm not doing as well as I could be doing. And here's a bunch of really stupid things I did in the past, and maybe I'm still doing, and that I'm planning to do in the future, that I know perfectly well are going to screw me up in 50 different ways, and I'm still going to do them.

And that's the human condition. So, and so the optimistic derivation from that is, well, what if you got a little better at not doing those things? How much better would things be around you? And I think that's a fundamental question. And the reason I think that, apart from the fact, on the negative side, which I've kind of laid out here, is like, you know, there's all sorts of reasons to be sort of unhappy or perhaps contemptuous about people because we're not everything we could be, and we're a bunch of things we shouldn't be. And that's undeniable, I believe.

But then on the opposite is we're really quite remarkable creatures. You know, there's as much on the positive end as there is on the negative end. And that's saying a lot, man, because there's plenty on the negative end. Like it's heat up high. You know, if you know anything about history, which you probably don't want to know anything about history, which is why most people don't know much about history, it's pretty much a bloody nightmare. It's a deep dark abyss of catastrophe.

And so that's what, it's almost intolerable, the deeper you look into it, but as deep and dark as that intolerability is, there's something that shines out of that, which is, well, the potential for people to overcome all that, which in the main we have. And so for all that darkness, there's light. And it's a really nice thing to know, too, because it can make you somewhat less afraid of the darkness. And there's plenty of bloody reason

to be afraid of the darkness. If you have some sense that no matter how deep you delve, let's say, into your own shortcomings, but even worse than that into the shortcomings of humanity itself, that out of that will emerge something optimistic, which is a clear-headed recognition that despite what we are, we can, we have the ability to transcend it. And then all of that pessimism transforms into something optimistic and not stupidly optimistic. Like, we're all good. It's like, no, we're not.

Children are born good. No, they're not. The world's a benevolent place and people are basically nice. No. Wrong. That's an ideology, right? And it's one that's born of fear. nicely nice, no, wrong. That's an ideology, right? And it's one that's born of fear. It's born of the unwillingness to face things the way they bloody will are.

And that's not good because if you don't face the way things the way they are, then you don't draw out of yourself the capability to deal with the world as it is, and then to improve it, perhaps, to move it beyond its current, intolerable state. And so you have this moral obligation, I think, to look at things, to look at the darkest part of things. And then in the faith that the darker the place you look, the more likely it is that you'll find something that's a true light, because it could only be a true light that would shine in that sort of darkness.

And that's the sort of light you want. You don't want one that flickers when things are, you know, a little rough. And you certainly want, don't want something that goes out when things get really rough. You want something that stays bright when things are as bad as they can be. And they can be really bad. And so if there is a light that can stay on when things are really bad, well, then, then you have some grounds for, I would say, an intelligent and wise hope. And Jesus, it would be lovely to be able to have an intelligent and wise hope as the fundamental grounding of your existence.

Back to King Arthur. So it's a complicated story. You know, the Knights, Monty Python notwithstanding. You know, the Knights of the Round Table are off to look for the Holy Grail. And they don't know what the hell the Holy Grail is. There's different variants of the story. One idea is the Holy Grail is, there's different variants of the story.

One idea is the Holy Grail is the cup that Christ used at the last supper to drink wine when He announced that His blood was wine and His body was bread, very, very strange thing to say. But one that people haven't forgotten, perhaps at least in part, because of its strangeness. It's actually more, it's actually deeper than that, you know, it's an, it's not believably deep idea that it's an archaic idea. So the idea is that you can, by ingesting something, you can transform yourself into that thing. It's a really old idea, like thousands and thousands of years old, and that particular strange twist of Christian drama calls on that ancient idea to suggest

that if you think in the Western canon, again, this is a psychological perspective that whatever Christ represents is an ideal that whatever you can do to incorporate the ideal is redemptive, to become that. It's the same as the idea in the Christian mass. It's like, why do you eat the wafer? The idea is so that you become that. It's a moral injunction. It's like, whatever the ideal is,

you can think about that however you want. I mean, if you all think about an ideal and if you all thought about it long enough, you'd come to quite the consensus upon what constitutes an ideal. The fact that it would be virtually impossible for us to all live together if we didn't have some consensus of what was ideal, because we wouldn't act in a way that we could all

predict. We wouldn't act in a way that we would all, at least in principle, admire or be willing to punish. We have an implicit ideal. And it's not fully explicit, but it's certainly there. Anyway, so that was one part of the grail, the cup that Christ used to make this strange announcement, that to act properly, you have to ingest the ideal. That's a hell of a thing to think about.

That's for sure. And then, the other idea was that when Christ was on the cross, he was pierced, and there was an idea that a Roman soldier caught blood in the cup. That's the Holy Grail. So it's the container of the magically transforming liquid. That's what it is at a symbolic level. It's something that you would imbib that would transform you. And so it's the transformative substance.

It's like the philosopher's stone. It's what you most want in life. That's another way of looking at it. And so it's associated with the ultimate ideal. And so the night, just decide they're going to go look for the holy grail, which seems like a, I mean, it's just a cop, where the hell are you going to find that?

There's a whole new tingling that's not that big. But it's big enough, man. There's lots of places you could hide a cop. Where the hell are you going to go look for the holy grail? You don't even know if it exists. And so each of the nights enters the forest at the part that looks darkest to him. That's a hell of a fine story that.

And it's a terrifying story. It's a terrifying idea that what you need most will be found where you least want to look. But there's a truism to it, and which is, well, as I said already, you already looked all the easy places. You know, so if you found what you need by looking in all the easy places, well, more power to you.

You've got what you need, and life is going along fine, and everything's perfect for you. And good, you're done, man. It's like, we've built a church and put you in it. You've managed it, but that isn't the case for people. And then you think, oh, oh, God, damn it. Maybe I have to go look at places I don't want to look, you know, like how I'm not, you know, the best father I could be and why I am alienated from my brother and why fight with my wife and why I have multiple

affairs and why drink too bloody much and why gamble and why I'm, it's a long list, right? I could go on for a long time. It's like, I don't want to look at all that. Well, yeah, no kidding. No kidding. You definitely wouldn't want to look at that, but Well, if you've got everything you need then you don't have to look at it, but if you don't have everything you need It's a good idea to look

Where you haven't looked? Because you've looked everywhere else and you haven't found it So what are the basic ideas? Well, the first idea is that things are way worse than you think. Way worse, no matter how pessimistic you are, they're way worse than that. You're way too optimistic about your future.

Terrible things are going to happen to you. And human beings are malevolent right to the bloody core Histories of nightmare and nature is trying to kill you in all sorts of brutal ways and will succeed So that's rough man and then on So it's no wonder we're possessed by ideologies because who the hell wants to think that. But then on the other side of the coin is, man, we've been around a long time, right?

Life is 3.5 billion years old, and every single one of your relatives going back 3.5 billion years lived long enough to reproduce. every single one of your relatives, going back three and a half billion years, lived long enough to reproduce. It's an absolute bloody miracle that you're here. It's so incredibly unlikely that that could occur and such a testament to the absolute indomitability of life. And then, you know, we're kind of a particularly special kind of life because not only are we alive

after that three hundred, three and a half billion year struggle, but we're conscious and aware, you know, and we can shape our own destinies to some degree. So we've got some wicked enemies stacked up against us, but it's not clear that we're not up to the challenge, especially going back to the point I was making, given that we're really not giving it all. And here you are anyways anyways like you're alive. Hot, you're about, you're 50 somewhere around there. Oh, sorry. Okay, good.

So that was a bit of a compliment. It's probably, it's probably the dim light. But, but so, but, you know, look, you've managed to be here for 56 years, and you're not even, and you're not what you could be. So that's pretty damn good, you know. Just imagine how much you might be thriving if you polished yourself up. And I'm not picking you up.

Well, I'm not picking you out specifically. I'm saying this about all of us, right? I mean, really, and I'm definitely am. It's like it's an open question. You know, how much is there to you that you're not utilizing? And I think that's a fine question, man. That's a good question. How much is there to you that you're not utilizing?

I actually think that's the fundamental religious question, because I think that one of the chronic, continual, implicit messages of the fundamental belief systems that human beings have produced over the thousands of years that we've been trying to formulate a story about who we are, is that our ignorance about the world is only equal by our ignorance about who we actually are.. And I think we all know it. I really believe that because I don't, you know, people think, oh, it'd be good to live without guilt and it would be good to live without shame and it would be good to live without shame, and it would be good to live without pain and fear. And you know, maybe that's all true, but you don't deserve to. Well, I don't believe it.

One of the things that psychologists have done that's a real disservice to people is to tell you with it, well, you're kind of okay the way you are. It's like, no, you're not. You're not, and you don't believe it. You don't wake up, there's no bloody way like you don't wake up it. There's no bloody way You don't wake up at three in the morning sweating and think

I'm really okay the way I am And you you pat yourself on the head and go back to sleep. It's bull. That's such bloody nonsense I don't know anybody who I can't even believe that anybody can think that that could be a possibility. It's like with all the knowledge you have of all the things that you aren't, how could you possibly wake up at that time of night and like console yourself with your fundamental perfection? That's just not going anywhere. And if you're feeling perfect, just wake up your wife

and ask her what she thinks. So all these rules that I laid out, I'm going to go through them really quickly. And then I'm going to talk about the, I talked about it a bit already, but I'm going to talk about the under structure of the, of the rules, because they all cohere. They're all, what they're attempting to do is to lay out an ideal and to lay out an ideal, you need rules. The rules aren't the ideal.

And there's a bunch of reasons for that because rules conflict with one another. You can follow rule A and you can follow rule B, and then you'll find out at some point that while you're following rule A and rule B, they don't work together. And so you can't completely map out the world with rules. It doesn't work. The world's too complicated to be reduced and so you can't completely map out the world with rules.

It doesn't work. The world's too complicated to be reduced to a rule-based system. Otherwise, you could just be an automaton, right? Be like, you got 100 rules. You just go out there and act those out. You're done. Or we'd have artificial intelligence systems that were rule-based. Remember, like 30, 40 years ago, people were trying to make expert systems

with computers that could follow rules, like diagnostic systems that physicians use. It's like, well, there's a universe of illness, and there are diagnostic rules for diagnosing each rule. Illness, why don't we just make a comprehensive list of rules and enter your symptoms in and the computers will just tell you what's wrong with you. It's like that didn't work and then rule-based systems so that sort hardly worked for anything and it's because rules are useful but the rules of thumb they have limited domains of applicability and you just can't master the world with rules.

But that doesn't mean they're not useful. They're disciplinary structures, they're guidelines. I'll tell you something else that's really fascinating about Christianity, in particular. I learned this by assessing, it's analyzing, it's narrative structure. So there's another idea. It's a psychological idea again.

I'm not speaking in religious terms, except incidentally. What happens in the Old Testament is that people behave a lot of different ways and a lot of reprehensible ways. And there's a sense that the reprehensible ways that people conduct themselves are wrong, what Cain does, to able is wrong,

whatever the people who surrounded, know a did that caused, the flood was wrong, like there's wrong doing everywhere. But no one exactly knows what it is that's wrong. You're not following God's will, that's wrong. It's like, okay, fine, but God's kind of mysterious, and it's a bit vague. And so, you don't get rules until Exodus, until Moses, and Moses takes his people out of the tyranny, out of tyranny, out of Egypt. Now they got rules in Egypt, their're slaves, they follow the damn rules. And you don't want to get too cynical about that.

There's some bloody advantages to being in this situation like that. Everybody knows their place and everybody knows what to do. It's not what dreaded freedom. But it's not optimal. Maybe people have a certain desire for freedom. It's not obvious that they do, but perhaps they do. And Moses convinces them that they do. And he takes them out in the desert.

And he wanders around there for 40 years, which is a hell of a thing, man, because the desert's like 10 miles long. It's a little tiny bit of the country. It's like, make a beeline there, Moses, and you're two weeks and you're through. It's like, no, 40 years, 40 years. Well, what does that mean?

It means, well, when you jump out of your tyranny, you're bloody confused. That's what it means. And it also means something else, too, is, like, the tyranny can be social. Maybe you have a job that you don't like, and you have a boss that's tyrannical. And, you know, but you've been in the job for 10 years. It offers you a certain amount of security and you're not sure if you can function,

if you leave and maybe you'll let people down and maybe you'll fail. It's like, okay, we'll just keep the tyranny. But then you're sick of it one day and you think, oh, to hell with this. And you, you know, you curse your boss with a bunch of different plagues and he fires you. And so then where are you? It's like, well, you're not in a promised land. That's bloody well for sure. And that's worth knowing too, because one of the things you might want to ask yourself

in life is, well, if you're so sure that there's a bunch of things that you're doing wrong and you're in not such a bad, not such a good place, then why do you just jump out of it and go to a better place? Like that would be the logical thing to do, right? Hypothetically we could all be enlightened. That's the theory. It's like, well, why the hell don't you just drop all the foolishness and the tyranny, your subjection to it, and just be enlightened. God, you think that'd be an improvement. It's like, it's because that isn't how it works. You jump out of your box and you end up,

well, maybe it's not somewhere worse, but it's not clearly somewhere better. It's 40 years in the desert. There's not much to eat there, plus it's a desert. And then you've got all, you know, you're surrounded by all these fractious people, and they're no longer united by the tyranny, so they don't know which ways up. And all they do is argue and fight and generate a bunch of false idols, which is exactly the situation we're in right now, by the way, with the death of God,

and the false idols that have characterized the 20th century. It's like, well, we're not following these rules anymore. What rules should we follow? Well, we don't know any old rules will do. And so then we have constant arguments about which ways up. And that's part of the desert. And of course, look, if you've ever made a radical change in your life, whatever that happens to be,

you know that's exactly what happens to you. You're now in the place of radical change. That's the underworld, by the way. And you don't know which ways up. It's like, what should I do? Well, there's 1,000 things to do. And think, well, great, 1,000 things to do. And they think, well, great, 1,000 things to do. It's like, no, that's way too many things to do.

You want, like, if you have a toddler, right? And let's say you're too rich, and you've bought your toddler 300 things to wear. And so her closet's absolutely full of toddler wear. And you take your poor toddler and you say which of these do you want to wear and what the hell is she going to do about that she's going to do it like comprehensive analysis of the qualitative distinctions between all 300 outfits it's like she's gonna cry which is what you're doing when there's a thousand things that you should be doing.

What you take maybe three outfits out of the closet and you put them on the bed and you say, hey, pick one. And she's thrilled because she gets, you know, a bit of choice, but it's not like 300, thousand things is too many. And that, well, that's what happens in the desert. And while Moses eventually more or less figures out what the Israelites are up to, because he listens to the bitch and whine

and complain and squawk and fight and generate new gods and wish that they were back in Egypt, like the bloody Russians wish they were back under the Stalinists. It's like 55% of them wish that. Bring back the good old days. When Stalin, we really had someone who knew what to do. What he knew what to do was kill tens of millions of people, but at least he was decisive.

So it's amazing what people. I read a book once about Auschwitz prison guards nostalgia for their old jobs I'm dead serious about that, you know, so God doesn't matter how terrible the past was It's like you can conjure up some nostalgia for it, and so you're in his realite and it's desert All you've got to eat is like man out whatever the hell that is and you're thinking well some of those larks tongues that the Egyptians loved would sure go well right now. Anyways Moses spent a lot of time judging his people because they're always fighting fighting fighting about everything because they didn't have any

overarching authority and it was driving him stark-raving mad, having to mediate all of the conflicts, but he learned a lot by doing it for some of that 40 years. You know, you learn a lot if you're fighting with you and you're fighting with you and you all have to go to someone and say, well, here's our problems. And you know, they could be real problems, real moral conundrums. And then somebody who's a judge has to say, OK, well, here's what seems to work. And it work is complicated.

It can't just be, here's what you have to listen to this. And so do you. And if you don't, it's like off with your heads. That's not peace. That's not a good judgment. A good judgment has to be, well, I've taken this apart. And I've decided, well, here's your error. Here's your error, and here's, and here's what you did right, and here's what you did right, and here's a way that we could take both your interests into account, and maybe it's not perfect, but it's better than anything you guys can think up, and now you won't have to kill each other. How about if we go with that? And you think, yeah, well, you know, I just soon kill them, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but guys can think up, and now you won't have to kill each other. How about if we go with that? And you think, yeah, well, I just soon kill them, but maybe that's not for the best,

and so I'll live with it. And so that's a good judgment. It's not perfect, but it's good. And what happens is you've taken a complex ethical situation, and you've extracted out a rule from it, right? And the rule only fits if it's in accordance with the moral intuitions of the people who are having the conflict.

Because otherwise it isn't going to bring peace. And that's an interesting thing, because what it implies is that this entire large scale, social structure that we've built, over thousands and thousands of years, predicated, say, on English common law, and this is genuinely the case, is a consequence of continually adjudicating between the conflicts of individuals,

extracting out general principles as a consequence that can be laid out as something approximating rules, approximating rules, and then having everyone agree on them. And so we start with the basic moral foundations of our moral intuitions. And we say, well, that seems fair. Well, why does it seem fair? Well, we don't exactly know. It seems fair.

OK, that's the best we can do. And so that's what we start with is what seems fair. And then on top of that, we build something like a representational structure that's an articulated, it's an articulated description of what seems fair. That's the body of laws. And it's out of our moral intuitions that are articulated ethical representations emerge. And that's bloody well-important to know that, because what people often think is that we think up ethical

things abstractly and then act them out, right? Rules first, good behavior later. It's like, no, doesn't work. That's why top-down governance doesn't work very well. It has to be reciprocal. It has to be, well, you think some things ethically and so do you. And there's differences, but there's some commonality because otherwise you'd be at each other's bloody throats all the time. There's some commonality. And so we have to come up with a description

of how we're going to act that fits with that commonality that will accept. And that's how we scaffold civilization out of our moral intuitions. And then it works because what we say we do is sort of like what we do. Or what we say we should do is sort of like what we think we should do. And then everybody can kind of agree on that. Or maybe you can go off and come up with your own better solution and try to convince people. And that's okay too, although it's really hard.

I mean, geniuses can do too, although it's really hard. I mean, geniuses can do it, and it happens from time to time. You know, you get a bit of a moral revolution in one domain of society, but by and large, we have a descriptive system that matches our moral intuitions. And so, and that's what happens in the story of Moses, essentially, it's mythologized to some degree,

but Moses is judging his people like mad for forever while he's wandering around in the desert narrow, fratious and bitching and whining and they get so crabby you know at some point they're basically cursing God and he gets so irritated that he just sends a bunch of poison the snakes into the desert just to bite them. And so, you know, it doesn't really, what would you say, say that much for the character of God perhaps, but it is rather comical. It's like, oh Christ, you crabby bastards. It's like, have some snakes. It'll give you something to really complain about. And one of the things that Moses does,

this is pretty interesting, man, is he takes, he prays to God, he says, look, can you call off the goddamn snakes? I have enough problems here. Call off the snakes and God's thinking, I'm pretty amused about these snakes. I don't know, I think maybe we'll just keep around for a while, but he tells Moses to make a snake out of bronze abused about these snakes. I don't know. I think maybe we'll just keep around for a while, but

he tells Moses to make a snake out of bronze and to put it on a on a snake. And if anybody will come and look at the bronze snake, that the snakes will no longer bite them. And God had sought. You just can't believe how much intelligence is packed into that idea. It's an absolutely insane stroke of overwhelming poetic brilliance because what it suggests is that let's say something's tormenting you. Let's call it a poisonous snake. What do you do about it? You make a bloody representation of it and then you look at it. You think about it. You attend to it. You don't hide. You don't run. None of that. You make

a representation and you look at it. And if you get the representation right and you look at it, then you don't get bitten anymore. Man, unbelievable. I can't believe that people thought that up. You know, it's the fundamental rule of human learning. It's a fundamental rule of successful psychotherapy. You're afraid of something? Okay, let's figure out what it is, first of all. And then let's figure out how we can break it into bits so that you can look at it,

so that you can face it. That works, right? It's exactly the opposite of safe space culture. I'm dead serious, it's exactly the opposite of that. And it says, what it says is that even if it's poisonous snakes, even if you're in a desert for 40 years, and it's poisonous snakes sent by God, which is pretty bad, that your ability to represent and confront is more powerful than that.

That's a pretty optimistic story. And it also kind of emeliorates the idea that it's God being cruel because another explanation of that story is that it's just people being weak and ungrateful. And the distinction between God's cruelty and people's weakness and in gratitude is a very, very, very, very difficult paradox to untangle. So rules. The rules point to a principle.

The principle is a mode of being. There's an idea in Christianity that Moses lays out all these rules, and so the rules are emergent properties. Everyone knows how to act, sort of, or at least knows what's unfair. You know, little kids, they don't really know how to act, but they know what's unfair, man. They got an unerring eye for justice, especially if they're siblings. It's like he got one-tenth of an ounce more gummy bear than me. That's not fair. It's like fair enough. It's a violation of reciprocity, right?

And people don't like having reciprocity violated, and so the kid has a point. So we can certainly object to what's unfair without knowing precisely what's fair. And that's what human beings are like. We know what's unfair, but we're not so good at what's fair. Anyways, we figured out, we make some rules.

Now there's this idea. I was just reading about this a little while ago, trying to make sense out of it. A very complicated thing to make sense out of. There's this scene in the New Testament, where Christ goes up on a mountain. Why is people seem to go up on mountains? It's like you don't go down to a valley

to find a wise guru, right? It's like I'm going to the valley to talk to my guru. No, you're not. You go to the mountain. Why? Well, who the hell knows? It's up. You know, it's not, you go to the mountain. Why? Well, who the hell knows? It's up. You know, it's closer to the sun.

I don't know, it's closer to God. Who knows, but it's on a pinnacle, and you can see from a pinnacle, right? And you have to climb up to get to a mountain, and a guru doesn't climb down. He climbs up. It's a fundamental metaphor. So anyways, Christ goes up on this mountain and

with a couple of his disciples and he finds Moses there, weirdly enough, and another project, another prophet Elijah. And I won't talk about Elijah because that's just insanely complicated, but Moses is bad enough. So Moses is the log giver and the way that the narrative of the Old Testament and the New Testament are put together is that imagine that there's a thousand rules and they make a pattern, you know, which is what makes them rules. And what's what makes them coherent? There has to be some underlying pattern to the rules in order for them to be coherent. Otherwise, they just be arbitrary and they'd be full of contradictions. You know, like maybe we'd say, well, those are good rules. So then the question is, well, what is it that's common across the rules that make them good? It's something, well, you don't

know, it's some sort of meta-rule, right? It's a rule that governs rules, but you don't know what it is. And what it is, in some sense, is a mode of being. It's a way of acting, like let's say you got the pattern right. You know, you fulfilled all thousand rules, all 10 commandments. But there's way more rules than that. But you fulfilled them thoroughly. Well, that would make you a some sort of person, right? It would make you a singular sort of person.

And the point of the rules would be to make you that person. Well, one of the things I can tell you about the reason in the New Testament that Christ goes up on the mountain to talk to Moses is to fulfill a strange prophecy. There's a prophecy that runs through the Old Testament that something will emerge out of the concatenation of rules that will be a personality that's redemptive in its quality. And so again, I'm not speaking religiously here. I'm speaking as if this is a set of psychological ideas. We all have a sense of right and wrong. Out of that, we can abstract a set of principles.

If we follow the set of principles, that produces a kind of character, a good character, let's say. And the idea would be that the manifestation of that good character would be redemptive. Now, I mean, I mean, it would be good for you. Like, if you were that person, as much as you could be, like, and still be you, because it has to be sort of particularized as well. If you were that person, which would be the best person that you could be and still be you,

that would be way better than just being the you that you are now. And look, I also think that people, I think that people know this because you see we feel shame and we feel guilt and you might think, well why? Why bother with it? Exactly. We're going to just take the psychopath route. Because psychopaths really don't feel much guilt and shame. It's like, who the hell cares what you think of me?

Or you or my family? It's like, it's all for me, man. And that'd be a lot easier as far as I can tell. It's like, no guilt. Okay, no shame, that'd be nice. I mean, those aren't pleasant emotions. I think they're worse than fear. They're certainly up there with pain. It's not like you're praying at night.

Oh my God, send me more shame. It's like no, but you feel it. If you have any sense, like if you're worth your salt, then you feel that. And the reason is, it's got to be because you aren't who you could be, right? You aren't living up what to. What the hell is it that you're not living up to? It's got to be some sort of ideal, because otherwise, why would you feel shame? And it's an ideal that you hold,

because it's you holding yourself accountable. It's like, well, why, why, why does it bother you? I mean, we can start at least with the observation that it clearly does bother you. That's bloody well something. That says something about who you are. You're the sort of person who's ashamed and guilty because you're not everything you could be.

Well that implies maybe you're wrong, maybe you're just deluded, maybe there is no thing that you could be that would be greater than you are. Well there's a problem with that then, though like, well what about your ambitions? What the hell are you going to do with them? You're already as good as you're going to get. You must just stay in bad, man. You've already attained whatever perfection is possible in this world. That isn't how you act.

You act as if there's ambitions. There's things that are more and worse doing. There's things that you should be out there striving for. That all implies that there's some sort of ideal that you haven't yet manifested, and along with that, has to go some sense that you're not everything that you could be. And so,

the idea is that if you manifested this set of abstracted principles properly, then you would transform yourself into, you would redeem yourself. You would atone, that's the other thing, atone means at one. It was very interesting, derivation. One of the things, Solzhenitsyn did, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote the Goulogarchipelago, a very interesting thing he did. He was in the work camps, terrible situation to be in.

And he was having a bloody miserable time of it, man. Not as bad as it could be, but in the bottom two or three percentile, bad enough. And he's wondering, because he had lots of time to wonder, just what the hell was up with him being there? You know, and he had some cheap excuses that weren't even so cheap, because, well, first of all, he was on the Russian front in World War II, and that was no picnic, and you can pretty much blame that on Stalin, and if you want to blame, if you've got to have someone to blame for your misery and to justify that blame, then Stalin's a good one.

Right? It's like, why am I here? Stalin. It's like, hey, no problem. Free pass for you, man. But it wasn't just Stalin. It was also Hitler. Because it was Stalin and Hitler that caused the war and produced all the catastrophe that Sotin has tangled up in. So he didn't just have Stalin to blame. He also had Hitler.

So that was even better because you could have a debate. Who is the worst monster of the 20th century? Mao, probably. But we'll forget about him momentarily. But if it's not Mao, well, it's either Hitler or Stalin. And if you have both of them to blame, you're Scott free, man. It's like, it's not me, it's Hitler. OK, no problem, man.

You're a good guy. It's definitely Hitler. And so, Sorsenitzin is in the camp. You know, after a while, this whole Hitler and Stalin thing wasn't cut net for him because he was watching people in the work camps that he admired. He saw, and I don't want to overestimate this, he saw that there were people even under conditions of unbelievable privation, right? Who were conducting themselves admirably truthfully and nobly? And that really shook him to the core because he wasn't exactly sure that he was the sort of person who was doing that

Despite the fact that he had Hitler and Stalin to blame and he said he started to think about it You know to really bloody well think about it as if is not his life Depended on it because that wasn't enough as if it's Soul depended on it and I think that's more important because you know look life can be bad enough With enough sacrifice of soul so that you can wish for death There was this character named John Wayne Gacy and you know want to know anything about him and he was a He was a clown. That's bad enough.

He was a serial killing clown. And he existed. And he killed all sorts of kids. And they finally found him. And he asked for the death penalty. And, you know, if you have even an ounce of sense, you can figure out why. You know, because maybe there was 2% of them that wasn't a psychopath, you know? And he got caught and

it was like, please kill me, like enough. And that's interesting because it indicates that there are things that you can do to yourself that make death desirable, right? There are things that you can do to yourself that make death desirable. There are places you can go that are so dark. You think, well, there's nothing worse than death. It's like you've got no imagination. There are things that are way worse than death. And I would say John Wayne Gacy's life was way worse than death. And if you don't believe it, you just go read about it,

draw your own bloody conclusions. It was enough for him to beg for death. I don't remember if he got the death penalty or not. I don't believe so, but it's beside the point to some degree. The point is that, well, you know, there are worse places that there are worse places that you can end up. So, it's an it's and thought, all right, well, wait a minute. Here's these people that are acting nobly and honestly, truthfully, not taking the easy way out,

not being trustees, not cooperating with the administration. I was just reading this other book called Ordinary Men. How's the hell of a book, man? You want to know how things go from bad to worse? You probably don't want to know. But if you do want to know, you could read ordinary men because it will tell you how things go bad from bad to worse. And maybe you do want to know that because maybe you don't

want things to go from bad to worse in your own life. But it's a story about these policemen in Germany who were military policemen. They were too old to be drafted and so they were putting this police unit and then they were put in Poland after the Germans had marched through and they were sort of charged with mopping up the Jews essentially. They were at war and I suppose they thought of the Jews as an enemy fifth column although that was primarily a rationalization.

These are just ordinary guys, you know. They were you people, for all intents and purposes, and you know, if you don't think that, well then you don't understand. And you know, their commander, who has actually seemed to be a pretty good guy, you know, by normative standards, so as good as anyone you know unless you happen to know a pretty good guy, you know, by normative standards. So as good as anyone you know, unless you happen to know a saint, and you would be able to stand knowing a saint anyway, so you wouldn't be your friend, you know, so you probably don't know a saint, but he's good as anybody you know. And he told his men that they're going to have to do some brutal things and

that they could just go back to Germany if they wanted to. And hardly any of them did. And there's complicated reasons for it. They didn't want to abandon their comrades and all of that. And Jesus, the first thing they were supposed to do was just round up the Jewish men of military age and sort of pack them into cattle cars. And it's not like that's nothing. It's not nothing. And they knew pretty much what that meant. But it's not as bad as it gets. And then, well, some of them wouldn't do it. Some of them wouldn't do it.

And they weren't punished for it. The men laughed at them, and they were alienated and ostracized to some degree. But they faced almost no military penalty. So that's pretty interesting. And then, well, it got a little more serious. And there was more push from the Nazi leadership to eradicate the Jews in Poland. And the next thing was, well, you go into a town and you clean up the men and pack them away.

But maybe you bring the women and the children along too. If there's old people and they can't get the hell out of bed, well, maybe just shoot them. And so that was rough, but most of them learned how to do it, not all of them, and they made them physically ill and made them feel terrible. Most of them, although some learn to enjoy it. And step by step, they turned themselves into people who were making a habit and perhaps a sport out of taking naked pregnant women out

into the fields and shooting them in the back of the head, which by the way is a lot more difficult, technically, than it sounds. So that's one step at a time. So that's a good thing to read about. In case you're wondering whether or not you should take that next step that you think you shouldn't take. That do that next thing at work that violates your conscience, that would cause some trouble to object to.

You can get to some pretty damn low places one step at a time, and I mean, I know this is an extreme situation that I'm describing, but things become extreme. So Jeanette in the Gulag, he decided that he was going to, because he was interested in these people that wouldn't cooperate. They just tell the commanders who were trying to get them to rat on their fellow men or to do some demeaning job. I clean the shoes of some bloody trustee. Hey, just tell them, tell with you, you discussed me, I'm bloody well not doing it. You know, and sometimes that meant death.

Most of what happened in the camps meant death anyways, but it meant death. It was like you're gonna go out there and work at I don't know Breaking rocks when it's 40 below, you know or something like that and that was that for you but but not always it it was not infrequently the case that the moral authority of the people who But the moral authority of the people who dared that sort of resistance provided them with a certain amount of protection. Maybe they scared the people that were trying to torment them.

You can see why, because if you met someone and you had that much power over them, not only the power of life and death, but the power of torture and life and death. And they basically told you that they could see and use something absolutely despicable. And there was no bloody way they were going to listen to you no matter what you did. What you'd think, well, okay, maybe I'll find someone else easier to pick on, you know? Solzhenitsyn said he went over his entire life with a fine tooth comb And he had lots of time to do that and he tried to remember Every bloody thing he'd ever did in his life that he thought was wrong

That'd be a long list you could imagine but that he thought was wrong and it'd be a long list, you could imagine, but that he thought was wrong. And it's worth thinking about that phenomenologically, I guess, about what that would mean. You know, one of the things that I suggest to people, and I did that in 12 rules for life, was that you try not to say anything that makes you feel weak. That's a real interesting exercise. And you can really learn to do this. You have to decide to do it. You think, okay, well, from here on in, I'm going to listen to what I say, which is already a whole revelation, because lots of times you say things without listening. No one else listens either, so you don't necessarily notice, but you say things without listening. You just say them habitually.

But now you listen, and you think, well, how do I feel when I say that? And it might be, well, I feel angry, I feel grateful, I feel unhappy, I feel, forget about all that. I feel like I'm coming apart at the seams or I feel like I'm gathering myself together and aligned because you can detect that. When you betray yourself with your speech, you can feel yourself coming apart at the seams. And when you don't, you can feel yourself aligned.

And that's your own judgment. And then you might think, well, what would happen if I only said things that made me feel stronger? Well, one of the things that would happen is that you'd feel stronger, right? That's something. Maybe you'd actually be stronger, you know, because maybe it's not just a feeling. You probably wouldn't be perfect at it to begin with, you know, you'd get it wrong a little bit, but I would say with a bit of practice,

you just start saying things that were strong. And maybe if you said things that were strong enough, you'd be indomitable. It's certainly possible. You know people who speak weekly and you know people who speak strongly, and you know that the people who speak weekly just get pushed out of the way, and you know that the people who speak strongly don't, and so then you might ask, well, what would happen if you spoke strongly? And maybe the answer is that like all the poisonous snakes would get off your path.

It's certainly a possibility, or at least they'd skitter away to some degree. And I think you already know that, too, because you know perfectly well how bloody proud you are of yourself when you wake up at 3 in the morning, and you're being harassed by whatever thoughts are harassing you and you think, Jesus, at least I got that right, at least I said that right,

at least I stuck up for myself properly under those conditions. It's such a bloody relief to have that memory rather than, oh God, I compromised myself completely and there's no coming back from it. So imagine, well, if your life was nothing but the speech acts that lent you strength, what would that be like? You think, what would you be like for yourself then? Who would you be?

What would you be like for your family? What would you be like for your community in the rest of the world? God only knows. You know, we could use forthright and truthful speech that I think, or we want weak and deceitful speech because that's the opposite, like which of those two things sounds better? I mean, truly, you might think, well, I can use deceitful and untruthful speech to avoid some difficulty that I might otherwise get into. You know, it's like a little escape route, but it's not like you have any sense you're proud of that.

You know, it's a second-rate alternative. Nobody in the right mind thinks that deceitful, weak speech is the right pathway forward. So Jean-Itz and decided that he was going to a tone for every single thing that he could remember that he did wrong now. It was a strange thing, right, because like maybe you did something wrong when you were seven, you know, you bullied some kid. Maybe it still bothers you, you know, when you think about it, maybe not to, but you've got things no doubt that you're ashamed of, you think, okay, well, I'm going to get rid

of all those things. I go over my life, I'm gonna figure out everything I did wrong. I'm gonna fix it. Like, you think, well, how can you fix it now? It's like, I don't bloody well know how you can fix it now. You know, I mean, you might not be able to apologize to the eight year old kid, you bully, to be ridiculous anyways, but maybe you could derive the moral lesson necessary from the memory so that you change yourself so that you're much less likely to engage in similar activity

in the present and the future. And maybe that would be atonement. That would bring you back together. That would make you one again, right? And that would absolve you of your error. And I don't mean in some metaphysical sense. I mean, you would no longer be the sort of person that would commit that error. And then that would seem to be a good thing. Maybe you have 200 things to fix up.

It's not that many. Maybe it's 2000, even that's not, I've met people that had like 300,000 things to fix up. Really, I'm really dead serious about that. I figured it out sort of mathematically. It's like they were making 100 mistakes a day. It's a lot. Everything they did was a mistake. And then so that's like 3,000 a month. And so that's 36,000 a year. And then 10 years, that's 360,000. Your man, your screwed, if that happens.

It's really hard to recover from that, because you've done 360,000 things wrong, doesn't do your character much good, and it's a hell of a monster to face. But most of us aren't in the situation that's quite that dismal, and even if we are, maybe there would still be some hope with enough desperation. It's bloody difficult, though.

But let's say you did that. You went over your life, you think, okay, what the hell's wrong with me? Like seriously, like as if it's a question that matters. There's a prayer, there's this idea in the New Testament. You knock and the door will open and you ask and it will be given to you. I think, I want a yacht. It's like poofy yacht appears in your, probably in your basement,

so you can't get the damn thing out. That'd be a good joke from God. It's like, well that's a stupid prayer. You're not going to's a stupid prayer. You're not gonna get a bloody yacht. Besides, what would you do with a yacht? You just spend all your income trying to keep the damn thing afloat, you would even want it.

It's like, it's not a good prayer. It's like, well, what do you want? That you could get. Well, maybe you could think, well, maybe I could fare what's wrong with me. And where I'm not what I could be. And I'd like to do that. I'd like to open up that doorway so I could see what that was.

And I'd like to fix it. Maybe you'd get that. And maybe you'd be able to fix it. At least you'd be able to fix it a little bit. You know, one of the reasons I'm so stunned by the Goulai Garcopaligo, a social net sense book, is because he went through this process of confession and atonement to reunite himself, to make himself one thing again, and God only knows what one thing means. Like God only knows what one thing means.

Like, if you're one thing, what does it mean you're aligned with? You're aligned with the good. And I don't know what the metaphysics of that. I don't know how high up into the cosmos, the good extends. I mean, I know that hell extends a bloody long ways down. So you might think that good extends a long ways up.

You atone, you put yourself in alignment. Who knows what you're aligned with now? Well, Soshenitsin aligned himself, and he wrote the Goulagar Capelago, and it was one of the books that wiped out the Soviet Union. Without a thermonuclear war, let's point out, which was kind of a plus, unless you think that human beings are the sort of cancer

on the planet that would have been better eradicated. And thank God we didn't go down that route. Thank well. The ethos that I was trying to develop in 12 rules for life was that, you know, there's all these rules. Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Well, what does that mean? It means confront the world, not aggressively,

but like you're ready for it, regardless of what it is. And it's not something pretty. I just wrote a letter to my mother today. She's 80 years old. I wrote her a letter. I put it on my blog. She's in pretty good shape. She's a tough cookie. I really like her. I put it on my blog. You know, and she's in pretty good shape. She's a tough cookie

I really like her, but all her friends are dying, you know She goes and works in the nursing home in this little town. She lives in like she's got like five friends there of Alzheimer's They don't even know who she is. You know, that's it's bloody brutally you think well That's what happens when you get old. It's like that's what young people say. Oh, that's what happens when you get old. It's like That's a fine what would you call it? What would you say about that? There's not a lot of solace in that, you know? Not only do your friends have Alzheimer's, now, and they don't recognize you, but you're also old. It'd be a lot better if it just happened to you now, because at least you'd be young with friends with Alzheimer's,

instead of like old. So it's a bitch of a thing. She, I know, an old age visits you just when you're least capable of handling it. It's really rough. And so you got a lot to stand up to, man. There's no doubt about that. So rule one is that's what to do.

Is to stand up and confront the world and these little alarms that go off. And rule two, it's a lied with that. Treat yourself like you're someone worth. Treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for taking care of. that's a good one. That's a moral injunction. It's not be nice to yourself.

I don't know if you deserve to be nice to yourself. Probably no more than someone else deserves to have you be nice to them. Besides nice is a weak virtue. Good to yourself would be a lot better. Treat yourself like you're more valuable than you understand. Treat yourself like you're moral transgressions count for more than you think. Treat yourself like you're someone

who could add a hell of a lot more to the world than you are. That's something, that's something that'll frighten you properly, especially when you start to think about the darkness that you're capable of, because at least you could avoid that. Surround yourself with people who want the best for you. Same thing, not to make it easy for you.

That's not helpful, but who like look at you, like someone that loves you and thinks, man, I can see something in you, you know? And I'm gonna do everything I can to say yes when that manifests itself and to say no when it doesn't and to separate the wheat from the chaff and that's no not radical you don't want radical acceptance from your friends I don't care your drunk you're

an addict you beat your wife it's all okay with me it's like it's not a bloody okay and someone who thinks it isn't a friend Maybe they won't abandon you because they can still help but that's not approval of your actions Rule four is to treat yourself like you're someone responsible to Sorry rule four is to compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today That's an injunction against In gratitude and resentment. It's like you've got your problems. So do you, man, we've all got our problems, we've got our weaknesses, we've got our unfair situations thrown into the world as we are with our

imperfections. Lots of people are better at lots of things than we are. You know, it's not a fair comparison though because because you don't have his problems, and you know, you don't have her problems. And so what the hell do you know? It's like you have your problems, that's for sure. And they're probably quite a bloody burden, but you have your advantages. And maybe with a bit of work,

you could be slightly more put together tomorrow than you are today. And that'd be a fair contest, because you're competing against yourself and you've got all your advantages and disadvantages and so maybe if you were a bit better, well what's the harm in that? And you get to move uphill without being jealous that way. And so that's because it's not easy to move uphill without being jealous about the people who are hypothetically already there.

Rule 5, don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Well, what does that mean? Well, if you dislike them, what makes these things? Other people will like them. I mean, you love them. Other people don't. So if they, if you're not likeable, you love them and they're not likable, at least you love them. You don't love them and they're not likable. Man, you're not going to spend any time with them at all. Maybe you'll smile falsely when the little monsters make their appearance, but that's going to be about all there is to it.

You want to entice your children into pro-social behavior so that they can take their part in society and have everyone open their arms to them. That's a good thing. Rule six, put your... Welcome to season two, episode 41 of the Jordan B Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator. Happy new year. We took a much needed two-week break, but we're vaguely back at it. Peterson updates. Andre and I are back together. That makes me incredibly happy, and life could certainly be worse. I'm recording this from Moscow, Russia. We're here for the next month or so with Dad. It's beautiful

and completely unlike what I was expecting. It's much fancier than anywhere I've seen in North America and the food and culture is amazing. Today's episode is a 12-year-old for life lecture recorded in Perth, Australia on February 8th, 2019, named Defense Against Ideological Possession. If you guys haven't checked out Dad's E-course, Discovering Personality with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, it's available at JordanBeePeterson.com slash personality and has over five hours of university level video lecture material. Check it out at JordanBeePeterson.com slash personality. Enjoy the podcast. Defense against ideological possession. A Jordan B. Peterson, 12 rules for life lecture.

Nice welcome and it's also not 35 below here. That's a good combination of events. It was really, really horribly cold when I was in Toronto like two days ago. Yeah, I don't know why people live there. So, well thank you all for coming. I'm very happy to be here. The Australia tour looks like it's, well, it's just starting. So we'll see how it goes.

But people seem enthusiastic. The venues are selling out, and some of them are very large. So I don't know what it is about you Australians, but you seem to be starved for whatever it is that we're going to be doing tonight. So I guess we'll see how that goes. So I've got lots of things I'm really interested in talking to you about tonight. I thought what I would do to sort of warm up

is because it's been a little while since I've spoken to a large audience. And I thought I'd just walk through the rules. And then I want to go underneath them and lay out a conceptual structure that I've been working on for a very long time. It's a psychological structure. And I think it's unbelievably useful. I've often thought about it with my classes.

What I've thought, the way I've conceptualized what I've been doing for 30 years, is to provide people with a defense against ideological possession. It's something like that because the possibility of being possessed by an ideology is extraordinarily high. I mean, first of all, we tend to be trapped by our own biases. Some of that's just temperamental, right? Because you have a particular way of looking at the world

and you're gonna be trapped by that. Now, there's advantages to that too, because there's advantages to looking at the world, the way you look at the world and you're going to be trapped by that. Now there's advantages to that too because there's advantages to looking at the world, the way you look at the world. But it also lays you open for blind spots and then there's the fact that you just bloody well don't know anything, right? I mean there's so much of the world you don't understand, it's amazing that you can even walk across the street, you know, because it's so complicated and it's worse than that because you don't even know how much you don't know because the expanse is so vast and so you're trapped

by your own ignorance as well and then you're trapped by your willful blindness because well, maybe you know you need to learn things but it's really hard to learn things and it's really easy not to learn them, but it's really hard to learn things, and it's really easy not to learn them, right? Because to not learn something all you have to do is just sit there and not learn things. And that's really, my man, some of you did that for like 12 years in school, right? And so it's really easy not to do that. And then there are more subtle reasons that you might get hijacked as well, too.

I mean, one of the things that struck me is that one of the ways you can distinguish between a genuine, I think, religious view of the world. I don't mean one that's necessarily predicated on a belief in God. I mean, I'm thinking about a religious viewpoint from a psychological perspective. And that's a reasonable thing to do because we know that religious experience is part and parcel of the universal human experience.

And we don't know what that says about the metaphysics of reality. You know, there's no way of determining it, but we certainly do know that people are prone to religious beliefs and that they are definitely biologically capable of a wide range of religious experiences. And a religious viewpoint presents a certain view of the world. It's a comprehensive view of the world. And what happens in the case of ideologies is that ideologies hijack parts of that. So they take a complete story that's very compelling in its fundamental essence, which is, of course, why religious stories have potency

and why they last for a very long time. And they take a piece of it and make it the whole thing. And so that's a lot of reasons to be possessed by ideology. Now, the problem with that is that as far as I can tell is that you really have to deal with the whole world, you know, because there it is, right in front of you, the whole world with all its complexity. And if you So, simplified it in a biased manner, which means that you inappropriately ignored some arbitrary proportion of it, you're going to get flattened because of that, because you're going to have blind spots like, this is a stupid example, but it's the best one I've been able to think up in like 25 years.

I mean, imagine just for this sake of argument that you didn't believe in white vans that approached you from the left. You believed in everything else, but not that. You know what I mean? That means that you've comprehended a lot of the world, but now and then, you know, you're gonna step off the curb and you're just gonna get flattened.

And you're gonna wake up wondering,, what the hell is going on? I just, I just ended up flattened. But you don't believe in white vans approaching you from the left. So you never learn. And then you're okay for another five years. And then you step off the curb and smack. You know, and it's, this small blind spot. Well, it's not that small, but it's this blind spot that's characteristic of the way you're thinking. And because of that, the world, which contains

that thing that you're blind about, takes you out on a regular basis. And then, you know, you can imagine you'd sit up in your hospital bed all all bandaged up in your casts and your intravenous drips and you'd think, Jesus, this is one miserable cause most. Always doing this thing to me and I've done nothing to deserve it. It's like, well, you know, you have a blind spot. And this is something that's really, like I said, it's a foolish example in some sense, but it's a concept that's really worth thinking about because you never know how much the reason that you're getting taken out by reality is because you have a blind spot.

And it's sad to think that way because you think, oh my God, I've got a blind spot. And it's sad to think that way because you think, oh my god, I've got a blind spot. And there's real serious repercussions that are associated with that. And isn't that unfair. But on the other hand, it's actually a really optimistic idea. Because it could be that the reason you keep getting taken out is because you have a blind spot.

And that's actually unbelievably optimistic because what it means is that if you could just figure out what the blind spot was and then go through the work of fixing it because it's not just that you recognize it and then it's fixed. It's more complicated than that but maybe, maybe, this is like the only optimistic thought I know. Maybe the reason that you keep getting taken out is because there's some important things that you either don't know or refuse to know. And you think, oh my God, that could be the case.

If I just knew more, or if I was just willing to know more, and maybe even in a radical way, that a lot of the terrible things that are happening to me, that are undermining my faith, let's say in myself and in other people, and in the world, maybe even in existence itself, maybe that would, well, maybe not vanish, but maybe it would be ameliorated. And that's something, right? It's like there's always the possibility that there's something about your own ignorance that's actually causing a substantial proportion of your misery.

And God, that would be so wonderful if that was the case because there's this story in a book called The Cocktail Party, which is by T.S. Eliot. It's a play. And in the play, there's a woman who talks to a psychiatrist at the party asking for free medical advice to some degree. And she tells him, like you might tell a psychiatrist, that she's having a pretty damn miserable time of it. You know, and there's real reason to have a miserable time of it. And some people have some real reasons to have a miserable time of it, man. And she said, I'm having a bad time of it. And she says, I want to talk to you because I hope there's something wrong

with me. And the psychiatrist is kind of taking it back. And he says, well, why are you hoping that there's something wrong with you? And she says, well, this is the way I look at it. I've got two choices here. I'm having a pretty damn brutal time of it. And so on the one hand, it's because the world is the way it is. And that's just how it is, man. I'm stuck with it. And that's just not good because, man, I'm stuck with it. And that's just not good, because what am I going to do?

I'm not going to change the structure of reality. Or maybe you change it a little bit, but you probably just make it worse. But if it's me, if I'm doing something wrong and it's sort of systematic, and I find out what it is that I'm doing wrong, and I fix it, then maybe things would get better. And like that's a hell of a thing to think, because you know, and here's what makes it so believable, I think, is that you have bloody well-know that there's a bunch of things that

you're not doing as well as you could be doing. I don't just mean not putting in as much effort as you could be doing. I don't just mean not putting in as much effort as you could, that's common as hell, you know, or maybe not putting in any effort, or being cynical, you know, or having rationalizations or lying to yourself, all of that. There's God, there's a thousand reasons why you're not putting your best foot forward, you know,

and just in terms of inaction, but then there's also all of the things that you know that you're doing wrong. I don't mean by some arbitrary ethical standard, although you can use that. It's not such a bad idea. I mean, if a hundred people think that you're doing something wrong, maybe you are, maybe not, like maybe you're the one guy

that's right and they're all wrong. Sometimes that happens, not bloody well very often. And I wouldn't assume it as a rule of thumb, but sometimes it's true, but I'm talking more about those errors of conscience, let's say, that you, that you are judged, jury, and executioner with regards to yourself for. So that if no one said anything and no one asked you, you would still know in your heart of hearts that there were things that you were doing that were wrong. And you're still doing them.

And so then that open question is, what would happen if you stopped doing them? You know, and what would happen if you stopped being willfully blind. You know, and so, and started to look at the things you know you need to look at. That's a big one. That's a sin of a mission. I really think those things do people in. You know, you get a hint from your nervous system. It's low level, embodied, something's wrong here. And that's a call to action, right? That maybe that wakes you up at three in the morning and a bit of a sweat, and you think something's wrong. What? Well, who knows, man? Who the hell knows what's wrong? Maybe you have to argue with yourself for a month before you figured out, or maybe you have to have a fight with your wife

and your kids and all your family before you have any sense of what's wrong. Like figuring out what's wrong, even if you know that something's wrong, that's not easy. Getting that question formulated is very difficult. But man, if you went through all that work, especially once you know you have to,

because you feel guilty or because you have to, because you feel guilty or because you feel ashamed or because you feel afraid, because you wake up in a cold sweat or because you don't want to go to work or because you're avoiding things that you know you should be doing or because you're bitter or because you're cynical, because you want to turn away, because the joy is going out of your life. You know something's rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak. And then you know that if you dug into it, you'd find something you have bloody well, don't want to find.

Because, of course, when you really have something to learn, this is one of the terrible things about life, when you really have something to learn, it's always something that you really don't want to learn. And the reason for that is, well, if it was easy to learn and you wanted to learn it, you already learned it. So of course, all that's left over are the things that you don't want to pay attention to and you don't want to learn. There's this old idea from a story of King Arthur.

King Arthur and his knights, they're all around the round table. And that kind of makes them equal. There's a king and all that, but they're still equal. And they're knights, they're tough guys, man. You know who you think about those knights? I don't know what was with those people. They were completely out of their mind. I mean, in case themselves at Iron was heavy,

they had to use some sort of ratchet system, get themselves up on their horse, because they were so heavy, they couldn't get on their horse by themselves. They had to use stirrups, you know, you couldn't have nights without stirrups. Stirrups actually changed the world, because they allowed armored men to be on horses.

And that's bad, you're armored. And the reason being armored is bad, is because, well, you need to be armored, right? There's a, you're armored. And the reason being armored is bad is because, well, you need to be armored, right? There's a reason you're armored. That's not so good. And then, you know, they used to run at each other with these massive bloody horses,

with these huge sticks, like solid rock hard sticks and try to like knock each other off the horse. Can you actually imagine doing that? Jesus, we're so pathetic. Modern people are so pathetic. Well, God, that's just so, it's completely, it's almost, it's almost completely beyond comprehension that you would not only do that,

but maybe look forward to it. It's like, oh, good. Another jostling match, you know? Maybe I can get my head not clean off this time. So anyways, back to facing what's difficult, you know, this is what I wanted to talk about tonight. It's about all about this optimistic idea that there's in my work, in my psychology work, my intellectual work. I've always tried to do one thing. If I have an idea, I try to take the bloody thing apart

because I know that you use ideas to act. Ideas are the guidelines to action. This is a good thing to know too about ideas, because you might think about ideas as representations of the world. We tend to think of ourselves as scientists, and we tend to think of science as the only way of thinking, but we don't really think like scientists. We really think like engineers. We're much more interested in how to act

in the world than we are in how to represent the world. It's part of the reason why we had engineers way before we had scientists. So an engineer is concerned about how to act in the world. And engineers is concerned about how to act in the world. And an idea is an abstract representation of how you might act in the world. And we even know this neurophysiologically. One of the things I like to do, you know, if I have an idea, I like to see if the thing stacks up from a variety of different intellectual perspectives, you know, like if it works anatomically, well that's one bit of evidence, if it works neurochemically, that's another bit of evidence, if it works behaviorally, that's another bit.

If there are mythological or dramatic stories that represent it, that's another bit of evidence. If it works practically in the clinical realm, then that's another bit of evidence. And now, and then you get lucky, and you find an idea that stacks up across all those levels, and you thank God, there's got to be something to it. It's just too much triangulation.

It's like all five of your senses are saying the same thing. It's probably there. Well, and so it is with this idea, the one I'm trying to lay out is that it's an idea in some sense of radical ignorance and sin, strange word, sin, that's an old word, it's from a Greek word, hamartia, sounds nothing like sin, by the way. And it's an archery term, and it means to miss the target, which is a lovely way of thinking

about it, especially if you're thinking about it in terms of action, right? There's a target you're supposed to hit. You wouldn't be moving forward in the world if there wasn't a target you were supposed to hit. You might not know what the bloody target is. You might not have it specified very well, which is a mistake, by the way, because your target you should specify it to miss the target is to sin. Well, how do you miss the target?

Well, you don't have a target. Well, there is problem number one. You're not aiming at anything. And problem number two is that it's vague. Problem number three is you don't have a bow. Problem number four is you don't draw it back. Problem five is you close your eyes when you shoot, you know, or maybe you're afraid of hitting the target because then people expect you to hit the target,

you know, another time, right? Because you build up expectations that way. God only knows, there's all sorts of reasons to fail to do it. Anyways, I've been looking for ideas that constitute solid ground with regards to moving forward in the world. Things that I can't undermine, no matter how hard I question, I can't get underneath them. And I'll tell you, it's very difficult to find a set of ideas that's more believable than that you are more ignorant and malevolent than you could be if you were operating optimally in the world.

I just can't believe, I don't think I've ever found anyone in my life who doesn't believe that. Maybe in casual conversation you'd deny it, but if you have a serious conversation with someone for like a week or a month about the way their lives are going You know, it's pretty clear. Here's a bunch of things I'm not doing as well as I could be doing and Here's a bunch of really stupid things I did in the past and maybe I that I'm still doing and that I'm planning to do in the future That I know perfectly well are gonna screw me up in 50 different ways and I'm planning to do in the future, that I know perfectly well are gonna screw me up in 50 different ways and I'm still gonna do them.

And that's the human condition. So, and so the optimistic derivation from that is, well, what if you got a little better at not doing those things? How much better would things be around you? And I think that's a fundamental question. And the reason I think that, apart from the fact, on the negative side, which I've kind of laid out here, is like, there's all sorts of reasons to be unhappy or perhaps contemptuous about people because we're not everything we could be. And we're a bunch of things we shouldn't be.

And that's undeniable, I believe. But then on the opposite is we're really quite remarkable creatures. You know, there's as much on the positive end as there is on the negative end. And that's saying a lot, man, because there's plenty on the negative end. Like it's heaped up high. You know, if you know anything about history, which you probably don't want to know anything about history, which is why most people don't know much about history, it's pretty much a bloody nightmare. It's a deep dark abyss of catastrophe.

And so that's what, it's almost intolerable. The deeper you look into it, but as deep and dark as that intolerability is, there's something that shines out of that, which is, well, the potential for people to overcome all that, which in the main we have. And so for all that darkness, there's light. And it's a really nice thing to know, too, because it can make you somewhat less afraid of the darkness, you know, and there's plenty of bloody reason to be afraid of the darkness. If you have some sense that no matter how deep you delve, let's say into your own shortcomings,

but even worse than that into the shortcomings of humanity itself, that out of that will emerge something optimistic, which is a clear-headed recognition that despite what we are, we can, we have the ability to transcend it. And then all of that pessimism transforms into something optimistic and not stupidly optimistic, like we're all good. It's like no or not, children are born good, no they're not, the world born good. No, they're not. The world's a, what would you say?

The world's a benevolent place, and people are basically nice. No. Wrong. That's an ideology, right? And it's one that's born of fear. It's born of the unwillingness to face things the way they bloody will are. And that's not good because if you don't face the way things the way they are, then you

don't draw out of yourself the capability to deal with the world as it is, and then to improve it perhaps, to move it beyond its current, intolerable state. And so you have this moral obligation, I think, to look at things, to look at the darkest part of things. And then in the faith that the darker the place you look, the more likely it is that you'll find something that's a true light. Because it could only be a true light that would shine in that sort of darkness. And that's the sort of light you want. You know one that flickers when things are a little rough. And you certainly want something that goes out

when things get really rough. You want something that stays bright when things are as bad as they can be and they can be really bad. And so if there is a light that can stay on when things are really bad, well then then you have some grounds for, I would say, an intelligent and wise hope. And Jesus, it would be lovely to be able to have an intelligent and wise hope as the fundamental grounding of your existence back to King Arthur so It's a complicated story

you know the the Knights Monty Python notwithstanding know, the Knights' Monty Python notwithstanding, you know, the Knights of the Round Table are off to look for the Holy Grail. And they don't know what the hell the Holy Grail is. There's different variants of the story. One idea is the Holy Grail is the cup that Christ used at the last supper to drink wine when he announced that his blood was wine and his body was bred, very, very strange thing to say. But one that people haven't forgotten, perhaps at least in part,

because of its strangeness, it's actually more, it's actually deeper than that, you know, it's it's not believably deep idea that it's an archaic idea. So the idea is that you can, by ingesting something, you can transform yourself into that thing. It's a really old idea, like thousands and thousands of years old, and that particular strange twist of Christian drama, calls on that ancient idea to suggest that if you think in the Western canon,

again, this is a psychological perspective that whatever Christ represents is an ideal that whatever you can do to incorporate the ideal is redemptive, right? To become that, it's the same as the idea in the Christian mass, it's like, why do you eat the wafer? The idea is so that you become that, right? It's a moral injunction, it's like, whatever the ideal is, you can think about that however you want. I mean, if you all think about an ideal,

and if you all thought about it long enough, you'd come to quite the consensus upon what constitutes an ideal. In fact, it would be virtually impossible for us to all live together if we didn't have some consensus of what was ideal, because we wouldn't act in a way that we could all predict, we wouldn't act in a way that we could all predict, we wouldn't act in a way that we would all

at least in principle admire or be willing to punish. We have an implicit ideal and you know, it's not fully explicit, but it's certainly there. Anyway, so that was one part of the grail to the cup that Christ used to make this strange announcement that the cup that Christ used to make this strange announcement that to act properly, you have to ingest the ideal. That's a hell of a thing to think about. That's for sure. And then another idea was that when Christ was on the cross, he was pierced, and there was an idea that a Roman soldier caught blood in the cup. That's the holy grail. So it's the container of the magically transforming liquid. That's what it is at a symbolic level.

It's something that you would imbib that would transform you. And so it's the transformative substance. It's like the philosopher's stone. It's what you most want in life. That's another way of looking at it. And so it's associated with the ultimate ideal. And so the night, just so they're going to go look for the holy grail, it seems like a, I mean, it's just a cop.

Where the hell are you going to find that? There's a whole new tingling, it's not that big. But it's big enough, man. There's lots of places you could hide a cop. Where the hell are you going to go look for the Holy Grail? You don't even know if it exists. And so each of the knights enters the forest at the part that looks darkest to him.

That's a hell of a fine story that. And so, and it's a terrifying story, you know, it's a terrifying idea that what you need most will be found where you least want to look. But there's a truism to it, and which is, well, as I said already, you already looked all the easy places. You know, so if you found what you need by looking in all the easy places, well more power to you. You've got what you need and life is going along fine and everything's perfect for you. And good, you're done, man. It's like we've built a church and put you in it.

You've managed it, but that isn't the case for people. And then you think, oh, oh, God, damn it. Maybe I have to go look at places I don't want to look. How I'm not, you know, the best father I could be and why I am alienated from my brother and why fight with my wife and why I have multiple affairs and why drink too bloody much and why gamble and why I'm, it's a long list, right?

I could go on for a long time. It's like, I don't want to look at all that. Well, yeah, no kidding. No kidding. You definitely wouldn't want to look at that. But well, if you've got everything you need, then you don't have to look at it. But if you don't have everything you need,

it's a good idea to look where you haven't have to look at it, but if you don't have everything you need, it's a good idea to look where you haven't looked because you've looked everywhere else and you haven't found it. So what are the basic ideas? Well, the first idea is that things are way worse than you think. Way worse, no matter how pessimistic you are, they're way worse than that. Your way too optimistic about your future. Terrible things are going to happen to you, and human beings are malevolent right to the bloody core. History is a nightmare, and nature is trying to kill you in all sorts of brutal ways, and will succeed. So that's rough, man.

And then, so it's no wonder we're possessed by ideologies because who the hell wants to think that. But then on the other side of the coin is, man, we've been around a long time, right? Life is 3.5 billion years old, and every single one of your relatives going back 3.5 billion years lived long enough to reproduce. It's an absolute bloody miracle that you're here. It's so incredibly unlikely that that could occur and such a testament to the absolute

indomitability of life. And then we're kind of a particularly special kind of life because not only are we alive, after that three and a half billion year struggle, but we're conscious and aware, you know, and we can shape our own destinies to some degree. So we've got some wicked enemies stacked up against us, but it's not clear that we're not up to the challenge, especially going back to the point I was making, given that we're really not given at all. You know, and here you are anyways, like you're alive.

You're about 50 somewhere around there. Oh, sorry. Okay, good. So that was a bit of a compliment. It's probably the dim light, but so, but, you know, look, you've managed to be here for 56 years and you're not even, you're not what you could be. So that's pretty damn good, you know. Just imagine how much you might be thriving if, if you polished yourself up. And I'm not picking you up. Well, I'm not picking you up specifically.

I'm saying this about all of us, right? I mean, really, and I'm definitely am. It's like it's an open question. How much is there to you that you're not utilizing? And I think that's a fine question, man. That's a good question. How much is there to you that you're not utilizing I actually think that's the fundamental religious question because

I think that one of the one of the chronic continual implicit messages of fundamental of the fundamental belief systems that human beings have produced over the thousands of years that we've been trying to formulate a story about who we are, is that our ignorance about the world is only equaled by our ignorance about who we actually are. is only equal by our ignorance about who we actually are. And there's way more to us than we think. And that's obscured by our refusal to make full use of that.

And I think we all know it. I really believe that because I don't, you know, people think, oh, it'd be good to live without guilt, and it would be good to live without shame, and it would be good to live without pain, and fear, and you know, maybe that's all true. But you don't deserve to. Well, I don't believe it, you know?

One of the things that psychologists have done that's a real disservice to people is to tell you that, well, you're kind of okay the way you are. It's like, no, you're not. You're not, and you don't believe it. Like, you don't wake up, there's no bloody way. You don't wake up at three in the morning sweating and think, I'm really okay the way I am. And then you pat yourself on the head and go back to sleep.

It's bold, that's such bloody nonsense. I don't know anybody who, I can't even believe that anybody can think that that could be a possibility. It's like with all the knowledge you have, of all the things that you aren't, how could you possibly wake up at that time of night and like console yourself with your fundamental perfection? That's just not going anywhere.

And if you're feeling perfect, just wake up your wife and ask her what she thinks. Okay, so all these rules that I laid out, I'm going to go through them really quickly and then I'm going to talk about the, I talked about it a bit already, but I'm going to talk about the understructure of the, of the rules. Because they all cohere. They're all, what they're attempting to do is to layout an ideal. And to layout an ideal, you need rules. The rules aren't the ideal. And there's a bunch of reasons for that, because rules conflict with one another.

You can follow rule A and you can follow rule B, and then you'll find out at some point that while you're following rule A and rule B, they don't work together. And so you can't completely map out the world with rules. It doesn't work. The world's too complicated to be reduced to a rule-based system. Otherwise, you could just be an automaton, right? Be like, you got a hundred rules. You just go out there and act those out, you're done.

Or we'd have artificial intelligence systems that were rule-based. Remember, like 30, 40 years ago, people were trying to make expert systems with computers that could follow rules like diagnostic systems that physicians use. It's like, well, there's a universe of illness and there are diagnostic rules for diagnosing each rule, illness.

Why don't we just make a comprehensive list of rules and enter your symptoms in and the computers will just tell you what's wrong with you. It's like that didn't work and rule-based systems, so that sort hardly worked for anything. And it's because rules are useful, but the rules of thumb, they have limited domains of applicability, and you just can't master the world with rules. But that doesn't mean they're not useful. They're disciplinary structures, they're guidelines.

I'll tell you something else that's really fascinating about Christianity in particular. I learned this by assessing, it's analyzing, it's narrative structure. So there's another idea. It's a psychological idea again. I'm not speaking in religious terms, except incidentally.

What happens in the Old Testament is that, well, people behave a lot of different ways and a lot of reprehensible ways. There's a sense that the reprehensible ways that people conduct themselves are wrong, what Cain does, to able is wrong, whatever the people who surrounded, know a dead that cost, the flood was wrong,

like there's wrong doing everywhere But no one exactly knows what it is that's wrong. You're not following God's will. That's wrong It's like okay fine, but you know God's kind of mysterious and it's a bit vague and so You don't get rules until Exodus until Moses and Moses takes his people out of the tyranny, out of tyranny, out of Egypt. Now, they got rules in Egypt. They're slaves. They follow the damn rules.

You don't want to get too cynical about that. There's some bloody advantages to being in this situation like that. Everybody knows their place and everybody knows what to do. It's not what dreaded freedom. And then, but it's not optimal. And maybe people have a certain desire for freedom. It's not obvious that they do, but perhaps they do. And Moses convinces them that they do.

And he takes them out in the desert. And he wanders around there for 40 years, which is a hell of a thing, man, because the desert's like 10 miles long. It's a little tiny bit of the country. It's like, make a beeline there, Moses, and you're two weeks and you're through. It's like, no, 40 years, 40 years.

Well, what does that mean? It means, well, when you jump out of your tyranny, your bloody confused, that's what it means. And it also means something else, too, is, like the tyranny can be social. Maybe you have a job that you don't like and you have a boss that's tyrannical. And, you know, but you've been in the job for 10 years.

It offers you a certain amount of security, and you're not sure if you can function if you leave and maybe you'll let people down and maybe you'll fail. It's like, okay, we'll just keep the tyranny. But then you're sick of it one day and you think, oh, tell with this and you curse your boss with a bunch of different plagues and he fires you. And so then where are you? It's like, well, you're not in a promised land. That's bloody well for sure. And that's worth knowing too, because one of the things you

might want to ask yourself in life is, well, if you're so sure that there's a bunch of things that you're doing wrong and you're in not such a bad, not such a good place, then why do you just jump out of it and go to a better place? That would be the logical thing to do, right? Hypothetically, we could all be enlightened. That's the theory. It's like, well, why the hell don't you just drop all the foolishness and the tyranny, your subjection to it, and just be enlightened? God, you think that'd be an improvement?

It's like, it's because that isn't how it works. You jump out of your box and you end up, well maybe it's not somewhere worse, but it's not clearly somewhere better. It's 40 years in the desert. There's not much to eat there, plus it's a desert. And then you've got all, you know, you're surrounded by all these fratious people and they're no longer united by the tyranny, so they don't know which ways up.

And all they do is argue and fight and generate a bunch of false idols, which is exactly the situation we're in right now, by the way, with the death of God and the false idols that have characterized the 20th century. It's like, well, we're not following these rules anymore. What rules should be followed? Well, we don't know any old rules will do. And so then we have constant arguments about which ways up. And that's part of the desert.

And of course, look, if you've ever made a radical change in your life, whatever that happens to be, you know that's exactly what happens to you. You're now in the place of radical change. That's the underworld by the way. And you don't know which ways up. It's like, what should I do? Well, there's a thousand things to do. And think, well, great, a thousand things to do.

It's like, no, that's way too many things to do. You want, like, if you have a toddler, eh? And let's say you're too rich, and you've bought your toddler 300 things to do. You want, like, if you have a toddler, right? And let's, let's say, you're too rich. And you've bought your toddler 300 things to wear. And so her closet's absolutely full of toddler wear. And you take your poor toddler and you say, which of these do you want to wear? And what the hell is she going to do about that? She's gonna do it, like comprehensive analysis of the qualitative distinctions between all 300 outfits.

It's like, she's gonna cry. Which is what you're doing when there's a thousand things that you should be doing. What you take maybe three outfits out of the closet and you put them on the bed and you say, hey, pick one. And she's thrilled because she gets, you know, a bit of choice, but it's not like 300,000 things is too many.

And that, well, that's what happens in the desert. And, well, Moses eventually more or less figures out what the Israelites are up to because he listens to the bitch and whining, complaining, squawk squawk and fight and generate new gods and wish that they were back in Egypt, like the bloody Russians wished they were back under the Stalinists. It's like 55% of them wished that. Bring back the good old days. With Stalin, we really had someone who knew what to do. What he knew what to do was kill tens of millions of people,

but at least he was decisive. So it's amazing what people, I read a book once about Auschwitz prison guards nostalgia for their old jobs. I'm dead serious about that. So God doesn't matter how terrible the past was, it's like you can conjure up some nostalgia for it. So you're in his real light and it's desert. All you've got to eat is like man out whatever the hell that is. And you're thinking, well some of those lark tongues that the Egyptians loved would sure go well right now. Anyways, Moses spent a lot of time judging his people

because they're always fighting, fighting, fighting about everything, because they didn't have any overarching authority, and it was driving him stark, raving mad, having to mediate all of the conflicts, but he learned a lot by doing it for some of that 40 years. You know, you learn a lot if you're fighting with you and you're fighting with you and you're fighting with you.

You all have to go to someone and say, well, here's our problems. And they know they could be real problems, real moral conundrums. And then somebody who's a judge has to say, okay, well, here's what seems to work. And it work is complicated. It can't just be, here's what you have to seems to work. And work is complicated. It can't just be years what you have to listen to this, and so do you, and if you don't, it's like off with your heads. That's not peace. That's not a good judgment.

A good judgment has to be, well, I've taken this apart. And I've decided, well, here's your error. Here's your error. And here's what you did right. And here's what you did right. And here's a way that we could take both your interests into account and maybe it's not perfect but it's better than anything you guys can think up and now you won't have to kill each other.

How about if we go with that and you think yeah well you know I just soon kill them but but you know maybe that's not for the best, and so I'll live with it. And so that's a good judgment. It's not perfect, but it's good. And what happens is you've taken a complex ethical situation, and you've extracted out a rule from it, right? And the rule only fits if it's in accordance with the moral intuitions of the people who are having the conflict. Because otherwise it isn't going to bring peace. And that's an interesting thing, because what it implies is that this entire large scale

social structure that we've built, over thousands and thousands of years, predicated, say, on English common law, and this is genuinely the case, is a consequence of continually adjudicating between the conflicts of individuals, extracting out general principles as a consequence that can be laid out as something approximating rules,

approximating rules, and then having everyone agree on them. And so we start with the basic moral foundations of our moral intuitions. And we say, well, that seems fair. Well, why does it seem fair? Well, we don't exactly know, that seems fair. Well, why does it seem fair? Well, we don't exactly know. It seems fair.

Okay, that's the best we can do. And so that's what we start with is what seems fair. And then on top of that, we build something like a representational structure that's an articulated, it's an articulated description of what seems fair. That's the body of laws. And so it's out of our moral intuitions that are articulated ethical representations emerge.

And that's bloody well-important to know that. Because what people often think is that we think up ethical things abstractly and then act them out. Rules first, good behavior later. It's like, no, doesn't work. That's why top-down governance doesn't work very well. It has to be reciprocal. It has to be, well, you think some things ethically and so

to you and there's differences, but there's some commonality because otherwise you'd be at each other's bloody throats all the time. There's some commonality. And so we have to come up with a description of how we're going to act that fits with that commonality that we'll accept. And that's how we scaffold civilization out of our moral intuitions. And then it works because what we say we do is sort of like what we do.

Or what we say we should do is sort of like what we think we should do. And then everybody can kind of agree on that, or maybe you can go off and come up with your own better solution and try to convince people, and that's okay too, although it's really hard. I mean, geniuses can do it, and it happens from time to time. You know, you get a bit of a moral revolution in one domain of society, but by and large, we have a descriptive system that matches our moral intuitions.

And that's what happens in the story of Moses. Essentially, it's mythologized to some degree, but Moses is judging his people like mad for forever. He's wandering around in the desert, narrow, fratious, and bitching, and whining, and they get so crabby, you know, at some point, they're basically cursing God, and he gets so irritated that he just sends a bunch of poison the snakes into the desert

just to bite them. And so, you know, it doesn't really, what would you say, say that much for the character of God, perhaps? But it is rather comical. It's like a Christ. You crabby bastards. It's like, have some snakes.

It'll give you something to really complain about. One of the things that Moses does, this is pretty interesting, man, is he takes, he prays to God. He says, look, can you call off the God damn snakes? I have enough problems here. Call off the snakes and God's thinking, I'm pretty amused about these snakes, I don't know, I think maybe we'll just keep around for while, but he tells Moses to make a snake out of bronze and to put it on a snake. And then if anybody will come and look at the bronze snake, that the snakes will no longer bite them.

And God had saw it. You just can't believe how much intelligence is packed into that idea. It's an absolutely insane stroke of overwhelming poetic brilliance, because what it suggests is that let's say something's tormenting you. Let's call it a poisonous snake. What do you do about it?

You make a bloody representation of it and then you look at it. You think about it. You attend to it. You don't hide. You don't run. None of that. You make a representation and you look at it. And if you get the representation right and you look at it, then you don't get bitten anymore. Man. Unbelievable. I can't believe that people thought that up.

can't believe that people thought that up. You know, it's the fundamental rule of human learning. It's a fundamental rule of successful psychotherapy. You're afraid of something? Okay, let's figure out what it is, first of all. And then let's figure out how we can break it into bits so that you can look at it, so that you can face it. That works, right? It's exactly the opposite of safe space culture. I'm dead serious. It's exactly the opposite of that. And it says

what it says is that even if it's poisonous snakes, even if you're in a desert for 40 years, and it's poisonous snakes sent by God, which is pretty bad, that your ability to represent and confront is more powerful than that. That's a pretty optimistic story. So you know, and it also kind of emeliorates the idea that it's God being cruel because another explanation of that story is that it's just people being weak and ungrateful.

And, you know, the distinction between God's cruelty and people's weakness and in gratitude is a very, very, very, very difficult paradox to untangle. So rules. The rules point to a principle. The principle is a mode of being. There's an idea in Christianity that Moses lays out all these rules, and so the rules are emergent properties. Everyone knows how to act sort of,

or at least knows what's unfair. You know, little kids, they don't really know how to act. But they know what's unfair, man. They got an unerring eye for justice, especially if they're siblings. It's like, he got one-tenth of an ounce more gummy bear than me. That's not fair. It's like fair enough, it's a violation of reciprocity, right?

And people don't like having reciprocity violated and so the kid has a point. So we can certainly object to what's unfair without knowing precisely what's fair. And that's what human beings are like. We know what's unfair, but we're not so good at what's fair. Anyways, we figured out, we make some rules. Now there's this idea.

I was just reading about this a little while ago, trying to make sense out of it. A very complicated thing to make sense out of. There's this scene in the New Testament, where Christ goes up on a mountain. Why is people seem to go up on mountains? It's like you don't go down to a valley to find a wise guru, so I'm going to the valley to talk to my guru.

No, you're not. You go to the mountain. Why? Well, who the hell knows? It's up. It's closer to the sun. I don't know, it's closer to God. Who knows?

But it's on a pinnacle. And you can see from a pinnacle, and you can see from a pinnacle, right? And you have to climb up to get to a mountain, and a guru doesn't climb down. He climbs up. It's a fundamental metaphor. So anyways, Christ goes up on this mountain, and with a couple of his disciples, and he finds Moses there, weirdly enough, and another project, another profit, Elijah. And I won't talk about Elijah because that's just insanely complicated, but Moses is bad enough.

So Moses is the log giver, and the way that the narrative of the Old Testament and the New Testament are put together is that imagine that there's a thousand rules and they make a pattern, you know, which is what makes them rules. And it's what makes them coherent. There has to be some underlying pattern to the rules in order for them to be coherent. Otherwise they just be arbitrary and they'd be full of contradictions. You know, like maybe we'd say, well, those are good rules.

So then the question is, well, what is it that's common across the rules that make them good? It's something, well, you don't know, it's some sort of meta-rule, right? It's a rule that governs rules, but you don't know what it is. And what it is, in some sense, is a mode of being. It's a way of acting. Like, let's say you got the pattern right. You know, you fulfilled all thousand rules, all ten commandments, but there's way more rules than that, but you fulfilled them thoroughly. Well, that would make you a some sort of person, right, make you a singular sort of person, and the point of the rules would be to make you that person. Well, one of

the things I can tell you about the reason in the New Testament that Christ goes up on the mountain to talk to Moses is to fulfill a strange prophecy. There's a prophecy that runs through the Old Testament that something will emerge out of the concatenation of rules that will be a personality that's redemptive in its quality. And so again, I'm not speaking religiously here, I'm speaking as if this is a set of psychological ideas. We all have a sense of right and wrong. Out of that, we can abstract a set of principles.

If we follow the set of principles that produces a kind of character, a good character, let's say. And the idea would be that the manifestation of that good character would be redemptive. Now, I mean, I mean, it would be good for you. Like, if you were that person, as much as you could be, like, and still be you, because it has to be sort of particularized as well, if you were that person, which would be the best person that you could be and still be you, that would be way better than just being the you that you are now. And look, I also think that people, also think that people know this

because you see, we feel shame and we feel guilt. And you might think, well, why? Why bother with it? Exactly. Like, you're gonna just take the psychopath route. Cause psychopaths really don't feel much guilt and shame. It's like, who the hell cares what you think of me? Or you or my family? It's like, it's all for me, man. And that'd be a lot easier as far as I can tell. It's like, no guilt. Okay, no shame. That'd be nice. I mean, those aren't pleasant emotions. I think

they're worse than fear. They're certainly up there with pain. It's not like you're praying at night, oh my God, send me more shame. It's like no, but you feel it. If you have any sense, like if you're worth your salt, then you feel that. And the reason is, it's got to be because you aren't who you could be, right? You aren't living up what to. What the hell is it that you're not living up to? It's got to be some sort of ideal, because otherwise, why would you feel shame? And it's an ideal that you hold,

because you holding yourself accountable. It's like, well, why does it bother you? I mean, we can start at least with the observation that it clearly does bother you. That's bloody well something that says something about who you are. You're the sort of person who's ashamed and guilty because you're not everything you could be. Well, that implies maybe you're wrong, maybe you're just deluded,

maybe there is this maybe there is no thing that you could be that would be greater than you are. Well, there's a problem with that then, though, like, well, what about your ambitions? What the hell are you going to do with them? You're already as good as you're going to get. You must have just stay in bad, man. You've already attained whatever perfection is possible in this world. That isn't how you act, you act as if there's ambitions, there's things that are more

worth doing, there's things that you should be out there striving for. That all implies that there's some sort of ideal that you haven't yet manifested, and along with that, has to go some sense that you're not everything that you could be. And so the idea is that if you manifested this set of abstracted principles properly, then you would transform yourself into, you would redeem yourself. You would atone, that's the other thing, atone means at one. It's very interesting interesting derivation. One of the things, Solzhenitsyn did, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote the Goulog archipelago, a very interesting thing he did.

He was in the work camps, terrible situation to be in, and he was having a bloody, miserable time of it, man. Not as bad as it could be, but in the bottom two or three percentile, bad enough. And he's wondering, because he had lots of time to wonder, just what the hell was up with him being there. And he had some cheap excuses that weren't even so cheap, because, well, first of all, he's on the Russian front

in World War II, and that was no picnic, and you can pretty much blame that on Stalin, and if you want to blame, if you've got to have someone to blame for your misery and to justify that blame, then Stalin's a good one, right? It's like, why am I here? Stalin. It's like, hey, Then Stalin's a good one, right? It's like, why am I here? Stalin. It's like, hey, no problem. Free pass for you, man. But it wasn't just Stalin.

It was also Hitler because it was Stalin and Hitler that caused the war and produced all the catastrophe that socialists got tangled up in. So he didn't just have Stalin to blame. He also had Hitler. So that was even better because you know you can have a debate. Who is the worst monster of the 20th century? Mao probably, but we'll forget about him momentarily. But if it's not Mao, well it's either Hitler or Stalin and if you have both of them

to blame, you're a scot-free man. It's like, it's not me, it's Hitler. Okay, no problem, man. You're a good guy. It's definitely Hitler. And so, Sorschnitzin is in the camp. And, you know, after a while, this whole Hitler-installing thing wasn't cut net for him because he was watching people in the work camps that he admired. He saw, and I don't want to overestimate this, he saw that there were people even under conditions of unbelievable privation, right, who were conducting themselves admirably, truthfully and nobly. And that really shook him to the core because he wasn't exactly sure that he was the sort of person who was doing that Despite the fact that he had Hitler and Stalin to blame him. He said he started to think about it

You know to really bloody well think about it as if it's not his life Depended on it because that wasn't enough as if his soul depended on it And I think that's more important because you know look life can be bad enough With enough sacrifice of soul so that you can wish for death I think that's more important because, you know, look, life can be bad enough with enough sacrifice of soul so that you can wish for death. There was this character named John Wayne Gacy, and you don't want to know anything about him. And he was a clown.

That's bad enough. He was a serial killing clown. And he existed. And he killed all sorts of kids and they finally found him and he asked for the death penalty And you know if you have even an ounce of sense you can figure out why You know because maybe maybe there was two percent of them that wasn't a psychopath You know and he got caught and it was like, please kill me, like enough. And that's interesting because it indicates

that there are things that you can do to yourself that make death desirable. There are places you can go that are so dark. You think, well, there's nothing worse than death. It's like you've got no imagination. There are things there's nothing worse than death. It's like you've got no imagination. There are things that are way worse than death. And I would say John Wayne Gacy's life was way worse than death. And if you don't believe it, you just go read about it, draw your own bloody conclusions. It was enough for him to beg for death. I don't remember if he got the death penalty or not. I don't believe so,

but it's beside the point to some degree. The point is that, well, you know, there are worst places that you can end up. So, it's an itsen thought, all right, well, wait a minute. Here's these people that are acting, nobly and honestly, truthfully, not taking the easy way out, not being trustees, not cooperating with the administration. I was just reading this other book called Ordinary Men. How a hell of a book, man. You want to know how things go from bad to worse. You probably don't want to know. But if you do want to know, you could read ordinary men, because it will tell you how things go bad from bad to worse.

And maybe you do want to know that, because maybe you don't want things to go for bad to worse in your own life. But it's a story about these policemen in Germany who were military policemen. They were too old to be drafted. And so they were putting this police unit, and then they were put in Poland after the Germans had marched through. And they were sort of charged with mopping up the Jews, essentially. They were at war and I suppose they thought of the Jews as an enemy fifth column,

although that was primarily a rationalization. These are just ordinary guys, you know. They were you people for all intents and purposes and you know if you don't think that well then you don't for all intents and purposes. And if you don't think that, well, then you don't understand. And they're commander, who has actually seemed to be a pretty good guy by normative standards. So as good as anyone you know, unless you happen to know a saint, and you would build a stand knowing a saint anyway.

So he wouldn't be your friend. So you probably don't know a saint. but he's as good as anybody you know. And he told his men that they're going to have to do some brutal things and that they could just go back to Germany if they wanted to. And hardly any of them did. And there's complicated reasons for it. They didn't want to abandon their comrades and all of that. And Jesus, the first thing they were supposed to do

was just round up the Jewish men of military age and sort of pack them into cattle cars. And it's not like that's nothing, you know? It's not nothing. And they knew pretty much what that meant. But it's not as bad as it gets. And then, well, some of them wouldn't do it. Some of them wouldn't do it.

And you know, they weren't punished for it. The men laughed at them and they were alienated and ostracized to some degree. But they faced almost no military penalty. So that's pretty interesting. And then, well, they got a little more serious and there was more push from the Nazi leadership to eradicate the Jews in Poland.

And the next thing was, well, you go into a town and you clean up the men and pack them away, but maybe you bring the women and the children along too. And if there's old people and they can't get the hell out of bed, well, maybe just shoot them. And so that was rough, but most of them learned how to do it, not all of them, and it made them physically ill and made them feel terrible.

Most of them, although some learned to enjoy it, and step by step, they turned themselves into people who were making a habit and perhaps a sport out of taking naked pregnant women out into the fields and shooting them in the back of the head, which by the way is a lot more difficult technically than it sounds. So that's one step at a time. So that's a good thing to read about. In case you're wondering whether or not you should take that next step that you think you shouldn't take. That do that next thing at work that

violates your conscience, that would cause some trouble to object to. You can get to some pretty damn low places one step at a time and I mean I know this is an extreme situation that I'm describing but things become extreme. So Jeanette and in the Gulag he decided that he was going to, because he was interested in these people that wouldn't cooperate. They just tell the commanders who were trying to get them to rat on their fellow men or to do some demeaning job,

like clean the shoes of some bloody trustee. They just tell them, tell with you, you discussed me, I'm bloody well not doing it. You know, and sometimes that meant death, most of what happened in the camp's meant death anyways, but it meant death. It was like you're gonna go out there and work at, I don't know, breaking rocks when it's 40 below,

you know, or something like that. And that was that for you. But not always. It was not infrequently the case that the moral authority of the people who dared that sort of resistance provided them with a certain amount of protection. Maybe they scared the people that were trying to torment them. And you could see why, because if you met someone

and you had that much power over them, not only the power of life and death, but the power of torture and life and death. And they basically told you that they could see and use something absolutely despicable. And there was no bloody way they were going to listen to you no matter what you did. What you'd think, well, well, okay, maybe I'll find someone else easier to pick on. You know, Solzhenetsen said he went over his entire life with a fine tooth comb.

And he had lots of time to do that. And he tried to remember every bloody thing he'd ever did in his life that he thought was wrong. That'd be a long list, you could imagine, but that he thought was wrong. And it's worth thinking about that phenomenologically, I guess, about what that would mean. You know, one of the things that I suggest to people and I did that in 12 rules for life was that you try not to say anything that makes you feel weak.

That's a real interesting exercise. And you can really learn to do this. You have to decide to do it. You think, OK, well, from here on in, I'm going to listen to what I say, which is already a whole revelation, because lots of times you say things without listening, no one else listens either, so you don't necessarily notice,

but you say things without listening, you just say them habitually. But now you listen and you think, why do I feel when I say that? And it might be, well, I feel angry, I feel grateful, I feel unhappy, I feel, forget about all that. I feel like I'm coming apart at the seams or I feel like I'm gathering myself together, like a line, because you can detect that. You know, when you betray yourself with your

speech, you can feel yourself coming apart at the seams. And when you don't, you can feel yourself aligned. And that's your own judgment. And when you don't, you can feel yourself aligned. And that's your own judgment. And then you might think, well, what would happen if I only said things that made me feel stronger? Well, one of the things that would happen is that you'd feel stronger, right? That's something.

Maybe you'd actually be stronger. Because maybe it's not just a feeling. You probably wouldn't be perfect at it to begin with. You'd get it wrong a little bit, but I would say with a bit of practice, you just start saying things that were strong. And maybe if you said things that were strong enough, you'd be indomitable.

It's certainly possible. You know people who speak weekly, and you know people who speak strongly, and you know that the people who speak weekly just get pushed out of the way and you know that the people who speak strongly don't and so then you might ask well what would happen if you spoke strongly and maybe the answer is that like all the poisonous snakes would get off your path. It's certainly a possibility or at least they'd skitter away to some degree, and I think you already know that too because you know perfectly well how bloody proud you are of

yourself when you wake up at three in the morning and you're being harassed by whatever thoughts are harassing you, and you think, Jesus, at least I got that right, at least I said that right, at least I stuck up for myself properly under those conditions. It's such a bloody relief to have that memory rather than, oh God, I compromised myself completely and there's no coming back from it. So imagine, well, if your life was nothing but the speech acts that lent you strength, what would that be like, you think? What would you be like for yourself then? Who would You think, what would you be like for yourself then? Who would you be? What would you be like for your family?

What would you be like for your community in the rest of the world? God only knows. We could use forthright and truthful speech that I think, or we want weak and deceitful speech, because that's the opposite, like which of those two things sounds better. I mean, truly, you that's the opposite, like which of those two things sounds better. I mean, truly, you might think, well, I can use deceitful

and untruistful speech to avoid some difficulty that I might otherwise get into. It's like a little escape route, but it's not like, if you have any sense, you're proud of that. It's a second-rate alternative. Nobody in the right mind thinks that deceitful weak speech is the right pathway forward. So Jean-Itzen decided that he was going to

a tone for every single thing that he could remember that he did wrong now. It was a strange thing, right? Because like maybe you did something wrong when you were seven, you know, you bullied some kid. Maybe it still bothers you, you know, when you think about it, maybe not too. But you've got things no doubt that you're ashamed of, you think, okay, well, I'm going to get rid of all those things. I go over my life, I'm going to figure out everything I did wrong, and I'm going to fix it. Like, you

think, well, how can you fix it now? It's like, I don't bloody well know how you can fix it now. You know, I mean, you might not be able to apologize to the eight-year-old kid, you bully, to be ridiculous anyways. But maybe you could derive the moral lesson necessary from the memory so that you change yourself so that you're much less likely to engage in similar activity in the present and the future. And maybe that would be a tonement. That would bring you back together.

That would make you one again, right? And that would absolve you of your error. And I don't mean in some metaphysical sense. I mean, you would no longer be the sort of person that would commit that error. And I don't mean in some metaphysical sense, I mean, you would no longer be the sort of person that would commit that error. And then that would seem to be a good thing. Maybe you have 200 things to fix up. It's not that many.

Maybe it's 2000, even that's not. I've met people that had like 300,000 things to fix up. Really, I'm really dead serious about that. I figured it out sort of mathematically. It's like they were making 100 mistakes a day. It's a lot. Everything they did was a mistake. And then so that's like 3,000 a month.

And so that's 36,000 a year. And then 10 years, that's 360,000. Your man, your screwed, if that happens. It's really hard to recover from that because you've done 360,000 things wrong, doesn't do your character much good and it's a hell of a monster to face. But most of us aren't in a situation that's quite that dismal. And even if we are, maybe there would still be some hope with enough desperation. It's bloody difficult though. But let's say you did that. You went over your life. You think, okay, what the hell is wrong with

me? Like seriously, like as if it's a question that matters, there's a prayer. There's this idea in the New Testament. You knock and the door will open and you ask and it will be given to you. I think, I want a yacht. It's like poofy yacht appears on your, what in your, probably in your basement so you can't get the damn thing out. You know, that'd be a good joke from God. It's like, well, that's a stupid prayer. You're not going to get a bloody yacht. Besides, what would you do with a yacht? You just spend all your income trying to keep the damn thing afloat. You would even want it It's like it's not a good prayer. It's like well, what do you want? That you could get or maybe you could think well, maybe I could fare what's wrong with me and

Where I'm not what I could be and I'd like to do that. I'd like to open up that doorway so I could see what that was. And I'd like to fix it. Maybe you'd get that, and maybe you'd build a fix it. At least you'd build a fix it a little bit. You know, one of the reasons I'm so stunned by the Guilaguerre Capelago, Solzhenitsyn's book is because he went through this process of confession and atonement to reunite himself to make himself one thing again and

God only knows what one thing means like if you're one thing, what does it mean? You're aligned with you're aligned with the good and I don't know what the metathysics of that I don't know how high up into the cosmos, the good extends. I mean, I know that hell extends a bloody long ways down. So you might think that good extends a long ways up. You atone, you put yourself in alignment. Who knows what you're aligned with now? Well, Solzhenitsin aligned himself,

and he wrote the Goulogarchapelago, and it was one of the books that wiped out the Soviet Union. Without a thermonuclear war, let's point out which was kind of a plus unless you think that human beings are the sort of cancer on the planet that would have been better eradicated. And thank God we didn't go down that route. Think, well, the ethos that I was trying to develop in 12 rules for life was that. There's all these rules stand up straight with your shoulders back. What does that mean? It means confront the world, not aggressively, but like you're ready for it, regardless of what it is.

And it's not something, it's not something pretty. I just wrote a letter to my mother today, she's 80 years old, I wrote her a letter, I put it on my blog. You know, and she's in pretty good shape, she's a tough cookie, I really like her. But all her friends are dying, you know? She goes and works in a nursing home in this little town

she lives in, like she's got like five friends there of Alzheimer's, they don't even know who she goes and works in a nursing home in this little town she lives in. Like she's got like five friends there of Alzheimer's. They don't even know who she is. You know, that's bloody brutally you think, well that's what happens when you get old. It's like that's what young people say. Ah, that's what happens when you get old. It's like, that's a fine, what would you call it? What would you say about that? There's not a lot of solace in that.

You know, not only do your friends have Alzheimer's now, and they don't recognize you, but you're also old. It'd be a lot better if it just happened to you now, because at least you'd be young with friends with Alzheimer's instead of like old. So it's a bitch of a thing. She, I know, an old age visits you just when you're least capable of handling it.

You know, it's really rough. And so, you know, you got a lot to stand up to, man. There's no doubt about that. So, you know, rule one is that's what to do. Is to stand up and confront the world. And these little alarms that go off. And rule two, it's a lied with that. It's treat yourself like you're someone worth. Treat yourself as if you're someone responsible

for taking care of. That's a good one, that's a moral injunction. It's not be nice to yourself. I don't know if you deserve to be nice to yourself. Probably no more than someone else deserves to have you be nice to them. Besides, it's nice. It's a weak virtue. Good to yourself would be a lot better.

Treat yourself like you're more valuable than you understand. Treat yourself like you're moral transgressions, count for more than you think. Treat yourself like you're someone who could add a hell of a lot more to the world than you are. That's something that will frighten you properly, especially when you start to think about the darkness that you're capable of, because at least you could avoid that. Surround yourself with people who want the best for you.

Same thing, not to make it easy for you. That's not helpful. But who, like, look at you, like someone that that loves you and thinks man, I can see something in you You know and I'm gonna do everything I can to say yes when that manifests itself and to say no When it doesn't and to separate the wheat from the chaff and that's no not radical You know what radical acceptance from your friends? I don't care. You're drunk, you're an addict, you beat your wife, it's all okay with me. It's like, it's not a bloody okay. And someone who thinks it is isn't a friend. Maybe they won't abandon you because

they can still help, but that's not approval of your actions. Rule four is to treat yourself like you're someone responsible to, sorry, rule four is to compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today. That's an injunction against in gratitude and resentment. It's like you've got your problems. So to you, man, we've all got our problems, we've got our weaknesses, we've got our unfair situations thrown into the world as we are with our imperfections.

Lots of people are better at lots of things than we are. You know, it's not a fair comparison though, because you don't have his problems and you know, you don't have her problems. And so what the hell do you know? It's like you have your problems, that's for sure. And they're probably quite a bloody burden, but you have your advantages. Maybe with a bit of work you could be slightly more put together tomorrow than you are today. And that'd be a fair contest because you're competing against yourself and you've got all

your advantages and disadvantages. So maybe if you were a bit better, well, what's the harm in that? And you get to move uphill without being jealous that way. And so that's because it's not easy to move uphill without being jealous about the people who are hypothetically already there. Rule five, don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Well, what does that mean? Well, if you dislike them, what makes these things think other people will like them. Well, what does that mean? Well, if you dislike them, what makes these things other people will like them. I mean, you love them. Other people don't. So, if they, if you're not likeable, you love them and they're not likeable, at least you love them. You don't love them and they're not likeable. Man, you're not going to spend any time with them at

all. Maybe you'll smile falsely when the little monsters make their appearance, but that not going to spend any time with them at all. Maybe you'll smile falsely when the little monsters make their appearance, but that's going to be about all there is to it. You want to entice your children into pro-social behavior so that they can take their part in society and have everyone open their arms to them. That's a good thing. Rule six, put your house in perfect order

before you criticize the world. Well, that's just a moral hygiene argument as far as I'm concerned. It's like, what makes you so sure that all the horribleness isn't just you. Well, it's like you said, it's an optimistic idea. Maybe it isn't, you know, like maybe, I mean, I know people have bad luck, although I've seen people with terrible luck, managed to not make it into absolute bloody hell by being morally responsible and honest and decent about it, and under horrible circumstances, you know, like when they were taking care of someone who is really sick and really difficult, which is rough man, especially when it's long time and it's fatal.

That's rough. You say, well, that's not my fault. It's like fair enough, man. But boy, you can sure make it worse. And you can actually make it better. And so, who knows how much better you could make things? Mazel, give it a shot. See how much better you could make things before Mazel, give it a shot, see how much better you could make things before shaking your fist

at God and the world and going down that pathway. Rule seven, do what's meaningful and not what's expedient. That's a good one. That's a deep one, I think. One of the things I've become convinced about as a psychologist is that our instinct for meaning is real. Meaning isn't an artificial construct. It's not a cortical phenomena.

It's not something that we thought up rationally. It's something that speaks to us like really from here, maybe from the spine, deep. It's what you feel when you listen to music. You know, music gives you that intimation of meaning. That's not rational. It moves you. It limes you with the world.

And you follow that instinct for meaning. There isn't anything more real than that. Your whole nervous system is set up to illuminate a path forward with meaning. I think there's all the evidence for that and that sort of goes along with rule eight which is don't lie, tell the truth or at least don't lie. Why? If you're going to follow your own instinct, your instinct for meaning, let's say don't fill your head up with deceit because all that will

happen is you'll corrupt the instinct and then you want to be able a trust yourself. And then when you have to make a difficult decision and you will have to make a difficult decision, you'll make it wrong and then you're done. So says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. It's like well that's the fear of deceit. Don't fill your head with what you know to not be true, because it will stop working properly. And then when you need to rely on yourself, there will be no one there except the lies. And they're not going to guide you properly.

Rule 9. Assume that the person you're listening to knows something you don't. Why? Well, because sometimes if you listen to people, well, they're weird people. And if you listen to them, it's interesting, because they'll believe some weird thing, you think, how can you believe that? And then you want to argue with them because you want to show

that they're wrong. It's like, yeah, yeah, they're wrong. So are you. It's like, it's dull. Why in the world do you believe that weird thing? That's a fun conversation. Because maybe they'll tell you and you'll get this. It's like, I was a clinician for a long time and I always thought of people like platypus or penguins or ostriches you'll get this. It's like I was a clinician for a long time and I always thought of people like platypuses or penguins or ostriches or rhinoceroses like completely improbable creatures, right? All of us. And so you get a completely improbable creature

come talk to you and they have strange things to say and you ask them and they tell you their strange story and all of a sudden it's so bloody interesting. You can hardly believe it. And then they start to unfold themselves and straighten themselves out. And it's a conversation like a fascinating novel. And then they tell you things you don't know. Because they're weird and they've had experiences you haven't had.

And maybe a lot of it, you have to separate the wheat from the chaff, but you think, oh man, that's the conclusion you derived from that. That's really interesting. I would have never, in a million years, thought that up. And so that's worth it, because you're stupid and blind. And so if somebody can tell you something you don't know, then you're a little less stupid and blind, and that's good, because then you won't wander into a pit. And then rule 10, be precise in your speech.

That's a good one. Say what you mean. Say what you mean because then you specify your aim. This is literally the case, say, like we specify our aims and our actions with our thoughts and our values. And so if you start to speak precisely, you think, well, what do I want? God, who wants to think that up? Maybe you spend two weeks, all right? If I could have what I needed and I wanted, what would it look like? There's a terrifying idea, because maybe you won't get it,

but maybe you will. Maybe you don't even want to admit to yourself what it is, but then you specify it, it starts to clear it, and all of a sudden that vague target that's floating out, it starts to clear it, and all of a sudden that vague target that's floating out there somewhere starts to, you know, come together in something tight and your ability to draw the bow back and and send the arrow to the mark increases, and then there's always the possibility that you get it. And so that's

maybe not too, hey, that's the big risk of life. Maybe you won't get it. That's certainly possible, but you haven't got a better bet. And you've got to stake your life on something, because you are staking your life on something. Rule 11, don't bother children when they're skateboarding. Yeah, well, that's like, you know, the reason you have to let your children grow up is because they're just,'re gonna be just as stupid as you are when they're adults. And so they kind of have to get used to that. Like, you know when your kids in an adult, they're like 25 and they come and ask you about what they should do.

And some existential question, you know, a tough one, and you think, why don't I know what you should do? I can't tell. You're your own person, you're complicated. This is a tough question. It's like, oh, oh, you're an adult. I don't have the answers anymore. And so you don't bother children when they're doing daring things

because they need to do daring things and confront danger and overcome obstacles and push themselves past the point of safety and break some rules and get ready because they've got things to be prepared for and they should be celebrated for that and not protected and discouraged. And the last one is pedicat when you encounter one on the street. And that's, that was a more personal chapter. And it has to do with what you do when things have really gone in a way in your life that you can't control in the large.

I mean, you can make it worse, as I said. But, you know, you have a sick person in your life. And there's not much you can do about it. And maybe's getting worse and all you can do is endure you know, and that's something too that we don't teach people anymore It's like You should be happy Yeah, maybe good luck if you are But you're not gonna be happy when you're not happy and so that isn't gonna work very well But sometimes what you can do is endure, you know?

It's like things are rough. Maybe they're going to be rough for like five years. Or maybe they're going to be rough for 10 years. And you can put one bloody foot in front of the other and keep moving forward. And the truth of the matter is, you can actually do that. And that's really something. And maybe there's ways you learn to do that. And that's really something. And maybe there's

ways you learn to do that. You think, well, I don't know if I can take the next 10 steps, but I can take the next two. And then maybe I can take the next two. And then maybe I can take the next one. And you know, you get through the days and the weeks and the months, and you do that, and you can do it. And maybe you do that partly because while you're doing it, and you put one foot in front of the other, you notice something off to the side that's kind of beautiful and kind of remarkable and kind of reminds you that life is worth living. And maybe if you're attentive enough while you put one foot in front of another, then you don't despair to the point while you endure that you can no longer manage it. And that's something to know too.

Also, those are the 12 rules. And that's part of the under structure of why I wrote them. So I think we're at a point in our psychological and technological development that we have to wake up a little more than we have. And the reason for that is because we're getting more powerful and we have very, very complicated decisions to make. All of us. And we don't even know what the decisions are going to be because things are changing so rapidly around us. And so what do you do when you don't know what to do, when things are coming out you fast and they could be really good and they could be really bad. And the answer is you have bloody well better have your act together right? You

better have built your arc, you better have put yourself together, you better have made the right sacrifices, you better have opened your eyes because here it comes and if it goes left, well that's on you and if it goes right, well that's on you too. And so I wrote 12 rules for life and the other books that I've written and I've been doing these talks to encourage people, you know, because we could use some encouragement. I think what I've learned from looking at the darkest things that I could look at was that the light outweighs the dark. I really believe that. I think people are remarkable, miraculous creatures. Blinded for some reason, I don't understand,

to our own capability and ability. And I think that if more of us opened up more, if more of us spoke what we believed to be the truth, if more of us took, voluntarily, took on the risks that are necessary to take on, to live properly, that we could make the world up. Well we could first make the world a lot less hellish than it might otherwise be, and that's bloody well something.

But even more, I think that there's no limit to what we might be able to accomplish. You know, and that would be a good thing to better lives on, because we have to do that anyways. So I guess you can all think about that, and see if it makes sense, because it makes sense to me, and I've tried to take it apart, as far down as I possibly could, and as far as I've been able to tell, it works. And it also seems to be something that people know. You know, we could use some encouragement.

I think there's a spark of divinity in each of us. I truly believe that that's the case. Our entire bloody culture is predicated on that idea. There's something uniquely valuable that even the state has to take into account about each of our possibilities, where the cornerstone and the sovereign of the state, why? Because we have within us the power

to change the direction of the world. And we do that, each of us, with every bloody decision we make. And so let's make some good decisions. Thank you very much. Applause. Be long as lecture. That you're given this entire time.

Were you planning that? I could tell you were intense tonight backstage. No, but it didn't end when I thought it would. So I had to end later. So now I'll try to speak more quickly. Well, we answer these questions. All right. We'll try to do rapid fire, which is pretty much impossible.

We've got a lot of hard ones to experience. Here, I'm sure you can do this quickly. Can a couple truly thrive if there is a large difference in IQ? And we'll meet that in under 10 seconds. Go. Well, the first question might be how large it's harder. You know, people generally do better with people who are quite a bit like them, because it makes communication much more straightforward. I wouldn't say that, and I guess that's really about all I can say about that, it's hard for an extrovert and an introvert to get along for a long period of time, especially

if they're extreme, because the extroverts want to be with people all the time, and they're energized by it, and the introverts want to be alone, and they're tired out by the social interaction. And it looks to each of them like the other person is merely being arbitrary, but it's a real difference in neurological wiring, and it's hard to overcome. My parents are like that, because my mom's very extro's very extroverted, my dad's quite introverted. And it's a constant source of tension. Now they have other similarities in their relationship that hold them together. So I would say IQ intelligence, that's a major difference. If there are other factors that are working well, then great, if there's good will, then great.

But people do mate assortatively, which means that they tend to pick people who are like them, especially on the dimensions of intelligence. Women tend to pick men that are slightly more intelligent than they are. So it's an important fact. Somebody really got to kick out of that.

It actually might be part of the reason speaking evolutionarily that we diverge so rapidly from the common ancestor between us and chimpanzees about 7 million years ago is that female chimps aren't selective maitors, but human females are. And we've left about half of the males in our evolutionary history in the doldrums. You have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. And so there is a proclivity for women to mate across and up hierarchies, which is kind of hard on men.

And in some ways, hard on women, like the women, the very, very high achieving women have a hard time finding mates because they run out of available men. But it does look like one of the forces that's driven rapid human evolution to sexual selection issue. So anyways, no, it's hard, the bigger the difference is, the only exception to that, I think, might be the case is that if you're high in neuroticism, negative emotion, which is another trait, so you're anxious and fearful and with drawn,

attend to withdrawn avoid, you probably want a partner who's emotionally stable because if there's two of you that are like that, it's not good. You get a positive feedback loop going. But other than that, trait similarity seems to be better than trait difference. So. Did you ever see the episode when the Simpsons went to Australia? I've seen every Simpsons episode well except I didn't watch the last five years or so. It's just really something when you can say that about a TV show, eh? I watched it all except five years.

It's like I watched that at least five times. So yes, and I thought it was funny. US Australians are funny. So I thought the Big Boot was a really good idea. What's the secret to keeping your wife happy? Your wife happens to be the audience in my way. In my way. Or do you mean wives in general? You can answer that however you'd like.

Well, the secret to keeping wives happy, I would say, and my wife happy is that the secret is negotiation. It's the secret with any long term relationship, fundamentally. It's like, first of all, you have to find out what the person wants. Well, no, let's say, first of all, you have to find out what the person is upset about. That. I think that's funny, eh?

Okay, so that's hard because the person often doesn't know what they're upset about. So you have to do a lot of digging and they probably think they're upset about you. And maybe they are, but they're often upset about other things. So you have to find that out. And you have to find out what they want and get them to tell you, which is hard. And then you have to figure out how to strategize so that that's a possibility and so that you can both handle it. And then you have to do that constantly.

And so it's, my experience as a clinician has basically taught me. This is a good rule of thumb for marriage. You have to spend 90 minutes a week just talking to each other about You have to spend 90 minutes a week just talking to each other about Domestic life, you know about what's going on in your lives and in your joint life just to keep you up to date and You have to spend at least 90 minutes together Intimately as well when you're not talking about the problems of life. And a lot of that 90-minute discussion is ongoing negotiation. And it's very, very hard, and people are very, very, very, very, very,

bad at it. It's partly because it's just, part of it, because it's just complicated. If someone around you is upset, Jesus can take a long time to figure out why. To get to the bottom of that, you might have to go back to their childhood. Like really, it's really hard. It's amazing people can do it at all.

But that's what you have to do, is you have to negotiate. And the idea is that, well, do you want things to be better worse? Well, much as worse would be more entertaining, better. It's like, OK, what do you want that would make it better that I could do?

It's got to be specific. That's another thing about negotiating. It's got to be specific. That's another thing about negotiating, right? It has to be pretty specific. Is there one thing that I could do that would improve this situation that I would be likely to do? And can you tell me what that is? Or can we figure it out?

And then can we implement it? It's incremental continual negotiation. And it's terrible. It's difficult. But the alternative is slavery. Or, well, it's, it's, it's, or war. That's it. So you got three hard things, you know.

You can force the other person to do what you want them to do. Good luck with that. You know, I'll tell you a little story. This is a fun story. My wife worked in the palliative care ward for a while, and there's an old man in there that was dying, and his wife would come in to take care of him and my wife watched her clip his nails close enough so that each of them bled. Okay that's what happens when you don't negotiate. So you just think about that. Don't negotiate with your wife. One day you're going to be lying, dying, impalitive care, and she's going to come and clip your nails.

A 16th of an inch too short. And that will serve you right. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Well, we went dark here. Okay. Well, I couldn't have made this egg way up, then how important do you think forgiveness is? I think it's vastly overrated. Well, Jesus, that's what everybody says, right? Every two-bit guru you have to forgive. It's like, not unless you're going to change, like, what do you mean I have to forgive? You're going to do the same goddamn thing again, and again, and again, and again.

Like, at what point is my forgiveness of what you're doing? Mearily, what do they call that? The psychologist called that enabling. I hate that word. But it's gone, it's point. It's like forgiveness is very complicated. Something happened that wasn't right. We'll agree on that. Now we have to figure out what it was that wasn't right.

It's like we took the wrong road. That's the right way of thinking about it. Somehow we took the wrong road. Okay, maybe we did that repeatedly, but we took the wrong road. Okay, now we have to figure out why we took the wrong road. And then we have to figure out how to fix that, either to get back to where we made the wrong decision

or to get back on the path. We have to figure that, either to get back to where we made the wrong decision or to get back on the path. We have to figure that out. And then we have to agree that we're going to do everything we possibly can not to repeat that mistake. And then we're going to let it go. That's forgiveness. Right? It means you're stupid and I'm stupid, but we're going to try to fix it, and then we're going to give each other another chance, right? That's forgiveness, and then we're going to let it go. It's the recognition that the person is not incorrigible, but they have to be playing along. They have to be not incorrigible, for example, you know, because sometimes people aren't

ready to change. And then to forgive them, I think, is a sin. You're not forgiving them. You're just not upholding your moral duty with regard to them. It's like, let's say you're an alcoholic, and so you lie all the time, because alcoholics You're not forgiving them. You're just not upholding your moral duty with regard to them. It's like, let's say you're an alcoholic, and so you lie all the time, because alcoholics lie all the time. Partly, because you see if you're an alcoholic and you lie,

then you take a drink. That gives you a dopamine kick, neurochemically, because otherwise, you wouldn't be addicted to alcohol. And so the dopamine reinforces the circuit that lied, that enabled you to drink. So you do that 5,000 times. You're just chock full of lies, right? They've got you. It's like a little monster in there.

Well, you can't put up with that. And the forgiveness is, it's something like the allowance for redemption. It's like, well, if you're ready, man, if you're ready to put yourself back on the straight narrow and good for you, man, and more power to you, and I'll do what I can to help, but I'm not playing the fool for you to your own detriment. Because that's not forgiveness. That's just... That's the devouring mother. Everything you do is okay, dear. It's like, no, it's not.

It's not okay. You have to be... There's this old idea that God rules the world with two hands, mercy and justice, right? And it can't just be justice, because do you really want everything that's coming to you? Jesus Christ, that's much man. Okay, do you want to be let off the hook for everything you've ever done, like you have no will and no control, like you want to be let off the hook for everything you've ever done? Like you have no will and no control.

Like you're an infant. It's like no, you want them balanced. It's like mercy, because we make mistakes. Justice, because there's a difference between good and evil. And so you want to bring those together wisely, like a judge. That doesn't mean to be judgmental. You want to bring those together wisely, like a judge. That doesn't mean to be judgmental. It means to discriminate the wheat from the chaff and to the degree that if you forgive someone,

that that's to their benefit in your best judgment and not merely weakness on your part and inability to engage in the conflict then more power to you. But other than that, it's mostly a cliche. So. Yeah, that's seem worthy of applause. There we go.

Applause. This is important. Does it count if I'm paying someone else to clean my room? I don't know how we have it. That's a good one, man. It could. I mean, if you're doing something of more value, if it's helpful to them, if they're doing a good job of cleaning your room,

if it's putting you in order, there's lots of ways of solving a problem. And if your house is a bloody disaster, and you bring some people into help you sort it out, but you're also doing it at the same time that you've decided to sort it out and everything else that goes along with that, you don't have to do everything alone. You can't do everything alone. It's not possible. So it could, it depends on the circumstances, but certainly there are times when that would be a good decision. Maybe you have more important things to sort out at the moment than your room.

I mean, if you don't, then you should start with your room, because there it is right in front of you, you know. But it could easily be that you have bigger fish to fry. So. I love that you just spun that into a serious answer. That's amazing. This is a good one. Why do people deny the truth and attack those that speak in truth rather than embrace it?

What's the psychological reason for this kind of behavior? We seem to have a lot of that. Oh, we talked about that already. It's like, you know, out of tyranny into the desert. You know, it's, it's, it's like out of tyranny into the desert. It's truth is very annoying. You think this, all of you know this. It's like how often did you learn something in your life

that you really needed to learn what did you have a little party afterwards? Oh look, I learned something wonderful. It's like, no, it bloody well flattens you. I think, oh my God, really? I had to learn that. It's like, you're lucky if it doesn't take you a whole year to recover.

So people, the truth is harsh, man. It cuts and divides. And it's like it does, I do believe the idea that the truth sets you free and that the truth is the way and the life, all of that. I believe that that's gospel, so to speak, but that doesn't mean it's not a sword. Man, you know, you take the sword of truth to yourself, you cut three quarters of yourself off and you cast it into the fire,

it's not, it's not pleasant. Jesus, not by any stretch of the imagination. The only thing that's worse is not doing it, right? Because if you face the truth, then it burns you, it burns what's not useful in you off. And maybe that happens at a relatively rapid rate. But that beats the hell out of slow, painful, horrifying, multi-decade deterioration while you're dragging your entire family into a pit.

So those are your options. Fun as they sound. Good night everybody. Look you know that, you've seen families, you know. I've seen families in my clinical practice. I don't know if you ever saw the Simpsons episode where Marvin, the psychiatrist, had them all hooked up to a shock machine. I love that, man. Yeah, yeah.

They're just constantly shocking each other. I think they blew out the whole power grid in Springfield. Yeah. It'd be funny if it wasn't true. Like, I've been with families. There's this joke. Mitch Hedberg told this joke about why he didn't like to wear turtlenecks. He said it was like being strangled by a small midget that you were carrying on your back.

So, I think it's funny. It's a bit politically incorrect, but it's funny, I think. Well, you know, I've been with families where it was like they were in a circle, and each person had their hands around each other's neck, and they were squeezing slowly. Like, quick would have been merciful. It was more like, I'm going to kill you, but it's going to take 25 years. It's just slow. Well, that's not any good. That's not good.

What was the question? Oh, the psychological reason behind why it's so hard, why we attack people that tell the truth, basically. Oh, yeah. Well, you don't want to hear the truth, man, because it's what hard, why we attack people that tell the truth basically. Oh yeah, well you don't want to hear the truth, man, because it's what you're avoiding most of the time. It's so, so, so people just avoid it, and then it, then falsehoods accumulate around them. This is the, one of the oldest stories of mankind, the Mesopotamian creation myth, Tyam out, who's the goddess of chaos, gives rise to her children.

And they make a bunch of racket and they kill their father, Apsu. So now they're just living on his corpse. And that's worth thinking about, because we all live on the corpse of our culture, right? And there's solidity there, but it's dead. It has to be revitalized, and that's up to us. They live on the corpse, and they're behaving very badly.

They're causing all sorts of grief and misery, and lying, and cheating, and being careless. And timeout thinks, I just wipe mouth. And that's the story about how life works. It's like you have a structure that you can abide by. And it was granted to you in some sense. That's your privilege, let's say. But then you avoid your responsibility.

You put things under the rug. You pretend that your moral obligations don't exist. You don't pay your bills, you don't reciprocate with your neighbors, you don't do a good job at work, you don't tell the truth to your wife, you don't negotiate with your children. You let things slide. And everything you let slide is alive, and it grows, and it grows, and it grows. And soon all there is is that. There's a one massive monster that consists of everything that you've avoided. And by that point, you're not going to face it. That's when the truth has become a true monster.

Just to look at it at all, is intolerable. So the truth is, what did Nietzsche say? You can tell the moral depth of a person by how much truth they're willing to tolerate. And that's even though it's true that it is redemptive and that it is the way in all of that, it kills you. It really does that. That's how it works neurologically. Like let's say you make a mistake and you find out.

It's like, oh God, I made a mistake. It hurts why? Because that neural circuit, that living thing in you that was wrong has to die. That's what the pain is. And maybe that's like a huge part of you, like most of you, it's certainly the case that would be the case if you're terribly addicted, for example. So the truth is brutal, man.

It's like the burning bush. You can't look at it too closely because it just takes the flesh off you. And maybe what's left behind, assuming there's anything left behind, is capable of living through the fire. But man, there might not be much left. So it's no wonder people avoid it. Doesn't help, though. On that note, the last question.

Are you having fun? No. No, I wouldn't say so. But I don't think it's relevant exactly. I'm having more fun than I was a year ago because a lot of the pressure around me has started to recede. So that's helpful.

I mean, I haven't been in a scandal for a whole month. I'm going to knock on wood. Applause. Well, I've been in a minor scandal, but it was minor. The press reported last week that I had a clandestine meeting with the premier of Ontario, and God only knows what that means. But that was, as far as scandals go, that barely registered on the scandal scale. But a month without scandal is somewhat relaxing, so that's helped.

But this is fun isn't the right way to conceptualize this, and I don't think it's the right way to conceptualize life. One of the things I really learned last year, year and a half ago, I did these biblical lectures, and one of the stories I really studied was the story of Abraham. And I didn't know that story very well, eh? And Abraham's one of these guys who's failure to launch, you know. He's like 75, I think, when God comes and says, why don't you get the hell out of your tent?

Like, he's in his father's tent. This is really what God says. You're in your father's tent, you're in your father's community, you're in your father's country. Why the hell don't you get out? I don't know if he said that exactly. And go have a life. It's like 75, you know, it's time to get kicked out of the nest. And so Abraham, I guess, is convinced by God who can be rather convincing, apparently. And he goes out and has his life. And the first thing that happens is he encounters a famine.

Well, that's not pleasant. And then he goes to Egypt and it's a tyranny and a bunch of guys there try to steal his wife and they take him to the Pharaoh's court and like the Pharaoh falls in love with her. That's like the first two things. And so you can imagine Abraham thinking, I should have stayed at home on my cot and eaten peeled grapes. You know, it's a stupid adventure. What the hell is up with God calling me out into the world? It's like, and you say, well is he having fun? It's the stupid adventure. What the hell is up with God calling me out into the world? And you say, well, is he having fun?

It's like, that's not fun. But what the hell makes you think that that's what you're here for? It's like, what are we? What are we exactly? What are we exactly? Are we children at an amusement park? Is that our life? Is it fun? Is it one burst of impulsive pleasure after another? Is that what calls to us? Or are we the descendants of people who overcame obstacles that were to call them staggering barely even

scratches the surface man were tough were were something were here for an adventure right we're here to push ourselves to our bloody limits and and that's in every way that we can manage and And I wouldn't say that that was fun, but I wouldn't trade it for fun. So... Applause Although I would trade it sometimes for fun. Ha-ha-ha-ha.

Well, I kind of hope you guys had fun tonight, but more so I hope you will enjoy the adventure of your life. I'm gonna get out of the way and make some noise for Dr. Jordan Peters and everybody. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of of belief, or as newer bestseller, 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson podcast.

See JordanB Peterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Remember to check out JordanB Peterson.com's slash personality for information on his new course. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend. Thanks for tuning in and talk to you next week. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B Peterson on Twitter at Jordan B Peterson on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B Peterson and at Instagram at Jordan.b.p Peterson details on this show access to my blog information about my tour dates and other events and my list of recommended books

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