The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Slaying the Dragon Within Us

Episode Date: January 18, 2017

This is the first Big Ideas Lecture performed by Jordan Peterson, back in 2002. He reads a book for very young children by Jack Kent called "There's no Such Thing as a Dragon" to a group of University of Toronto alumni (most over 65). He explains what it means: Pay attention -- or else.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. This is Episode 6. Slaying the Dragon Within Us. This episode was taken from a 2002 lecture recorded by TV Ontario. The book that's discussed is called, there's no such thing as a dragon, and the link to which is in the description. You can support this podcast by donating to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's Patreon account by searching, Jordan Peterson Patreon.

George and Peterson Patreon. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, are available at self-authoring.com. So I'm going to tell you today about a way of looking at the world that I think is substantially different from the way that most people look at the world. And the way I want to tell you about looking at the world today is, I think, more inclusive than a standard sort of materialist view. The standard scientific view of the world, of course, is that it's made up of familiar objects and that the world is, in essence, a material place. But there's some very potent limitations of that viewpoint,

despite the fact that it's given us tremendous power. And the limitations are essentially as follows. The essential materialist view can't tell us anything about consciousness, which is probably the primary fact of experience. Neuroscientists in recent years, mostly in the last decade, have been trying to crack the problem of consciousness, and they have absolutely made no progress.

They've tried to associate consciousness with neuronal activity, but that seems to be an incomplete answer, because there's many forms of neuronal activity in the brain that aren't accompanied by consciousness at all. Not only do neuroscientists understand virtually nothing about consciousness, they can't even really figure out what its function is. They can't understand why our brains would go to so much effort to make us aware of things

when it isn't clear at all that awareness is necessary for life, especially given that there are many life forms on the planet that don't seem to be aware at all. The standard materialist view is also insufficient. Many other ways, it's insufficient philosophically, I think, as you probably all know, because a conception that portrays the world as made up of objects is in some really fundamental way dead. It doesn't seem to have a place in it for human beings or a place in it for meaning, or a mode whereby you might be able to conceptualize the real existence of something like an emotion or a dream or a motivation. All phenomena which are just as mysterious to neuroscientists and to scientists in general as consciousness. Now the problem with this seems to be mostly experiential. If you have to ask people what they know more than anything

else, they know number one that they're conscious, they know number two that their internal experiential life is composed of emotions and motivational states, which although not rational in essential structure are so real and relevant that virtually everything that people do is predicated on them. So our current viewpoint, despite its ability to give us tremendous technological power, seems to eradicate from formal consideration many, many essential experiences that are vital to life, in fact, even perhaps primary. Now I'm going to suggest to you today that there's an alternative viewpoint and I think also it's one that although you may be hearing about it formally for the first time, it's also something that you know

unbelievably deeply. Thousands of years ago Plato proposed that all knowledge was remembering and of course we don't believe that today, because we believe we gather knowledge as a consequence of contact with the world. But you'll see today that the knowledge that I'm going to share with you will strike a deep core of remembering. And it's because everything that you've done throughout your life is in one way or another predicated on what I'm going to tell you today.

I'm going to demonstrate this in a peculiar way, I think, because I'm going to start by telling you a story. And the reason I'm going to do that is because models of the world that include phenomena, like consciousness and emotions and motivations and actions and interactions are generally portrayed formally in stories, and not in scientific theories. And it does turn out to be that stories themselves have an identifiable structure, even a grammar that makes them comprehensible. Furthermore, it turns out that even the simplest stories, especially if they're elegantly constructed, have an unbelievably profound underlying meaning.

And you can frequently see this, most particularly in children's stories. So I remember I showed my son when he was four years old, the Disney movie Pinocchio, which on the surface of it is a very strange tale, right? It's a wooden puppet who wants to become real, so he has to rescue his father from the belly of a whale, a structure that could by no means be considered rational, that is in fact so surprising and unexpected, that it's remarkable to imagine that grown men and women, including children, can sit in a movie theater and watch a story like that unfold without ever thinking for a second that it's absolutely peculiar that

they can be taken in by such a tale and regard it experientially as real. Pinocchio is a deep, deep story. It has echoes that go back three or four thousand years to the earliest stories that we know, has real. Penocchio is a deep, deep story. It has echoes that go back three or four thousand years to the earliest stories that we know. And it's so rich with information that a child can watch it over and over and over and over. I think my son watched Penocchio 30 times. Why? Well, it's either because a child can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Or it's because there's something to those stories

that's much more potent than we actually consciously understand. It's kind of interesting too, you know, if you go to a if you go to a video rental establishment, you'll find that in the top 10 highest grossing movies of all time are four Disney movies that are animated fairy tales, essentially retelling of mythological stories. They strike a deep chord. Why?

Well, Shakespeare was, of course, a great literary figure. Said it, perhaps, better than anyone else has, which is not surprising, because he said many things better than anyone else has. He said, all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.

And so following from that, you can imagine that a story is no more about the props in the world than a play that you go see is about the props on the stage. A drama is about the matter in which people actually exist, the emotions that they feel, the motivational states they encounter, the problems they have to solve when they interact with each other.

And the plays the thing from that particular perspective in which we can capture those aspects of our experience that are not only real but essentially human. I'm going to tell you a little story to begin this off with. It's a kid story written for children of about four years of age. But it's very, very elegant. I tried to cut it down for this talk, but I found I couldn't because it was so well edited that every single piece of it had to fit in to make the story complete. And I'm going to show you first the structure of the story. Now, this is a very useful diagram in many ways. It's very simple. Basically, it says this, whenever you're doing anything, you inhabit a bounded world. Now you know, like for example, you're sitting here in this lecture, there's things you are paying attention to when things, you're not. If I took most of

you out of this room right now and asked you definitively what color the rug was, you wouldn't know or what color your chair was for example or what the person next to you was wearing and less that person happens to be your husband or your wife? You wouldn't remember any of those things. And the reason for that is when you're in a situation like this, and you're attending to a speaker, most of the occurrences that are unfolding around you are irrelevant. You don't store them. You only focus on certain things. Well, how do you decide what to focus on given that there is virtually unlimited number of things to pay attention to? Well, you have to conceive of yourself as being somewhere, always. And you have to conceive of yourself as going somewhere.

So you could say in a real sense, the world you inhabit is a journey. It's a journey from point A to point B, a journey from what is to what should be. A journey from the place you are, which is insufficient in some important manner to a place that in some important manner is going to be better. A standard story has exactly that structure. Child comes home and you say, well, what happened to you today on the way to school? Setting up the little narrative structure in the child unfold the sequence of events that he encountered, if the story is more interesting than just a recount of exactly what happened to him,

it usually involves the encounter with something unexpected on the way to point B, and a description of the manner in which that encounter with the unexpected was resolved. Typical story. Now, why would you want to know that? Why would you want to listen to it? Well, it's because on your journey from point A to point B, all sorts of unexpected things always happen. And if someone else has encountered something unexpected and conjured up a decent solution to it,

it could well be worth your time to listen. Well, maybe there's a pattern to encountering unexpected things. Maybe there's a proper way to encounter the unexpected. Maybe it's the case that in our collective wisdom as human beings, we've gathered up representations of ways to encounter the unexpected that we put forth in our stories. How should you face what you don't understand? Well, now I'm going to tell you this story.

It's written for four-year-old kids. But I want you to take a look at it for a moment from a different perspective and see if you can imagine exactly what it is that it's saying. There's no such thing as a dragon. Well, we all know that, right? A dragon is a fictitious creature. Reptillion, terrible, lives forever, breathes fire, hordes gold, strange combination of attributes. Why would something terrible and ancient hold a treasure?

Billy Bexby was rather surprised when he woke up one morning and found a dragon in his room. It was a small dragon about the size of a kitten. The dragon wagged its tail happily when Billy patted its head. It's interesting, you know, in Chinese mythology, the dragon is a positive figure. In European mythology, the dragon is something to face in combat and destroy, or something to face in combat and build something out of the pieces left over from the dragon. Billy went downstairs to tell his mother. It's no such thing as a dragon, said Billy's mother. And she said it like she meant it. such thing as a dragon, said Billy's mother. And she said it like she meant it.

Remember once my daughter had a nightmare, she's about four. This was at the time when she first started to notice graffiti and litter. And both graffiti and litter bothered her. She couldn't understand the motivations behind the graffiti artist. And she didn't like the fact that there was litter clattering up the world's order.

And the reason she got sensitive to that as a child was because children are really, really dependent on order. I mean, and the reason for that is that their realm of competence is rather restricted. So they like to see things messed up. So little kids, for example, they're not happy with you if you play a game with them and then mess around with the rules of the game.

They don't like that at all. They think that that's immoral activity to shake up the structure of the game. Well,'t like that at all. They think that that's immoral activity to shake up the structure of the game. Well, anyways, well, she was pondering all this. She came into our bedroom one night and said, Dad, I had a nightmare. Now, we all know, right? Nightmares aren't real, just like dragons.

Dreams aren't real. Of course, which raises the question of why in the world you'd bother having them, six or seven hours a night, every single day of your life, and why they're a recognized feature of animal behavior all the way down to the amphibian level. She said, I dreamt that there was a clear flowing stream, but in the stream there was all sorts of garbage, and it scared me and bothered me so much I woke up, so I told her, look,

close your eyes and imagine the stream. It's full of garbage. What should you do about it?" She said, well, I should take the garbage out of the stream. I said, all right, so picture the stream, picture yourself cleaning the garbage out of it. She calmed down and went back to sleep. Why? Well because dreams concentrate on threat.

We know that. They present threats to you. Threats you haven't been able to deal with. Well, there's a part of your brain that tracks threats. And it's not really all that smart in some ways. All it does is say, look, here's the problem. And it's waiting for the rest of your brain to conjure up some solution to that problem.

And if it doesn't conjure up the solution, then it just presents the problem over and over and over and over and over. So people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, who've been really upset by their contact with something unexpected, dream about the same tragedy forever until they solve it. And they solve it by facing it and living it over and over voluntarily. So you might think right off the bat from listening to that little story that suggesting two-year, four-year-old daughter who's just had a nightmare that her fears aren't real and that the dream

representation of them isn't real because it's not tangible like a table, might not really be the best approach to the problem. So you see, Billy, he's pretty much got it right right off the bat, right? The dragon wagged its tail happily when Billy patted its head. Billy went downstairs to tell his mother. There's no such thing as a dragon. He said, Billy's mother, and she said it like she meant it. So there's a dragon in this house. Now the next thing you might wonder is, how often have you actually gone into a house where there's a dragon? My guess is if you don't take this particularly specifically and allow

yourself to use your imagination and to think metaphorically for a moment, you've all encountered dozens of houses that were filled right to the rafters with various dragons, all of which were being studiously ignored by the people who inhabited the house. Billy went back to his room and began to dress. The dragon came close to Billy in a friendly manner and wagged its tail, but Billy didn't pat it. If there's no such thing as something, it's silly to pat it on the head. Billy washed his face and hands and went down to breakfast. The dragon went along. It was

bigger now, almost the size of a dog. Billy sat down at the table. The dragon sat down on the table. This sort of thing was not usually permitted, but there wasn't much Billy's mother could do about it. She'd already said there was no such thing as a dragon. And if there's no such thing, you can't tell it to get down off the table. Sometimes I sit with friends of mine who have very young children to eat, say. And the children, two or three years old, don't sit at the table, they sit on the table,

or they run around the table, or they run around the table and pull things off the table, or they run around the house and pull things off, all the shelves in the house, and keep their parents so busy chasing them around that they have no time whatsoever to interact as adults. Well, you have to wonder under those circumstances whether you're dealing with a child or a dragon, so to speak. And you also might wonder whether or not the dragon is large and unruly, precisely because

the parents are completely unwilling to admit that it actually exists. Mother made some pancakes for Billy. But the dragon ate them all. Mother made some more. But the dragon ate those too. Mother kept making pancakes until she ran out of batter. Billy only got one of them, but he said that's all he really wanted. Anyway, one time an acquaintance of ours in Boston brought their son over to be babysat at our house and his nanny had just been in a car accident so he was being shunted from house to house while his parents went off to work. And he didn't have very good reputation this kid, he was about four. And he came over to our house and with his mother in the morning and she

dropped them off and she said, well he probably won't eat all day but that's all right and I thought no he's four if he doesn't eat all day that's not all right right because kids if they don't eat they're basically horrible right if they don't sleep they don't eat they're horrible so it isn't all right, right? Because kids, if they don't eat, they're basically horrible, right? If they don't sleep, they don't eat, they're horrible. So it isn't all right that he doesn't eat. So then you think, well, maybe there's some sort of dragon associated with this child that happens to be interviewing, perhaps, with his ability

to eat. So I came back at noon. My wife had taken care of the children that day, and I walked in the house. And the other four or five kids that we had in the house were off playing. And this little kid was standing in the house and the other four or five kids that we had in the house were off playing. And this little kid was standing in the corner, really isolated and looking, you know, upset fundamentally.

So I went over and I poked him a bunch because generally if you poke a kid a little bit, you know, while they go like this, you know, they're sort of back off. But sooner or later you can crack them and they'll smile and then they'll play, not this kid boy, there's no bloody way he's going to play with me and that was BVAC. He'd already learned that adults should either be ignored or that they were trouble. And he wasn't going to let any adult into his little world. So there was absolutely a dragon associated with that little boy and it was eating all his pancakes.

Billy went upstairs to brush his teeth. Mother started clearing the table. The dragon, who was quite as big as mother by this time, made himself comfortable on the whole rug and went to sleep. I really like this one. By the time Billy came back downstairs, the dragon had grown so much, he filled the hall. Billy had to go around by way of the living room to get to where his mother was. I didn't know, dragons grew so fast, said Billy. There's no such thing as a dragon said, mother firmly. Cleaning the downstairs took mother all morning.

What with the dragon in the way and having to climb in and out of windows to get from room to room. So you know, you think back in your own experience when you've gone to a house where there's a dragon hiding underneath the living room rug, and nobody's saying anything about it. And then you think, how long does it take to get something absolutely simple done in a house that's absolutely jammed to the rafters

with unfinished business? Forever, right? Organizing people in a household like that, to even do something as simple as go out for breakfast in the morning, or even perhaps to make a meal, is virtually impossible. Why? Well, because there's something going on in the household that has been studiously ignored for a very long time and has grown so large as a consequence

that it occupies the whole domain. By noon the dragon filled the house. It's head hung out the front door, it's tail hung out the back door, and there wasn't a room in the house that didn't have some part of the dragon in it. When the dragon awoke from his nap, he was hungry. The bakery truck went by. The smell of fresh bread was more than the dragon could resist. He ran down the street after the bakery truck.

The house went along, of course, like the shell on a snail. The mailman was just coming up the path, with some mail for the bixby's when their house rushed past him and headed down the street. He chased the bixby's house for a few blocks, but he couldn't catch it. When Mr. Bixby came home for lunch, the first thing he noticed was that his house was gone.

Luckily, one of the neighbors was able to tell him which way it went. You know, that sort of thing happens to people not infrequently, too, right? They're not really looking around much at what's going on and they come home from work one day and their house is gone. And what does that mean? Well, maybe their children have become completely alienated from them or maybe their wife has decided suddenly, but of course not so suddenly, to leave? Why? Well, according to this story, it's because something ignored was growing in the house. Mr. Bixby got in his car and went looking for the house. He studied all the

houses as he drove along. Finally, he saw one that looked familiar. Million Mrs. Bixby were waving from an upstairs window. You know, in the 1890s in India, when a house was being built, the local priest, equivalent to the priest, would come by to set the foundation stone. And when he set the foundation stone, he'd take a big spike and drove it into the ground. And the reason he drove it into the ground at the place where the foundation was going to be laid was to keep the great dragon that is underneath the earth firmly pinned down by its head so it couldn't move and shake the house to bits. What does that mean? Well, it means the same thing that's meant in the New Testament when you're told not to

build your house on a foundation of sand, right? It doesn't matter how good the house is or how well constructed it is or how rich it is if the foundation is made out of sand or if it rests on top of a dragon. There's nothing in that household that's ever going to be accomplished that's positive. And the wealth, the display that the house might consist of, is nothing but a sham. Mr. Bixby climbed over the dragon's head onto the porch roof and through the upstairs window. How did this happen? Mr. Bixby asked.

It was the dragon, said Billy. There's no such thing Mother started to say. There is a dragon, Billy, insisted a very big dragon, and Billy patted the dragon on the head. The dragon wagged its tail happily. Then, even faster than it had grown, the dragon started getting smaller. Soon it was kitten size again.

I don't mind dragons this size, said mother. Why did it have to grow so big? I'm not sure said Billy, but I think it just wanted to be noticed. So the first thing you might think about is just what happens if you don't pay a bill? Like really don't pay it. I mean, when it first comes in, it's only the size of a kitten. But if you leave it alone for two or three years, it pretty much grows into a full-fledged dragon. Why? Well, because things that you ignore

have a life of their own, complex life, like a bill, a bill that attach to a whole industrial complex, right? One of whose major functions is to make sure that you pay the bill. And if you don't pay the bill, then you immediately find out what it's connected to. It's connected to something immense and very troublesome. And if you allow the full force of that thing

to manifest itself, it's not pretty. So one lesson from this story is that if something's nagging at you, just a bit, it's probably better to deal with it before it turns into a full-fledged dragon. And then you might think, well, what if it's already a full-fledged dragon, right? I mean, then what's your option? There's nothing left but to run away. And so then I can tell you what we know from 50 years of studying the outcome of clinical

psychological interventions. So let's take an extreme case, right? Let's say something truly terrible has happened to you. And as a consequence of that, you're in shock, post-traumatic shock, which is a condition that's sufficiently serious to damage your brain over time. It's not only a psychological disorder, it's a physical disorder. If you're really stressed, your cortisol level shoot up. And if your cortisol level shoot up, that cortisol in high doses is a neurotox and starts

to damage your brain. So let's take a very extreme case and imagine that you've been violently sexually assaulted and has a consequence of that, you're in post-traumatic shock. How do you get cured? So that means you can't really go outside you certainly can't encounter anything that's associated with the event Your sense of integrity and personal safety has been completely destroyed. Is there any way you can get back on your feet? Oh, there's a woman named Edna Fowa in New York I think one of the world's top clinical psychologists and she's been dealing with women who have post-traumatic stress disorder for decades.

And she's found a treatment that works, and the treatment is this. She has the women relive the event in as much detail as possible over and over in their imagination, with the accompanying emotion. And she's found, because she's done physiological measurements on her clients, that those women that allow themselves to get the most fully upset as a consequence of the reliving, get better faster and stay better longer. The clinical evidence is absolutely clear.

When you take someone to therapy, you're basically doing two things to them. Well, three. You allow them to confess what's wrong with them, because it's really useful to actually say what it is that's bothering you. It makes it clear and distinct. You help the person get their story straight, because you have to have your story straight, right? You have to know where you're coming from, and you have to know where you're going, because otherwise there's no

structure for your life. When the third thing is, if your path from point A to B is being blocked by something that you're afraid of, you better learn to confront it because if you don't, it will grow and expand until it turns into the kind of dragon that occupies your whole house. At this point in the lecture, Dr. Peterson refers to a figure, an image that is which can be found in the description under Map of motivation. It will be a link in the description, map of motivation, and it will give context to this segment to the lecture. This is another representation of the story. It's a map of motivation. It basically says this and it's easy to understand if you think, go to a movie, it doesn't matter what country it's made.

There's certain things that always happen, right? Like two broad classes of fiction, adventure and romance. What's an adventure? To go to new lands and discover something new and become transformed as a consequence. What's a romance? To meet another person who's certainly as complicated as anything you could meet on an adventure? And again, to be transformed as a consequence of the contact,

two fundamental plots. Why? Why are there fundamental plots? And why can we understand them without them being explained to us? Well, it's because fundamentally we're all very, very similar. We have a finite set of basic needs. So for example, hot people would rather be cool. Thirsty people would rather have water. Hungry people would rather eat. And these motivations color what we conceive of as our ultimate destiny. So in the Old Testament, for example, an agrarian community,

often hungry, paradise was construed as the land of milk and honey. Well, why? Well, milk is high in fat, and honey is high in glucose, and if you're hungry, really hungry, there's nothing you want more than fat and sugar. Affiliate of desire. We like to be around other people. Sexual desire. A fundamental sub-e element of a romantic plot These underlying motivational systems of ours set us up Bounded worlds within which we live so for example if you fall in love with someone and you construe your destiny as being with them any

indication that they're pleased with you is going to produce a rush of positive emotion Why because our emotional systems are set up so that any sign that we're pleased with you is going to produce a rush of positive emotion. Why? Because our emotional systems are set up so that any sign that we're moving towards our goal is Responded to with a rush of positive emotion and conversely a frown from the person that you love especially in the initial ages of Initial stages of aromance is met with a flood of negative affect. Why? Because anything that stops us on the path that we've chosen produces negative emotion. That's how we're set up. And our emotional systems are actually quite straightforward.

We pause it a goal. The thing about people is that we can pause it virtually. Anything as a goal. That's one of the things that distinguishes us from animals. So we can all be thrilled to death when our favorite soccer team as a goal. That's one of the things that distinguishes us from animals. So we can all be thrilled to death when our favorite soccer team scores a goal. Because we participate in what they're doing, the same way we participate in watching a protagonist

on a movie or in a book. We can feel it, we embody it. We even know now that the neural systems that I utilize to watch a movie involve the same neural systems that the actor is utilizing, acting out the part. So when you say you understand someone else, what you mean is your body is set to do exactly the same thing their body is and your emotional systems are locked on exactly

the same way there's are. So when they experience something and you're watching it, you experience an echo of it and that's what understanding means. And it turns out as well that those neural systems that allow us to embody someone else and to imitate them are right underneath the structures that we've evolved to use for language. And what that indicates is that mostly what we use language for is to tell stories, to tell stories about the way that people act so that we can derive information, not about what the world's made of, because we don't really care about that in some fundamental way. But instead, how should we act? That's the fundamental question. How should we act? Now, if you go see a movie about a thug,

the message there is, given that the thug generally comes to not so good end, don't act like a thug, right? Interesting though it might be, compelling as a lifestyle, at least sufficiently compelling so you'll watch it. It's not a good long-term strategy. What is a good long-term strategy? We've been collecting stories as people,

we don't know how long, really. We don't know 100,000 years maybe. There's been creatures like us, indistingu. We don't know 100,000 years maybe. There's been creatures like us, indistinguishable from us, for 100,000 years. And we know that societies that appear to be more or less as archaic as those old societies tell stories, have rituals, have mythology. We have ancient written stories, like the Anumai Lich, which is a Sumerian story, the oldest written story we have, 4,000 years old, based on oral tradition that's probably 20,000 years older than that. We've been collecting stories for a long, long time.

What do they mean? What are they good for? Well, imagine this. You know, you tell a story to your husband or your wife, about something interesting that you saw, right? Well, then imagine that you could collect a thousand of the most interesting stories. And then imagine that you were some kind of literary genius like Shakespeare, and you could take those thousand interesting stories and boil them down to a hundred really interesting stories. And then imagine that you had 10,000 years to gather up those hundred most interesting stories and average them, and you could come out with one perfect story, the best story, Then imagine that you had 10,000 years to gather up those hundred most interesting stories

and average them and you could come out with one perfect story, the best story, the most interesting story that you could possibly tell. Well, that's what a myth is. It's the most interesting story you can possibly tell. And just as this little story that I just told you had an underlying mythological structure, virtually every story you ever see has such a structure. That's why it's compelling to you. And when you meet someone who's charismatic or who holds your attention or who you're interested in, the probability that they're acting out a mythological fragment

is very, very high. And that's why it is that your attention is captivated by them. What's the world like from this perspective? Well, look, you know, you're all sitting in this room. You think, if I took you out of here, how would you describe it? Well, you'd say it was full of chairs. There was a table, lights. Well, why would you pick that level of resolution? And you're like, why wouldn't you say, well, you know,

the average ceiling tile had about 15,000 dots on it. Doesn't seem like a relevant data point, right? You say the same thing about the rug. There's nothing stopping you from counting the number of stains or the number of red spots or the way the light plays off your partner's shirt or the shine on your shoes. And if you were an artist, say, and trying to make a representation of this room, you'd concentrate on aspects of it that were completely different from those that you're concentrating on now.

You talk about chairs, TV cameras, cabinets, tables, why, they're functional, they're objects, right? They're tools, they're tools, they're things you can use. Normally, when you're going from point A to point B, you divide up the world into things you can use. Those are things you see, your perceptual systems do this. Things you can use, and things things you see, your perceptual systems do this, things you can use, and things that might get in the way.

And as you move from motivated world to motivated world, the little stories that you inhabit, you chop the world up in different pieces. So a piano for a concert pianist is different, is a different phenomena than a piano for someone who has no musical education. But you're always parsing up the world in terms of what it's good for,

how it can serve your purposes, and you even see it that way. Now the question is, the complicated question isn't so much, how do you parse up the world into things that are useful to you, like chairs? The complicated question is, what do you do when something that you don't expect happens? So imagine you've had a 15-year-long marriage and you find lipstick on your husband's collar. Not once, but three times. And then you think, well, I thought I had a map, right? I thought we were both in the same game.

I thought we were both going from point A to the same point B. I thought we had established a shared structure of interpretation, but I find that there's some aspect of his apparent behavior that's completely outside my scope of interpretation. What do you do? Well, you can choose to ignore that, right? It's easy to do that. Why would you ignore it? Because if you don't ignore it, you have to think,

he's not who I thought he was. And that's really not a good thing to think because people are really, really, really complicated. And if they're not who you think they are, you have no idea who they might be. And you also might think, well, maybe I'm not who I think I am because, after all, I got sucked into this situation. I thought I'd pretty much understood the world and turns out that I certainly don't understand the opposite gender. There's some indication that I really don't even understand myself because fundamentally I'm so clueless.

Then you might think, well, when did this start? This cluelessness. How long have I been blind? Well, do you really want to ask that question? Well, not generally, right? It's easy to keep the dragon in the closet, which is where it tends to live. What happens when you encounter something you don't expect?

For a long time, psychologists thought the people learned fear. So your typical person, your typical lab rat, was a common creature. Now, it's a funny thing, because if you take a lab rat out of his home cage and you put them in a new cage where you want to teach them say to be afraid of something to be afraid of a light paired with a shock which is a typical psychological experiment. The funny thing about the rat is he got to let him calm down before he's normal. Well except that you might think that the notcom rat is also the normal rat, right?

You take the rat out of this cage and you put him in the new cage and what does he do? He goes like this, why? Well, he's a rat, right? Someone might eat him. So he's a bit nervous about being in this new situation. Rats do not like being in new situations. They don't like bright light. If you put them in a new situation that's brightly lit, they go right over to the corner

because they think maybe cats won't find them. Rats are so afraid of cats that they never even have to meet a cat to be afraid of them. So you can take a rat that's never seen a cat in his life. And if you let him smell some cat odor or show him a cat, he'll, well, I'll tell you, if you show a rat a cat somewhere he doesn't expect it, he will run back to his burrow and scream for 24 hours. Now you imagine how scared you'd have to be to scream for 24 hours, especially given and Rat only lives about a year. So that would be for you like screaming. I'll be like screaming

for three months, right? So the rat runs back to his burrow, and he screams, and every other rat who hears and screams, freezes, and they all stay like that for 24 hours till they sort of calm down. And then the first thing they do is they go back to the place where they saw the cat, and they start to map it out. So they do these things called corner runs,

which is, so the rat wants to go back to this territory. He knows the territory might be a place where he gets food. Is the cat still there? Well, you might think, stay in the burrow, right? But then maybe you don't get something to eat. So the rat goes back to the place where the cat was, carefully, and then he hunches down, and he runs over part of it. And if nothing kills him, then he goes back

and does the same thing with a little more of the territory. Until finally, the rats have run all over the territory again. Then they go back to eating, making love, paying attention to their families, because rats are quite social despite the fact that they're rats. The rats aren't enough to go back to the scene of the crime, so to speak, right? It's not going to let the dragon that might be there grow. The rat knows that if something is terrifying, it should be investigated, not run away from. The question is, what do you encounter

when you encounter something you don't expect? And so you say, well, you've got your spouse mapped out, right? But then they do something you don't expect. Which hopefully happens fairly regularly, right? Because otherwise you get bored with them. They do something you don't expect. And you think, aha, who is that person precisely? And what that means is that what, what that means is that when you encounter something unexpected, you actually can't see what's there. Why? Because it's

too complicated. You might have to spend a month talking to your spouse to figure out just exactly why they have that particular peculiar opinion. You have to explore and dig to find out just exactly why they have that particular peculiar opinion. You have to explore and dig to find out how they map the world. If you encounter something unexpected, the first thing you see is not the world. The first thing you see is just a sense of discomfort and fear combined with some latent curiosity that the world is not the way you thought it was. Now, how do you find out what the world is actually like? We have to investigate it.

You have to investigate it. It means you have to take a risk, you have to move forward the same way that people do in psychotherapy. You have to find the thing that you're bordering on avoiding and going and map it. Now it's a curious thing, you know. Common anxiety disorder is agrofobia. Agrofobia is a generalized anxiety disorder, and people who suffer severely from agrofobia

often get to the point where, because of their panics, their housebound, they can't go outside their room or their house. Now, they'd run away from the room or their house, too, if they could, but there's nowhere to run, so they're pretty much stuck being somewhere. So an agrophobic comes in for therapy. I think well what do you do with them? And you say well the agrophobic says I can't go on elevators and you say okay well let's go try and you say all right well relax. It's a teacher's person to breathe which really doesn doesn't help that much, but it makes them feel better.

You can do this without teaching them to relax. It doesn't matter a bit, but it does help them feel better. You say, okay, well, there's the elevator. I said, how close can you get to the elevator? I say, well, I can't really get more than 20 feet, that's maximum. I said, okay, let's go up to 20 feet there, and I may do that, and then you let them stand there, and stand there, and stand and stand there and stand there and stand there. Sooner or later they get bored of being 20 feet from the elevator.

And then you say, well, look, you know, let's, could you go 10 feet? No, I couldn't go 10 feet. That's too close. How about, could you go three more feet? Yeah, I think I could do that. So they go three more feet and then you let them stand there. And they find out nothing terrible is happening sooner or later. And then they go another three feet and then they go another three feet. And then they're like confronting the elevator. And

then they're inside the elevator, but they're going like this. So they don't want to look at the elevator, right? So you say, well, you got to look at the elevator, you got to look at the numbers, you got to look at the buttons. So they do that. And then you think, well, could we go up a floor? No, we couldn't go up a floor. OK, well, I'll tell you what. We'll just close the door. I'll put my hand in.

It'll open again. Could you do that? Yeah, I could do that. Step by step sooner or later. And usually sooner, bang, they've gone up a floor, right? So then what happens? They go home and have a fight with her husband that's been brewing for like 15 years.

Why? Well, it's not because the that's been brewing for like 15 years. Why? Well, it's not because the elevator symbolically related to the fight has nothing to do with it. It's because what the person learns in the combat with the unknown, which just happens to be taking the guys of an elevator, is that they can confront things that frighten them without being destroyed by the confrontation. And so what you see immediately,

and this was contrary to an original psychoanalytic prediction, is that, man, you take that person out, you teach them they can go in the elevator. And right off the bat, they're going to shopping malls, they're in taxis, they're back in the subway, and they're standing up for themselves at home. Generalization, why? Because they didn't learn that the elevator wasn't frightening.

That isn't what they learned. They learned that despite't learn that the elevator wasn't frightening. That isn't what they learned. They learned that despite the fact that the elevator was as terrifying as anything they've ever encountered, they were actually up to the challenge. And now that's a really useful thing to teach someone, right? Because if you have an obsessive-compulsive patient, I had one who actually used to work with radiation. Now he was, he worked in some kind of biolab in Montreal. People with obsessive compulsive disorder

often, very frightened, if they'll contaminate someone else. So like, typical obsessive compulsive obsession would be, I'll go to a shopping market. I'll touch some fruit from some third world country. I'll get some nasty bacterial disease. I'll bring it home and I'll give it to my kids. Well, you tell them, look, the know, the chances of that are like one in 150,000. And they look at you and they think, I don't care if the chances are only 150,000.

What if my kids die? And you think, well, yeah, that does pose a problem, doesn't it? Because it isn't exactly clear from a logical perspective where you should draw the risk line. Well, with the obsessive compulsive you do exactly the same thing. You say, look, yeah, your fear is real. No kidding, because lurking at the bottom of their fear is the same fear that everybody else has, right? Same fear. I might die.

I might get sick. I might lose the people that I love. Not only might that happen, it's gonna happen. Why aren't people afraid of that all the time? We don't really know. Obsessive person becomes aware of it. What do you tell them? You say, do it anyway. Do it anyways. And they learn quickly that if they don't run away from the thing they're afraid of,

there's something in them that responds to it. They learn that the fear is not larger than they are. Now I like Edna Fowler's case in particular because you always might wonder with this like what's the limit, right? Okay, yeah that sounds good in theory but what if something really terrible's happened to you? Well what's happened to Edna Fowler's patients? That's up there with terrible, right? I mean that's up there with terrible, right? Strip of social dignity, violated physically. That combines two of people's most specific fears.

Well, then there's other kinds of confrontation, too. I like the story of Solzhenitsyn. I think it's really a good one, because there's different kinds of dragons, right? There's natural dragons like death and disease. And then there's social dragons like bureaucracies and tyrannies. Alexander Solzhenetsin, you may or may not know, was a prisoner in the Soviet gulag concentration camp system that by his report at least killed 60 million people between 1919 and 1959,

60 million. That's 10 times as many as Hitler killed, at least with regards to the genocide. 60 million people. So much in it, and he had a pretty nasty life. I mean, first of all, he's on the Russian front, which was a nasty place to be. Then he was captured by the Germans, and they didn't like Russians. So they put them in separate prisoners of war camp, partly because Stalin, who was a consummate paranoid, wouldn't sign the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. So the Germans set up extra POW camps for the Russians, and they starved generally so badly

that if other POWs were in the vicinity, they'd throw food packages over the wire, even though they themselves weren't particularly well fed. So then the war ends in the Russians. When it's ocean, it goes back to Russia, right? And what happens, you think, and you know, wow, this is over. We help defend the farther land we're going to get. If not a hero's welcome, at least some welcome, but still in figured, no, no. These Russians who'd been to the West, they were contaminated by their exposure to the

Western economic system. And as a consequence of that, they posed a threat to the integrity of the Soviet state, so he just threw them all in concentration camps. So fine. So Zosynetsyn sitting there in this concentration camp on a coal pile, a coal pile which contained this kind of clay that his compatriots would eat because they were so damn hungry that it was better to have the clay in their stomach than nothing at all. And he thought, all right, what the hell did I do to get here?

Which is really a remarkable thing to think, right? Because like there was the Second World War, and that probably couldn't be pinned directly on him. And then there's Stellan, who was really one of the world's worst monsters. And then there's the concentration camp and the POW camp. And like a lot of things happened to Solzhenetson, but he said he had nothing but time to think in this concentration cabin. He wasn't really that happy with the way things turned out.

So he made a vow in the camp, and the vow was this. He said, he is going to go back over his whole life, whole life, right from day one. And try to remember every time he ever did something, he thought was wrong. He thought, right, not someone else, but that gave his conscience a pang. And he said, well, since I don't have anything better to do, I mean, spend like the next 10 years seeing him fiking, undo all those little knots in my soul that I tied. And the consequence of that was that he wrote a book called the Goulog Archipelago, right, Three Volume Book, 1900 pages long. He memorized it because there wasn't any paper and pencil available for him in prison.

And then it circulated in the underground in the Soviet Union for years before it got published in the West, published in 1975. Definitely one of the literary events that brought down the Soviet Union. I think that's kind of interesting, isn't it? Think this one guy, right? He's got numbers tattooed on his arm, he's a skinny as a rail, he's three quarters dead, he's been beat to death in 15 different ways. He decides, under completely unreasonable circumstances, that he's going to take personal responsibility for the position that he happens to find himself in. The consequence of that 25 years later is that Solzhenitsyn still around,

but the Soviet Union isn't. And you think, well, that can't be the way the world works now can it. But then you think this too, like, do we really know how the world works, right? We've had a pretty nasty century in the last hundred years, right? We had the Nazis, we had Mao Zai-Tong, we had the recent tragedies in Africa, we don't seem to learn anything about genocide. Someone like Sozhenitsyn says, well, you know, might be your fault. Why? What are you ignoring? Good question. Can you make peace with your own family? It's not so easy, right?

It's probably no easier than making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. What do we encounter when we encounter something we don't understand? We don't know. It's not the simple world of objects. The simple world of objects is something we've learned to see. The real world is way more complicated than what we just see. Let me give you an example. When I was in

Montreal in 1985, my computer crashed. So what do you do when you're computer crashes? Well, when the computer encountered something unexpected, it crashes. It can't do a damn thing about it. You have to fix it. So I checked the monitor. It was okay. It wouldn't go on. It seemed all right.

And I noticed my lamps weren't working. So I went to the fuse box. So all the fuses seemed okay. So then I went outside to go down to the corner store to get a cigarette. And I saw that outside all the lights were off. so then I went outside to go down to the corner store to get a cigarette and I saw that outside all the lights were off, the traffic lights were off. The whole city was in darkness. Then I found out the next day that there was a solar wind, big solar flare, put out a

big cloud of electrons, zipped along to earth at the speed of light, put electrical pulse through the hydroelectric grid and go back, crash my computer. Well, I hadn't thought until that point that the integrity of my computer was dependent on the stability of the sun. Everything is way more complicated than it looks. And when you just look at something, you see a very simple representation of what's actually there. What do you encounter when you encounter something unexpected? Well, when you first encounter it, you don't know. All you know is that it frightens you, but it makes you curious.

You think dragons, right? Every primates afraid of lizards, including us. Chimp hands these don't like snakes. If you take a chimp, it's never seen a snake. You throw it a-short a snake. It will hit the roof of its cage. Then it'll look at the snake. Why would a dragon hoard gold? Because a dragon represents everything that you're afraid of. What's embedded in everything that you're afraid of? Absolutely everything that you need to find.

Run from what you're afraid of. Run from exactly what you need to find. One of the oldest dramatic representations we know of, not this specific painting, this is St. George in the Dragon, right? Dragon lives in the ground, chased there by heroes of previous generation, now and then re-emerging. Kills people, right? These are skulls around its lera.

Threatens the integrity of the community, like everything unexpected does. Hero comes out, slays the dragon, frees the treasure. In this case, it's a virginal woman. Dragon's hard gold because the thing you most need is always to be found where you least want to look. The thing you most need is always to be found where you least want to look. I'm going to close this with another dream. This is a dream my five-year-old nephew had.

Now, you got to get the context of this dream, right? Year after this dream, parents were divorced. So there were dragons in the house. So there were dragons in the house. He was about four at this time, is running around the house with this little plastic knight helmet on and a sword is zip around killing things with it. Doing this all of the time. And even when he went to sleep at night, he'd put the sword by his pillow and the knight helmet on his pillow. Now every night or every second night or every third night for six months, he'd been waking up screaming. Now why? Well he was about to go to kindergarten right so that's that's a real threshold for a kid away from maternal dependence fundamentally into the real world. That's that's a new thing. But also there was upset in his house. So I was there one night when he

woke up screaming next morning I said said, well, did you dream anything? And so he launched into this story. He said, Dwarf, he was in this field and these little creatures like Dwarfs were coming up to him and they didn't have any arms. They just had legs and they had big beaks and they were covered with hair in grease. And on top of their head was a cross shaved into this hair. And there's lots and lots of these dwarfs and they were jumping on them with their beaks, biting them. We all looked at them, thought, well, it's no wonder you're waking up screaming, right?

I mean, you know, that doesn't sound so good. And then he said, well, wait, there's more, right? Back in the distance, there's a dragon. And the dragon is puffing out, fire and smoke. And every time he puffs out fire and smoke and every time he puffs out fire and smoke it turns into these dwarfs. Big problem, right? Just like the problem of the Hydra and Greek mythology. Cut off one head, seven more appear, right? So what are you gonna do about these dwarfs? Kill one big deal, ten more

common. I said what can you do about that? Now in a legal trial that would have been an inadmissible question, right? That's called leading the witness because what I told him was, despite the horror of this situation, you maybe could do something about it. And he said, ha, I take my sword, I get my dad. That's a good idea, right? Dad, there's the real dad and then there's the tradition dad, right? You There's the real dad and then there's the tradition dad, right? You might as well have your father by your side if you're going to go into battle. I'd take my sword, I'd get my dad, I'd go to where the dragon was. I jump up on his head, I'd poke both of his eyes out with the sword, I'd go down his throat

to the place where the fire comes out, I'd cut a piece of that box out and I'd use it as a shield and I thought, wow, that's's unbelievable unbelievable that he could do that's perfect right? There's no sense going after the dwarfs because Thousands of them you might as well go after the dragon What happens if you go after the dragon you get a piece of it right a piece of its center nature a piece that can defend you against anything Including other dragons. So what if this was the case, think?

Evolutionarily speaking or religiously speaking. What if we were adapted to the world? And what if it's not the simple place of dead objects that we think it is? What if it's something a lot more alive, a lot more like a story? What if the story is something like this? You have absolutely everything you need but you have to use all of it. If you run away from any of it and in particular the parts of it that frighten you which you know there's endless reasons to run away from. If you run away from any of it you don't

get that piece of the dragon. If you miss even one piece, there's a chink in your armor. There's a place where you're vulnerable. If you make even one mistake, you lessen yourself. If you lessen yourself, you're going to run away more. Not only that when someone wants to lean on you, they're not going to be able to lean on you because you'll just fall over. What if it was the case that we were adapted to the world, really adapted to it, so that if we made full use of all the talents we had, we'd be okay. What if it was the case that if we set out consciously to never run away from something we know

we shouldn't run away from, that everything would be all right. Well, you can think whatever you want to think, but this is what I think. I think it's bloody amazing that that little kid's book that I read you at the beginning of this lecture had all that information in it. And so you might ask yourself when you leave. If that information isn't true, how the hell did it get there? That's it. Thanks. Thank you for listening to episode six of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, slaying the dragon within us. To support this podcast, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account by searching

Jordan Peterson Patreon or looking at the link in the description. You can also check out selfauthoring.com. Please review this podcast on iTunes. Thank you. Thank you.