The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Jordan Peterson's Rules for Life with Richard Fidler

Episode Date: April 3, 2018

From Dr. Peterson's appearance on Conversations with Richard Fidler from March 14th, 2018. Richard Fidler is an Australian ABC radio presenter, and writer, best known for his hour-long interview program, Conversations with Richard Fidler. The program is ABC Radio's most popular podcast, downloaded more than 3 million times per month. It features local and international guests from all walks of life, engaging in in-depth interviews. Original Program: http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/conver

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring can be found at selfauthoring.com. Professor Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada. He read a book a while back on the common truths that he found embedded in myths and legends and in some of the earliest Bible stories. He says that when you pull apart the story of Adam and Eve, can't enable, you can find all kinds of truths about human beings and belief and morality. Dr. Peterson

taught at Harvard and other universities, and then in 2016 something happened. He was catapulted into international prominence, and he spoke out against new legislation in Canada that would have compelled him and others to use gender neutral pronouns. And for this he was hailed as a defender of free speech and denounced as a transphobic, a word he doesn't much care for. Jordan Peterson's university lectures on YouTube have become spectacularly popular, and he's Australian speaking to a sold out almost instantly. He's something of a phenomenon right now, but interestingly, neither he's attackers on the left

and he's loudest supporters from the alt-right really seem to be listening to what he actually has to say. Jordan Peterson has now written a book called 12 Rules for Life, which offers advice like stand up straight with your shoulders back. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient, and do not bother children when they are skateboarding. Hello Jordan. Hello. 12 rules. 12 rules to guide you towards what?

Happiness or something else? No, not happiness. Happiness is something that happens to you if you're fortunate and it's a byproduct of pursuing, perhaps a byproduct, a fortunate byproduct of pursuing what you should pursue. And that's not happiness. It's not, that first of all, happiness doesn't tide you through periods of tragedy and betrayal and loss. So if that's

the purpose of life, well, what happens when things aren't going well? What do you have then? It's better to pursue things that are meaningful and meaningful is the right way of thinking about it, engaging and meaningful. You said that the point is to embrace being. And you spoke with a capital B. What do you mean by being with a capital B? Well, it's an idea that I got in part from the philosopher Heidegger, who was very interested in,

I would say, construing reality in a manner that was somewhat alternative to the reigning materialist viewpoint. I mean, you live in your experience. Your experience isn't really made out of matter. It's more made out of things that matter. It's a very different way of looking at it. I mean, in your field of experience, you have emotions and motivations and dreams and desires and stories and goals and aims. It's a narrative structure in some sense that you inhabit.

And that's a reality. That's really reality in some sense. And well, it's harsh that reality. It has a tragic element because people are vulnerable and mortal. And it has an element of malevolence as well because we're all touched by betrayal and the, what would you call it, the sins of our fellow men, but we're all touched by betrayal and what would you call it? The sins of our fellow men, but we're also capable of those things ourselves. And so the question is, how do you cope with that? And what do you make of it? And one answer is

you can judge it harshly and denounce it and become bitter and resentful. And maybe you have your reasons for that, but it's a counterproductive approach. And so the approach that I lay out is the alternative to that, I would say. If life is based in suffering, that's what you want to be, to be suffering is inevitable. Yeah, well, it's an incontrovertible fact. Yeah, absolutely. So then the point is what you're going to do about that. That is, that is, well, it's worse than just suffering. It's suffering tainted with malevolence because there's the tragic element of suffering, which is just that, well, you're a fragile creature, like everyone.

And because of that, you're subject to mental and physical deterioration and to death. And so that's rough in and of itself, hard enough, and maybe hard enough to turn you against being itself. But that's made even more complicated by the fact that much of the suffering that people endure is a consequence of they impose it upon themselves or it's imposed by them on others, by others on them. Oh, yeah. Well, what about the suffering you create yourself and coming to a proper accounting with

that? Well, that's a very difficult thing to do. People know perfectly well that number one, they don't take advantage of their full potential. They don't make use of their full potential. They don't make use, full use of the opportunities granted to them. They're characterized by laziness and procrastination and irritation and all sorts of habits of mind and of character that make their lives more better than they need to be. And that's also something that people have a very difficult time coming to terms with.

They feel guilty about that. And so that's the complicated landscape of being, let's say. The question is, how do you respond to that? Yeah, I don't know people who've banged their head against the wall because the world isn't as good as they want it to be, or they feel it ought to be, or as pure in fact as they think it ought to be. Well, hey, there's no shortage of evidence for that. I mean, so the thing is these problems are real.

And I think part of the reason that people have been gravitating towards my lectures, let's say, is because I make a very, very straightforward case for this. I'm not a feel good self-esteem optimist. That doesn't mean I'm pessimistic, but I'm trying to help people grapple with the fact that life itself poses a very serious problem. That's an existential idea, right? Is that the problem of life is embedded in the structure of life.

You have to contend with your own inadequacies as an individual. You have to contend with the tyranny and arbitrariness of the social world and you have to contend with the brutality of nature. Now, that's only on the negative side, right? But those are real things. They're real. That's the part of the mythological landscape, the reality of those things. And then you have to plot your course through that. And hopefully you do it in a manner that doesn't make everything

worse. That's a good start. One of your rules, intake the first one you have is stand up straight with your shoulders back. I'll introduce Nick, discussing this with you. And as you were talking with her over the phone, she said she unconsciously set up straight up. Right, right. So you must have this odd hypnotic power over the phone, Jordan Peterson.

This is really a disposition about status, and status consciousness. What's your understanding as a clinical psychologist have had deeply embedded status awareness of one's own status is in animals like humans. Oh, it's absolutely unbelievably deep. There is a an idea that's very attractive that's been put forward by thinkers on the left that hierarchy and exploitation which which clearly exist are secondary consequences of political and economic schemes.

So you might say if you're a Marxist for example that inequality and hierarchy can be laid at the feet of capitalism in the free market. It's like there's no doubt that there's hierarchy. There's no doubt that there's inequality and there are prices to be paid for both of those. But you are an unbelievably naive optimist. If you think that that can be laid at the feet of the free market and capitalism, because the problem of hierarchy and inequality is a third of a billion years old. It's so old that your nervous system is adapted to it as a permanent feature of existence. So the systems that regulate your emotions, these are serotonergic systems,

essentially serotonin is a brain chemical, the systems that regulate your negative and positive emotion do it in part unconsciously, pre-consciously by evaluating your relative status in whatever hierarchy happens to be relevant to you and determining whether the negative emotion should be turned up and the positive emotion turned down or vice versa. So if you encounter a status failure, let's say, and you move down the hierarchy, then your nervous system transforms so that you become more sensitive and status of high status you you retain you you get the happy happy drugs Yeah, and the unhappy drugs fear of my experience of a lot of senior political leaders is that they kind of highly strong and quite Shouting joy not enough that really accords with what you say well their well status is not the only determinant of your emotional well-being There's there's a observation of your own competence, so that's one. The other is your temperament, so some people are temperamentally more or less anxious,

and that's established very early on, very heavily under biological control. And then the third is your relative status within your communities. Those are the three determinants of your anxiety levels, let's say. So if you're giving that advice to someone, stand up straight with your shoulders back for someone who is feeling like they have low status in society. I don't want to say so, of your anxiety levels, let's say. So if you're giving that advice to someone, stand up straight with your shoulders back for someone who is feeling like they have low status in society. I don't wanna say, so you're saying, but. No, you don't wanna say that.

No, I don't wanna say that. No one wants to say that. Let me try and paraphrase you then, and saying, are you saying fake it till you make it then? Carry yourself like you are a formidable person, till you actually become more formidable. Well, it's part of that. It's part of that.

So there's practical advice in that postural readjustment, because if you set yourself up properly physically, then you can breathe better. And you manifest yourself as more competent and confident. And that does produce an internal feedback process that tends to facilitate that. So you can make yourself feel better generally if you're slouching habitually, if you learn to stand up straight, that actually does make you feel better physiologically. But there's a metaphorical element of it to it too, which is that even if you've had to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fate in some particularly unfair manner, you still

have the option of accepting that in some sense voluntarily. And that means to stand up straight into expose yourself to the world. Because partly what you're doing when you're standing up is you're exposing your most vulnerable surfaces to the social and natural worlds. And so that's an indication of confidence. But you're not hunching over like an armadillo. That's right. You're exposing your soft undably. That what you are precisely doing that on. It's particularly true with human beings because of course we stand up on our doing that. And it's particularly true with human beings because of course we stand up on our hind legs.

And so most animals are armored against the world by their back. But not us, we put our soft parts front and forward, which is that's partly the realization of nakedness in the Garden of Eden, right? That's partly what that story details in some sense is the discovery of that, the human self-conscious human discovery of that vulnerability. So, but your best path forward is to accept that vulnerability voluntarily. And the strange thing is, is that in that acceptance, there's a simultaneous transcendence.

So, if you're a clinician, for example, and if you're dealing with people who are anxious, you don't, you don't make them safe. You don't build higher walls around them, you help them develop strategies to voluntarily expose themselves to the things that they are frightened of or detest, and that makes them stronger. So rule one is an injunction to adopt that as a metaphysical stance in life, is to take the tragedy on voluntarily. As a clinical, I mean, you lecture in psychology at the University of Toronto, but you've worked clinically as well as a psychologist.

You would have been in a room, just guessing you would have been in a room with a person who would be suffering terrible bullying, terrible deteriorating of other people to the point where they're almost they're tearful and they're full of rage and and woundedness and vulnerability. Oh yes. Bearing what you just said in one, what advice do you give to someone who's actually, who's is carrying that kind of woundedness, that pain and that rage against the tyrant, whether it's a boss or a violent husband or someone like that.

Well, the first thing you do is someone like that is listen to them. It's like, imagine, so when someone comes to see you clinically, they have a problem, or they wouldn't be there, and it may be a psychological problem, but it might just be a problem, right? Because there's a distinction between a psychological problem and a problem. Like if your father is dying of Alzheimer's disease, that's a problem. It might also be a psychological problem. Like if your father is dying of Alzheimer's disease, that's a problem. It might also be a psychological problem. So people come because they have problems or psychological problems, or both. And they also come because they're not doing as well as they need to and they would like

things to be better. So what you do to begin with, if you're a careful clinician, is you listen to the person, tell you what their problem is. And they may have never had anyone listen to that. They might even not even know they come in because they're suffering in some manner. And when you told that story, a particular client, or when you asked that question, a particular client came to mind who'd been terribly bullied. He had a lot of physiological and cognitive problems and terribly bullied. And you used to people sneering at that. Oh, God. In ways you just can't imagine. I mean, you just can't believe how much people, some people can be alienated and bullied.

And, you know, you spend hours to begin with as a clinician just letting the, I had a client a while back who had been bullied into a psychotic break. When I first saw her, she could hardly speak. She was a young woman. She could hardly speak. And she would put her hands in front of her and move them up kind of robotically. And when I asked her what she was doing, she said, well, I can see lines. And I'm trying to balance the lines like in a psychotic manner. She was completely fragmented. It took six months of

listening to her say what had happened to her at school before I could figure out what broke her and help her put herself back together. She was targeted by two kids who were particularly malevolent, like they were in to take her out that was their goal and they broke her. And so yeah, that can be absolutely brutal. So anyways, you let the person delineate out their experiences and you do a causal analysis. It's like, well, let's figure out exactly what the chain of events were that led you to be vulnerable to that catastrophe because the cure, and this is actually why you remember the past, right?

What you want to do if something terrible has happened to you is analyze the terrible experience. So that you can now reconfigure your perceptions and your behaviors so that the probability that that will happen again in the future is reduced. That's the purpose of memory. So you recognize it, so you identified, right? And then you're standing outside the problem. Well, and then you can also develop a strategy

because that's the next thing you do as a clinician. It's like, okay, well, okay. Now, we see the situation. You were bullied and these were the people who were after you and they had malevolent intent. And in some way, you were vulnerable to that, even though that doesn't mean it was just or that it was your fault or any of those things, although we want to see what you might have contributed to it so that you can stop doing that. And then you need a strategy of defense. It's like, okay, if you meet someone like that again, how are you going to reconfigure your behavior so that they cannot take advantage of you again?

And when you find these people are harboring things, feelings like homicidal thoughts towards their tormentor and they're shocked by that. What do you tell them about those thoughts? Oh, well, we explore why they have them. I mean, I've seen people get pushed into position sometimes where they have homicidal thoughts that you can understand. They've been betrayed by someone. The betrayal is ongoing. They've been pushed into a corner

where terribly, terribly unjust things are happening to them that have serious consequences for their lives. It's not surprising that they have vengeful and hostile fantasies and obsessions sometimes. So you have to have them layout the problem, which is often extraordinarily complicated, and then strategize towards something that would be a better solution. You know, sometimes you see people who are so trapped and hurt that they feel that their violent impulse is actually the only way of obtaining justice.

And discriminating between justice and revenge is not easy. That's a very, very, it requires a very, very sophisticated analysis of the situation to distinguish between vengeance and justice. So you might say to people, well, you should give up your anger because it's so hard on you. It's ruining your life. And they say, well, I can't. This is so unjust.

Every ethical bone in my body cries out to me to rectify this. You have to help people find a pathway that's more productive. It's very difficult. So much of these conversations come out of something you touched on a bit earlier, which is a fundamental view of human nature, if indeed such a thing is appropriate. I don't know. I mean, there is a view, I guess on the show last year, who was, his view is an economist and his view is really that human nature is fundamentally good, that most of our interactions are either benign or kind,

but it's the horror show that gets the publicity. And it's like that when you write history, the most colorful bits are the bloodiest bits, the most interesting bits is when there's all this wickedness being perpetrated. But the boring truth is, according to you, the boring truth is that people are fundamentally good. What do you say to that? I think the second part of that is true,

but the first part is not true. I think that people are good and evil. And that's the case for everyone. And that Hannah Arant wrote a book called The Benality of Evil, which could have been reversed, it could have been the evil of banality, which I think would have been a better title, actually, but she pointed out very clearly, and many commentators have done this, that terrible acts are often the culminating consequence of an accumulation of what you might regard as minor sins. So the mythological landscape is that the individual is the hero and the adversary at the

same time. That would be mythologically represented in Christianity, for example, or represented theologically as the eternal conflict between Christ and Satan. But you see this sort of thing mirrored in popular culture all the time. It's Harry Potter versus Voldemort, for example. It's Batman versus the Joker, Superman versus Lex Luthor. You know, that idea of that duality of spirit that inhabits a single individual. That's an ancient methodological truth. That's mythology. That's mythology.

That's not what real life feels like on a day-to-day basis. Oh, depends on what your life is. Well, that's true. I mean, I'm not living in the killing fields of camera. But this is true. And this is true. And it's always a good thing to remember that. I give thanks and praise to it every day.

Right. Just quietly. But nonetheless, I think by and large, I mean, most people listening right now would feel that their lives are, there's not many jokers or Lex Luthor's or Voldemort's in their lives. They might be here and there, they're rare. And when they pop up, they're a big shock to everyone.

Yeah, well. So they're outliers rather than an integral part of them. Well, they are as they are as super villain figures, you know, because those are obviously, those are caricatures in some sense, you know. But it doesn't, you don't have to scrape very far down underneath the surface of most people's lives to find fairly appalling stories of betrayal and self-betrayal. And those are reflections of that proclivity for evil, let's say, that desire to do harm for harm's sake, that's characteristic of why you see that in school yard bullying, you see it in children, it's everywhere, and people don't like to see it. And I would also say, with respect to your point, is that we have managed to formulate societies

primarily in the West, where the default interaction between people is decent, but that's a kind of miracle. It's not the case for most of the thug off-creases in the world. You know, they're a rife with, I would say, individual, familial, social and economic pathology, where the default transaction is hostility and suspicion. It's very, it's not obvious at all how we manage to create societies where the default interaction between strangers is trust. That's an amazing accomplishment. One of the things you've talked quite a bit about is apprehending the true nature of certain evil figures like Hitler. I mean, yeah, but particularly Hitler, we have to sort of focus on him. There's also Stalin, there's also Paul Potter, other figures, Genghis Khan, as well people, people like that.

The thing that's most misunderstood about them, you say, is that they're not necessarily playing to win so much as to purify the world with fire. Can you just talk about that? Well, in rule six, the rule is set yourself, set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And it's a very dark chapter. And I would recommend it to people who would actually like to understand why the school shootings in the United States in particular continue to occur.

Why it is that young person might spend months or even years fantasizing about taking dark revenge, you know, of the sort that might involve killing elementary school children, for example, which is what happened at Sandy Hook. You have to go to very dark place for a very long period of time before you dream up something like that. And the question is, well, why might you go there? And well, part of it is that life, as we already discussed, is very hard. And for some people, they're outcast

and almost nothing works out for them. And they have a certain, they have been subject to a certain amount of malevolent treatment and have nursed a certain amount of malevolence in their own heart. They get very, very judgmental about the structure of existence and regard themselves as eternal judges, I would say in some sense, that was certainly the case for the Columbine high school killers and conclude that being itself, because it's

full of tragedy and malevolence, is an evil that should be punished and annihilated. And then they work to do exactly that. And you don't want to encounter someone like that. I mean, if you're a naive person, and I've had many people like this in my clinical practice, and this happens to people in the military too, if you're a naive person and you encounter that in someone else or in yourself, it will produce post-traumatic stress disorder. Because post-traumatic stress disorder occurs when people are touched by evil. That's not how it's normally described clinically because academics, I would say people in general, don't really like to grapple with that sort of reality, but if you talk to

a military personnel who have post-traumatic stress disorder and you start talking to them about a dialectic between good and evil, they are instantly on board for that. They need a dialectic of good and evil to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder. And now, while the murderous types, the types that are out for destruction, they make an artistic process of bringing as much misery to the world, to the least deserving, as rapidly as possible, with the most amount of trouble. And that's what they're aiming at. They're not misunderstood. They're not bullied people who are just responding and seeking justice. It's gone way, way, way past that. There are people who just want to see the world burn. That's right. There are people who... Yeah.

...and not only burn, but, you know, because maybe you could have a quick death if it was burning, but burning in a way that would give you the most drawn out possible pain. You know, Winston Churchill famously in the 1930s was the one conservative politician in Britain who recognized Hitler for what he was. Chamberlain and his colleagues believed Hitler ultimately would be a rational actor and would act in rational self-interest and was constantly confused and confounded by the Churchill kind of recognized that that malevolence in Hitler. Do you think he was able to do that because he had part of that in himself? Oh, definitely. And recognized it in himself was fascinated by. The first thing that we might point out is that it's by no means self-evident except as an axiomatic statement, which is what the economists

do, that self-interest is rational. That's foolish. It's foolish. Look, in chapter two, I suggest rule two that people should treat themselves like they're someone that they're responsible for helping. You might think, well, that's self-evident. That's the economist claim. People are rational, rationally self-interested. That's the economist claim. People are rational,

rationally self-interested. It's like, no, you're not. Not if you hate yourself. Not if you're terrified of your life. Not if you're contemptuous of yourself and other people. You have no rational self-interest. You might be perfectly willing to punish yourself on an endless basis. There's no shortage of teenage girls who are cutting themselves constantly. They don't have rational self-interest. They think that they deserve to be punished and continually. And it's not actually that surprising because people tend to carry a load of guilt, some of which is unwarranted, but much of which is justified because everyone knows that they're

not everyone they could be. And so the idea of rational self-interest is that's naive, that's naive fool. There were no shortage of economists at the outset of the before the First World War who said, was impossible. It would defeat everyone's self-interest. There's too much economically at stake for war to start. Right. Right. Well, you know, do you think that that people constantly presume that the current situation is somehow different than the historical reality? And it would be lovely in some sense if people were enlightened, rational, self-interested actors, even if that was primarily based in selfishness, at least it would be devoted towards

the preservation of at least one thing. But when you're dealing with someone who's gone beyond the pale and you think that they're acting, that their actions could be conceptualized within the framework of rational self-interest. You are a, you're a lamb to their wolf. That's all you are. So that's not helpful. This is conversations with Richard Fidel on ABC Radio.

To get a sense of your world view, let's talk about your origins. You grew up in a town called Fairview in Northern Canada. Where is Fairview? Can you give us a sense of its landscape and how far it is from everywhere else? It's on the western side of the country. It's about 600 miles from the Pacific Ocean, east of the Pacific Ocean. It's north of the Rocky Mountains. It's about 600 miles north of the American border. It's at the northern most reach of the North American Prairie. And so it was among the last land settled in the settler rush into North America. It was settled about, well, it would be about how long

ago now, 60, 19, 10, about 70 years ago. All right, that's pretty recent. Oh, yes, definitely. It was just scraped out of the prairie. And the railway ended 13 miles north of us. How close is the nearest big city to 400 miles? Right, so it's nearly like a thousand kilometers in other words. Yeah, yeah, yeah, about about 700 kilometers. Given that you're that far north, how duck and cold wind. I was cold.

I was just up there three weeks ago. I gave a talk to my alma mater, which was in a little college about 60 miles away, and reasonably a larger urban center, about 50,000 people. And it was 30 below when we were up there for the whole week. I mean, and when I was a kid, when I went to college at Grand Prairie Regional College, there was a segment of time there, 38 days where it never got above minus 40. And minus 40 is really cold, like you go outside at minus 40. Well, if you throw a kettle full of boiling water in the air at minus 40, it will vaporize completely before it hits the ground. And tires used to freeze flat to the bottom and things act very

strangely up 40 below. Yeah, what does smug do when it's coming out of a chimney there? It tends to drift downward. Yeah. It's that heavy in the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just gets cold so fast that the particulates drift downward. You can tell it's really cold outside when you can see the chimneys, the smoke kind of drift

downward and collect on the ground. And how much daylight do you get in the middle of the... About six hours. So it's like Iceland, in other words, essentially. It's the kind of weather of Iceland. As you were growing up there, did you pair it? It's much colder than Iceland though, because it has the Gulf Stream.

Of course it does here. Was the expectation always that you would leave? The expectation for most people in the town, most young people who had options, let's say, and who weren't options that transcended a working class horizon was that they would leave because they're what else were they going to do, even to further their education. There was, you know, there was a college there, what is an agricultural college, mostly, if you were going to attend college or university, you were definitely leaving.

You could go to college 60 miles away for the first two years of your university, which is what I did in a larger urban center. It only had about 45,000 people at that time, but by Northern Alberta standards, it was the urban hub. And then I went to Edmonton after that, which was 600 kilometers away. The big city. How old were you when you met your wife then? About eight. Yeah. That's the... She was a you when you met your wife then? About 8.

Yeah. That's the... She was a childhood friend of mine. A childhood friend of mine. Yeah, we used to play together all the time when we were kids. And then you kept in touch. She used to hit my croquet bald out in the street and then laugh. That'll do it for a young man in love.

Who was it that made you a reader when you were in this town? Oh, my father taught me to read when I was very young. He was a school, he was a schoolteacher, he's still alive, and he spent a lot of time with me when I was a little kid, and he taught me to read when I was very young. He had a workbook that he had designed that stepped me through the process of learning with phonics, and he'd spend an hour or so a night with me when he came home for work, which was something I really, really liked, really looked forward to. And so he taught me to read. And I had a particular facility for it as well. So it was a happy marriage of innate ability, I would say, and care and

attention. Who was the librarian that opened you up to the world of books? Yeah, well, she was an interesting person. Her name was Rachel Nautley. And she's actually the mother of the current premier of Alberta, Rachel Nautley, who is a childhood mother of the current premier of Alberta, Rachel Nautley, who is a childhood friend of mine, adolescent friend of mine really. Sandy Nautley was a new Englander, an educated person, a very anomalous person for our small community, partly because she was genuinely a literary person, let's say an educated person. She was the librarian in our local junior high, and also the wife of our local member of the legislative assembly, who was the only socialist in Alberta. Alberta, my home province, was the entire legislative assembly was conservative, every single

member, and for decades, like for 40 years, he was the only member of the opposition. And people in Fairview, Albert is a conservative province. People in Fairview, my town, didn't vote for him because he was a socialist. They voted for him because they thought he was a good person. And he was. Anyways, his wife was also a committed socialist. And she worked as our town librarian, our junior high librarian. And she introduced all the delinquent and semi delinquent types used to hang out in her library because

well it was she was an interesting person and that was you you were a delinquent or semi delinquent so what really yeah kind of you know fairview was kind of a rough town and the number that people to hang out with there there weren't there wasn't a lot of variety I kind of liked the kids who weren't particularly obedient and were kind of tough. Now I wasn't, I wouldn't say I was a particularly tough kid. I'd skipped a grade, so I was smaller than my peers and I was rather small for my age, but I was pretty mouthy, so I could hold my own in a verbal dispute. And it was, I just, I kind of admired the kids who had some fight in them. And anyways, you used to go hang out in the library.

And she got a fair number of my friends to read things that were quite sophisticated, but she piled books on me. What's the most beautiful thing you're using it to? Oh, well, she introduced me to 1984 and Brave New World, and one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. And also, Ein Rand's books, which was quite interesting because, of course, of course, yeah. Socialist too.

Hey. Hey, Rand. She was a genuine intellectual, right? It was, it was, she thought that I would read those books and come to the appropriate conclusion, you know, and I suppose in some sense that was the case. But she really put me on a path to reading, I was reading a lot of science fiction at that point. I read a book a day when I was a kid. And she tilted me more towards what you might think of as higher quality literature.

So that was a big deal. So when you went reading Solz and It's an In The Library, what would Tina just do for doing for fun in Fairview? What kind of stuff? Oh, God. Drinking ice cold vodka behind their neighbor's fence and like it was it was I wouldn't call it a particularly salutary adolescent culture yeah what were a lot of drugs in town yeah what party what do you remember teenage parties

at that time I never really liked teenage parties because they were very dark places you know there wasn't there was a lot of disengaged premature cynicism that kind of characterized the teenage population. It was in the 1970s. And you know, the 60s had a certain amount of optimism. And then they kind of, the detour to the 60s washed up on the shore of the 1970s. And like illicit drug use peaked in North America in 1979, which was the same year that I graduated. And the teenage parties were full of people who had consumed far too much alcohol, who were listening to music, and I liked music, and I liked loud music, but who was listening

to music at volumes that precluded any possibility of any sort of conversation whatsoever. And we're also places where there was no shortage of drugs, and there was a real nihilistic hopelessness about them that I didn't like. I don't think anyone liked it particularly, but what were we going to do? Sit at home and wait for Godot, you know? You and I roughly the same age. I think you're tiny bit older than me. Like you, like me, you had recurrence worries, if you like, Well, like me, you had recurrent worries, if you like, a certainty in the early 80s, particularly, as the Cold War reached a new kind of dangerous intensity

that we weren't gonna lift us to our 30s. I was quite convinced of that. Oh, many people were convinced of that. Quite convinced of that. And then you kind of had to live knowing that. You used to have a kind of recurrent nightmare. I had nightmares all the time about that. Oh yeah, I was just watching Terminator, the Terminator movie. There's a scene in there where

there's a scene of hydrogen bombs being blown off in the horizon, where you could see the mushroom clouds rise. I had dreams where they contained that sort of imagery all the time. Is it all the time? You said you began to read obsessively after that about the holocaust about terrible things, the worst things that have happened? Do you understand your fascination for that? Not really. I think it might have something to do with temperamentally. I have a fairly strong proclivity towards depression, which I think is an autoimmune illness, in my case. And I think that that might have highlighted the negative for me more than it might for someone else. But I am voraciously curious. So I don't know

if you combine a bit of a dark side with voracious curiosity, you get obsession with tyranny and malevolence, something like that. But the curiosity, I think, apart from the darkness, I mean, I was oriented towards finding the biggest problem I could conceptualize to try to solve it, you know, because I like an intellectual challenge. It's built into me that liking. And so I thought, well, especially once I went to graduate school and decided to, I, my first degree was in political science and literature. And I thought that political science held the key to understanding complex problems.

It was to be, they were to be analyzed at the political level. But I learned fairly rapidly, partly because I didn't by the human being as rational actor theory, or the people are motivated primarily by economics theory, which was the competing theory, say on the left, I thought, no, neither those are true. Psychology became much more attractive. And then when I decided to become a psychologist,

I thought, well, if I'm going to try to solve a psychological problem in my research, then I might as well pick the biggest problem I can conceptualize and have at it. I mean, at the same time I did my PhD on the heritable forms of alcoholism. It was much more bounded and much more, I would say, classically scientific, biological. So I was doing that at the same time. You try to make yourself invulnerable with this, like, if I can really expose myself to the full knowledge of this terrible thing, these awful things, the worst things that can possibly happen. And I fully am, and I'm kind of fascinated by this stuff myself, you know, forms my reading.

It makes you then, well now I know that. I won't be surprised or something. Well, I think there's some of that. It's some of it's preparation, but no, I think I was more, I was more interested in making myself not bad. You know, one of the things I learned quite rapidly from reading the literature pertaining to situations like those that obtained in Auschwitz was that

People could be Auschwitz camp guards and not only that they could really enjoy it And I thought see I learned early that history isn't about other people History's about you and then you might think well You might still try to warm out of that, let's say, and you think, well, the history that's about me is the history of the victim. It's like fair enough, you know, but it's also the history of the perpetrator. And if you don't read history as the perpetrator, then you haven't figured out how the world works. Succeeding history is a warning then, A warning not just to other people but to yourself.

Yeah, well history is an autobiography. History is a biography. It's about you. It's like you're the Auschwitz camp guard. You might think, well no, I'm not. It's like maybe not. Maybe you're the person who would have opened her house up to Anne Frank and her family.

But probably you're not. Because that's statistically very, very, very unlikely, and it requires a level of courage and a level of willingness to accept risk, even on behalf of your family, that virtually no one has, and that almost no one should ever lay careless claim to. Now, I see, I've really experienced that in the last year, watching people I've really experienced that in the last year watching people respond as I've been immersed in one political controversy over another. I knew people were timid before I stepped into this political arena, let's say, or before it engulfed me, but people are way more timid than I thought.

Not everyone. There are people you meet that have backbones of steel, but they're not very common. I'd say it's one in a thousand maybe. You read a book early on in your academic career called Maps of Meaning and what were you looking for when you were writing that book? I was doing two things. I was trying to understand what the fundamental issue was at the heart of the Cold War. what the fundamental issue was at the heart of the Cold War. And then I was trying to determine whether what the Cold War was was merely an argument between two hypothetically equally valid narratives, which would be kind of a postmodern view of it, right?

So, there's a left wing, radical left wing narrative, and it's arbitrary, but perhaps we can organize society along its guidelines. And there's a free market capitalist democratic narrative, and it's just as arbitrary, and perhaps we can organize society along those lines. But what one's arbitrary, and so is the other, and so is any other narrative that you might impose. And so I was curious about that, because I thought, well, look, it looks like there's something really at stake here. We've generated tens of thousands of unbelievably powerful weapons. We've aimed them at each other. We're willing to put the world to the

torch because of this argument. Maybe there's something to it. So I went into it with what I would say is an open mind, trying to understand if it was merely an argument between two arbitrary systems of moral relativism, or if there was something else at stake. And what I discovered, I would say, partly by reading the works of other people who had discovered this before me, let's say, was that no, they weren't equivalent systems. And anyway, at all, the West is founded on something that's far deeper than mirror arbitrary narrative. Part of that is the idea of the sovereignty and divinity of the individual, which is the most powerful idea there is, the most powerful human idea

there is. And it's also the idea that without which, in the absence of that idea, you cannot produce a functioning society at any level of analysis. You can't function in relationship to yourself because you won't take yourself with any degree of seriousness. You won't function well within your family because you won't treat your family members like they matter. And you won't function well as a citizen because you'll be nihilistic and cynical. How did you then with that met that onto stories, old old stories, which is what you wanted to do with this book. That's all the stories from the Bible,

and the stories like, Panakia, we didn't even Harry Potter. Yeah, well, even the political debates, in some sense, are competitions between stories about how to live. Okay, so then the next observation is, well, stories map out how to live. When the question then becomes, well, what's the story that maps out the proper way to live? And that story would have to contain a description of the environment, right?

Because just like a map has to map out the territory, the story would have to contain a description of the environment, and that would have to contain a description of your role in the environment. And so the mythological landscape is something like this. It's good and evil at the level of the individual. That's the hero and the adversary, right? Everyone has to contend with that. The darkness and goodness in yourself and in other individuals. Everyone contends with that. So it's universal truth. And then that's that individual is encompassed within society. And society is the wise king and the tyrant. And it's always

the wise king and the tyrant. It's both. Now, some societies are almost all tyrant. And some societies tilt quite nicely towards wise king. But even if you grow up in a relatively benevolent society like ours, you're still crushed by the mob into a certain conformity. And there's a lot of pain and wastage that goes along with that. Now, there'sity. And there's a lot of pain and wastage that goes along with that. Now there's benefits. And then the last element of the mythological landscape is the terror and creative potential of nature.

Well, that's the mythological landscape and a meaningful story guides you through that. Well, they're the same stories. We need the Joseph Campbell right about this. George Lucas Reddit, It's there in Homer's The Iliad and the Odyssey. It's there in Star Wars. It's there in the Wizard of Oz. There's the hero. The world is out of joints. The hero is living in this kind of strange environment. There's the call to adventure which is

refused. Then exceeded to you. You go into the world. You encounter shape shifters and allies and secret adversaries, and then you go into the evil kingdom, take the elixir, bring it back to the village and the good world is restored. That's exactly right. That's right. Or you revive your dead father and restore him to life. Oh yeah.

And then it might be Darth Vader, but that's all other things. But no, this is exactly right. The story is like when the recast Star Wars is a great example, although I don't think that the Star Wars stories are of particularly high quality. No, but we seem to need these stories. I don't I mean we seem to human seem to need to hear these stories again and again. I'm a killing Hollywood, but it's something we need to hear again. Well, if you get in a car without a map, you don't know where you are or where you're going. It's like what good is that? Like all there is then is confusion and pain. So yeah, the story is life. The story is, well, that's the story of rule one, stand up straight with your shoulders back, stand up and

confront the catastrophe of existence, voluntarily, move forward under your load, discover new things, share them with the people around you. Life is a call to adventure and everything's at stake. That's the thing. It's an all-in game. So you might as well play it that way. Dutch economist I had on recently, Richard Breggman, was talking about the state of play with jobs at the moment in the Western world particularly. And he quoted a poll that was done in Britain that showed as many as 37 percent of British workers say they have a job they think doesn't need to exist and the proliferation of jobs, worthless jobs that create little or no value and induce a kind of despair in people have created a big problem in modern life. This is something you've seen and this is something you

can, you feel these ideas can address. Well, one of the, one of the prices you pay for a hierarchy, like a society that's organized in complex, multi-level hierarchies, is that you can get in sconce in the middle of one of those hierarchies, and you're kind of detached from reality. And so the adventure isn't so self-evidently there. Maybe you're a mid-level functionary and a large faceless corporation

that makes some sort of widget. And I'm not being cynical about this. We need widgets. We need washers and screws and all those things. I'm not talking about the people who collect their garbage in clean houses and actually do worthwhile useful things. I'm talking about people who are living in some kind of strange vague bureaucracy, moving things around that are quite often very well-paid jobs. They're often also difficult. And if they're not producing anything of that, that's right. It's easy for large-scale bureaucracies to end up doing pseudo-work. It's still difficult, but the connection between the work and the actual world gets attenuated to the point that the job appears either meaningless or even counterproductive.

I mean, that's a sign that you're in an organization. That's the tyrannical king, right? He's old and willfully blind and ready to fall apart, but you're still part and parcel of that. One of the things I'm getting out of this with this is that your videos, particularly on YouTube, tend to resonate particularly with young men, young men are very, very large part of your audience. What do they want to know? And what do they say? They get from your videos to you. Oh, they want to know first that they're not everything they should be, which is, I have very perverse. They want to know that they're not everything. Oh, absolutely. It's like, I mean, it's so funny. I've thought about this a lot over the last couple of years

because, well, especially I did these biblical lectures in Toronto and they're pretty harsh and they sold out. It's like, and I thought, well, just imagine this, imagine that I formulated a business plan and I went to a venture capitalist and I said, here's my plan, I'm going to do, I'm going to rent a theater, I'm going to talk about the Bible, responsibility and truth to disaffected young men. We're going to talk about the Bible, responsibility and truth to disaffected young men. We're going to get them out of the pub and into the lecture of the hero bed. That's my plan to make a profit. It's like, well, you know how that's that's just so absurd,

but it's not so absurd because, you know, psychologists, the more pathological brand of psychologists, have been pushing this doctrine of like self-esteem on young people for 50 years. It's like, you're okay the way you are. It's like, well, actually, for most young people, they actually don't think they are okay the way they are. And that's a really pessimistic message. It's they think, well, I don't have a really good relationship.

I don't have any real goals in my life. I know I'm really undisciplined. I procrastinate all the time. I play video games till three in the morning. Not that there's anything wrongisciplined. I procrastinate all the time. I play video games till three in the morning. Not that there's anything wrong with video games, but they can become an obsession. I don't have any discipline. I'm not happy with my career. I'm not very well educated. It's like the list goes on, you know. And then you come along and you pat them on them, they're back and say, oh, well, you know, you're just lovely the way you are. It's like

it's so pessimistic. And so I've been suggesting to, not just to young men, although there are people who tend to be more on YouTube, that there's a hole in the structure of reality that's exactly their size and they should rise up and fill it. They have a destiny to achieve and that becoming disciplined and forthright and having an aim and paying attention to your family and taking on responsibility and learning to speak truthfully. All of those means that things don't careen towards hell.

It's really important that each person sets themself in order. And I know that that's true. And I'm on the side, like, I'm not finger wagging and saying, oh, these young people today. It's like, it's not obvious to me that young people today are any worse than they were in Socrates time, there's certainly no worse than they were in the 1960s, you know, baby boomers are so self righteous about young people. Oh, look at those young people today, it's like, yeah, look at those baby boomers, man. I mean, they were called the me generation for good reason. And so I'm telling these young guys, I'm suggesting to these young guys. And I put myself in the same category. You know, it's like, look, you're a, you're a make work project, man. There's lots of things about you that could be fixed. And so fix them.

I'm pretty sure you don't like gurus yet. People are always asking you, how should I live my life? Your book is called 12 Rules for Life. And then in that, they are your rules. Are you troubled by that? Well, I'm troubled by it to some degree. I mean, there's always a danger in that. I don't, I'm not troubled by it to any great degree

because I don't think it's a fairly strange guru who says, char your own destiny, take your own risks, make your own choices, pick your own aims, be responsible, right? Take this on yourself. It's like, well, that's not, that's a paradoxical message for a guru. So what am I, the leader of individualists? You know, you know, what I mean. I'm not too concerned about that. Now, you know, people, I would say, have a proclivity to at now, at least, to be occasionally somewhat star struck, let's say, when they encounter

me. But I can get over that very, very rapidly. You know, I have experience with that sort of thing, anyway, anyways, because that happens to you upon occasion when you, very rapidly. I have experience with that sort of thing anyway, because that happens to you upon occasion when you're a clinician. You have to learn to deal with that. And properly, you know? So, no, I'm not too concerned about that. It's been great pleasure to speak with you, Jordan Peterson.

I only got through half the questions I wanted to ask you, so I'd like to come back on some time in the future so we can go through those questions as well. No, that would be good. It's been such a pleasure. And it's been very nice talking with you. Thank you so much. MUSIC

On air, online, and podcast. This is Conversations with Richard Fiedler. MUSIC Jordan Peterson's new book is called 12 Rules for Life. ABC.net.au slash conversations is our website. I'm Richard Fiedler. Thanks for listening. You've been listening to a podcast of conversations with Richard Fiedler. For more conversations interviews, please go to the website

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