WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Healing Hour: Tell The Truth, or at Least Don't Lie

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Today, Adriana and Erika discuss Rule Eight of Jordan Peterson's Twelve Rules for Life: Tell The Truth, or at Least Don't Lie. They discuss lies in all their forms- little white lies, toxic "life-lies", and broader societal lies- as well as how it harms us to participate in them.

Hello and welcome to the Healing Hour on Radio Free Hillsdale, where we bring you your weekly dose of healing. I'm your host, Adriana Azarian. And I'm your co-host, Erica Kaiba. And we are here to help you become your happiest, fullest, fullest, self. So great to have you on the show. Yes, as always. Yes. And today we are talking about Rule 8 of Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.

And what is that this week, Erica? Tell the truth. Or at least don't love. I like this title a lot. We're all about that at Hillsdale College. The good, the true, and the beautiful. And the beautiful. So, Adriana, what were your initial reactions to this chapter?

Well, I remember in 10th grade, I took a moral theology class, and we talked about the whole, like, the morality of lying and how sometimes when you can't tell the truth, you just try to deceive people. Like, not in like a bad way, but, like, for example, there was a time when St. Athen was being chased on a river and someone was looking for him and they call out to him because they didn't recognize him. Where is Athanasius? And Athanasius goes, well, he can't be far away. So he kind of got them off track without lying to them. Yes. So I always think of that whenever I think of lying and deception. That's funny. Anyhow, just thought I'd bring up that little story.

I love that. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of moral distinctions that you can make and get into. Yes. The truthfulness and how truthful you should be. Jordan Peterson thinks as much as possible. I think that's like, you know, a good strategy. Which is fair. Yeah. But no, I thought this chapter was very good because you know the old adage that once you start

telling a lie, you can't stop. Yeah. Becomes bigger lies. I think he makes this very clear on a very macrocosmic scale of what it looks like when an individual starts lying and how it can affect all of society. Yeah, definitely, definitely. And going off of that as a little roadmap for what we're going to be talking about in this episode, I mean, Jordan Peterson definitely starts with the micro examples and kind of progresses broader and broader.

So we're going to be talking about just on the individual level, what it looks like and why it's important to not tell white lies, just not to lie in general to people. Then we're going to talk about what Jordan Peterson calls life lies. So when you're lying to yourself or living a lie with your life basically for an ideology or an ambition or whatever it is. And then we're going to talk about what you just mentioned, Adriano, which is what happens when a whole society buys into a lie or when individual people just aren't courageous enough to push back against it. And our society is living in a lot of lies right now. So that's fine. Yes. Yeah.

And so we can definitely talk about some lies that are being pushed onto us by the culture at large. and how we can say no to that and why we ought to say no to that. Yes. But first, white lies. How do we feel about them? Yay, nay. Oh, okay. As a disclaimer, lying is always wrong.

I'm a Catholic and I believe this. That being said, I'm also a human. Yeah. And definitely tell a few white lies during the day, every day. That's my confession. I think, really, you shouldn't ever do them, but if you're ever going to do them, it should be a case of, like, absolute necessity. But most of us are not in a life or death situation.

Yeah. So we choose to have little white lies. Yeah. Usually it's more of like, oh, do you like this skirt I'm wearing? Yeah. Yeah. That's great. For the record, though, I always love Erica's outfits.

I'm not joking. I also always love Adriana's outfits. Oh my gosh, thank you. Yes. And that's a really good point because that's what Jordan Peterson talks about. Those are the examples that he gives. It's because we, it's hard. It almost feels morally harder to tell the truth when it involves hurting someone's feelings.

He talks about this example when he, as a clinical psychology student, he was with a group of students in an insane asylum and they were about to go do something. And this young woman who was like very fragile and delicate, she comes up to them and she's one of the patients and she says, what are you guys doing? Can I come with you? And it would have been really easy. He says to just make something up, to spare her feelings and say, oh, sorry, we can only have eight people in our group or we're just looking. leaving. But that wasn't the truth. And what the truth was they were psychology students and they had

to do things related to that and she was not part of that group. And so that like creates a distinction between them and that hurts her feelings. But he says it's only momentarily because after that she understands. Right. In that situation it's like, like you just don't know how that person's going to react. So when I got to that part, I was like, oh my gosh. This would be easier if this person was like in their right mind, right? Right. Right. But I thought that it was interesting. Even in that situation, he was like, no, it's just better to be honest with them. Yeah. It's kind of like how psychologists, at least traditionally speaking, like if someone has a delusion, they can't just affirm it for them because it hurts them more in the long run.

So I guess there are times when maybe, you know, white lies really are not good, even if they seem necessary. Yeah. I think that it gives the person a certain amount of respect and dignity. Like, yes, she's in a very fragile moral state, but just because of that, he's not going to, to create a lie or a delusion for her to spare her feelings. Like he's just going to tell it straight like it is. And if you're just tuning in, you're listening to The Healing Hour on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. With your host, Adriana Azarian.

And your co-host, Erica Kaiba, discussing Rule 8 of Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life, tell the truth, or at least don't lie. And we were just going over just the distinctions with white lies, the positions that that we're usually in when we tell them, and then the importance of not telling white lies also, just like on a day-to-day basis to make things easier or smooth things over with people. Yes. However, lies can be broader than just pretending that you like a scarf that you don't actually like. You can be participating in what Jordan Peterson calls a life lie.

Adriana, what are your thoughts on that? I know that was something that struck you. Well, I think we all lied to ourselves, Erica. We all lie to ourselves in good ways and in bad ways. Explain what do you mean by in a good way? Well, in a good way, well, maybe in a positive way, I could say, I am really, really good, or I know a lot about this topic. And really, in reality, I don't know that much about that topic. Or something like a false pride about things that just aren't reality.

Or you could be like, oh, man, like I just look really bad today. I am really stupid. I'm really ugly. Like that sort of thing. That's like a negative lie. And I think that either one actually can shape your reality. That's a good point. Okay.

What you said just brought something to mind. You know when somebody stands up or makes themselves known in a group and they start going on and on about a topic and using big words and you're like, wow, this person really knows what they're talking about? And then they like turn to you after class and say, I didn't actually do the reading. And you're like, what? Yep. What? Because confidence, the way that somebody portrays themselves, like, is everything. I mean, it goes back to rule one.

Stand up straight with your shoulders back and believe that you're competent. And a lot of people will just follow you. But I think that sometimes, I think often a false competence can, I think that they're like marginal benefits, you know? I think that it can work in the moment. But if somebody actually, like, thinks that they know what they're talking about and don't ever do the reading for class, like, that's going to catch up. with you when the midterm comes around.

Or like in a broader sense in life. Like you can't fake it forever. Yeah. That being said though, this is a very kind of different. But it always comes back to weightlifting with me. Our listeners will know that. But I was watching a video about a study. And the study was saying that people, when they're like lifting weights and they tell

themselves, this is too hard, I can't do this. They're more likely to stop the exercise and not continue. Whereas they say, yes, I can do this. I can keep doing this. They have the strength to keep doing it, and they have better results in the long term. But then that's actually true. Well, yeah. Uh-huh.

But, like, it's kind of like mindset, you know, because in the moment, you may not actually know if you're able to do the next rep, but if you keep telling yourself, if you tell yourself you can or you tell yourself you can or you tell yourself you can, that's going to, that can have an effect on whether or not you can, if that makes sense. Yeah. No. Okay. Actually, yeah, I think it does.

Okay. Because it involves this element of the unknown, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, okay, maybe we don't actually have, we don't have, like, perfect self-knowledge in any case. So it requires a certain amount of just engaging with the unknown to just try a new thing and see how it works or change your strategy and see how it works. And that's exactly what he's talking about. So, like, in a broader sense with the life lie, he's talking about how someone living a life lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought, and action so that only some narrowly desired and predefined outcome is allowed to exist. A life lived in this manner is based

Consciously or unconsciously on two premises The first is that current knowledge is sufficient to define what is good Unquestioningly far into the future The second is that reality would be unbearable if left to its own devices And then he goes on and he talks he compares He talks about this in connection with John Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost Oh, it was so good And he talks about the faculty of rationality

And how it inclines dangerously to pride because it has this maxim, all I know is all that needs to be known. Pride falls in love with its own creations and tries to make them absolute. And so what that, I mean, that's very philosophical, but what it looks like practically is, say, somebody buys into an ideology or a vision of their life that just has to be true. And they can't abide it if it's not true. Well, then you're leaving out, if by not questioning that, you're leaving out the whole unknown of life. Or if like you're, say you're really committed to like socialism or, and you see historically socialism has never worked and leads to poverty and just horrible outcomes

wherever it's tried. Well, you're just ignoring all that reality because like your rationality has cooked up this really beautiful fantasy that real communism has never actually been tried. So you're like, well, I'm going to dedicate my whole life to this now. Yeah. And hence you have a life lie. Yeah, it's just your imagination. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. You are listening to Radio Free Hillsville 101.7 FM where we discuss health and wellness on The Healing Hour. Yes. I'm your host, Adriana Azarian. And I'm your co-host, Erica Kaiva. And thanks for tuning in. Right now we're discussing chapter 8 of Dr.

Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life, which is... Tell the truth, or at least don't lie. And we were just discussing this concept of life lies. And how telling yourself lies can affect your reality and your shaping of your own reality. Now, this can be a problem when we talk about the grand sense. scale of society because our society is chock full of lies that started with someone just telling them to themselves. Exactly. And then it turned into someone pushing them on others or more importantly someone using authority to push them on others. And so people are afraid of consequences.

And so in small instances they don't push back and then it builds up into bigger instances. And so Jordan Peterson gives us a little, a terrifying actually picture of someone who's living this kind of life where they never push back on lies. Says, consider the person who insists that everything is right in her life. She avoids conflict and smiles and does what she has asked to do. She finds a niche and hides in it. She does not question authority or put her own ideas forward and does not complain when mistreated. She strives for invisibility like a fish in the center of a swarming school.

But a secret unrest gnaws at her heart. She is still suffering because life is suffering. She is lonesome and isolated and unfulfilled. But her obedience and self-obliteration eliminate all the meaning from her life. She has become nothing but a slave, a tool for others to exploit. And then he goes on about how, like, that makes your soul sick to be always denying the truth and, like, what you want to need. But then he talks about, in a societal sense, it might be the noisy troublemakers who disappear first when the institution you serve falters and shrinks. But it's the invisible who will be sacrificed next.

Someone hiding is not someone vital. vitality requires original contribution. Hiding also does not save the conforming and conventional from disease, insanity, death, and taxes. And hiding from others also means suppressing and hiding the potentialities of the unrealized self. So then going back for a moment to that idea, when the institution falters, the troublemakers might go first, but then it's the invisible. Like, that's so true if you think of what happened in Soviet Russia. Like, Nizzen was out here publishing. all this stuff. Exposing it. Exposing it. And he just, and he talks about Solzhenitsyn in the chapter,

but Solzhenitsyn just, he decided to stand up, tell the truth. He's seen what happened in the Gulag. He's seen that we got there by people lying. And he's like, hey, you know, like, this. is not true what they're telling you. Yeah. And or like what we're telling ourselves. Yeah. And then, like, I read this section of the Gulag Archipelago where he talks about how if one man just stood up and said, this is wrong. Like the whole. system would come toppling. But everyone is complicit in it. So they would just like the government, their army trucks would just drive in and they actually had murder quotas. So this goes back to like the compliance thing, like the invisible people just disappear. Like they would just show up at

your house in the middle of the night and drag you off to prison. I mean, that's what happens. Like you're you tolerate these little abuses, little lies from the government and then you get turned into like that hellscape. And nobody's saying anything. How do you think that we as a society get where we all just turn into sheep, Erica. Maybe it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, where it's a lot of the time, like what you said, it's just human nature. Like when it comes down to it, if we're in a difficult situation, it's just easier to say what looks like a white lie.

So, I mean, maybe someone comes up to you and says, this is a spicy example, but I want you to refer to me by my preferred pronouns, even though they're clearly not of that sex. it's easier not to hurt their feelings. Maybe, I mean, we've gotten to the point where there's a fair amount of social intimidation that comes with that. So the easier thing to do is just to say sure. Yeah, because you'd rather be comfortable. Exactly.

Yeah. You'd rather be comfortable than pursue meaning. You'd rather them be comfortable. You'd rather not have conflict. You'd rather choose the expedient path, which is what we talked about in the last episode. Yes. So it starts with, you know, just one person saying, hey, coming by my preferred pronouns and my preferred new name,

and next thing you know, it becomes, well, now there's other person. And now there's a whole group of people. Yeah. And now society is rewarding that if you want to like pick a different, basically pretend that the realities of sex just aren't there, of male and female. I mean, it becomes just playing into a game.

But I had a question, Erica, another question. I think there's no such thing as a complete lie. All lies have some element of truth in them. what are we to make of that well i guess it depends on what you mean by that like what are some instances in this instance someone who if i said erika i'm a man now um okay that's not objectively true but there is some truth in the sense that like someone who's in that situation probably does have like some challenges some like discomfort in their identity you know there is some truth that like you actually should respect people and like you should be kind to people but it's mixing with that

lie of like you have to it's mixed in with this idea that like you have to acknowledge something that's not actually true it's mixed in with um this really skewed idea of sexuality and yeah the two sexes so yeah i think that's actually a really interesting point because it does it does get it sorry sorry no no i just want to add something quick because like as christians like we have to be kind to people like we are called to you know take care of the poor and the weak and the needy and i think that because of that we tend to have compassion in the wrong places hmm and by that I mean you know we accept things as true that are false because we think that it's better to be kind and compassionate and so with the pronoun thing right so like if it is good to be kind and if it's and if calling someone by their preferred name and pronouns is kind then we have to do that it's basically how this religiousism would go so how do we as Christians who are pursuing wellness spiritual wellness go about the idea that there is always going to be some truth and lies and how do we bring the truth and truth to the surface, you know, in a good way. Well, I think that truth and compassion should always go

together. So like you said, I mean, the truth is that people can often feel confused about, you know, what it means to be a man or a woman. And then especially like we see this when people hit puberty, that's a really uncomfortable time. And your body changes and you're like, what's going on? I don't feel comfortable with this. And it can be easy to say in that discomfort, well, this is actually dysphoria. And if I pump myself full of hormones, then that's going to fix it. everything. I think that a lot of people can come at this from the perspective of like, oh, you're a transgender degenerate. You're so bad. You know, like, okay, that's attacking the person and not respecting their human dignity and not seeing that there can be an actual reason or an

actual anguish that's behind it. Right. But if we're being really compassionate, I think saying, you're 12 years old and you think that pumping yourself full of hormones and doing these irreversible treatments on your body. Like, pretending that's going to be good for you in the long run, that's really toxic and ultimately evil. And so, but I think that approaching the situation and, you know, confronting someone and saying, you know, this vision that you have of reality and of yourself, like, I can't participate in that because it isn't true.

But then also treating the person with respect and love is the answer. Not that I know all the answers, if this chapter taught me anything. That was a good answer. Thank you. What do you think, Adriana? I would agree with you 100%. I think something I've really been thinking about a lot lately is that there is always a degree of truth even in a lot of lies. That doesn't mean that the lie is good at all, but there is, as long as something exists, there's something good in it. And you have to kind of get at that and kind of find the starting point of the lie, which is always in something good. And then try to help the person see where they went wrong in their reasoning. And that's true of every, that's true of every sin, not just lying. I mean, we're all trying to aim at something good in very perverted ways. And that's, that should really be our, we should emphasize that more in Christianity. So I think that we have this idea that like all of our desires are evil and that's also a lie. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. This was an idea of Jordan Peterson's that really influenced me in high school.

Because I, like coming into junior year, I identified a lot with the hypothetical woman that he's describing in the beginning, where somebody that just kind of is going with the current. Because I was in a very, very left-leaning environment. And I had conservative ideas, but I wasn't talking about them. Sure. Just because I was nervous about it. And I was like the 16-year-old kid. And I was like, well, what do I really know?

And then over the summer, I got exposed to Jordan Peterson. And he was saying all these ideas about the importance of just telling the truth and standing upright and make, putting your ideas forward. And he talks about how you can only find out if you're wrong, if you actually speak your ideas into being and say what you really truly believe. And then you can learn something from other people and you get to truth together by like put pitting your ideas against each other. Yeah. And I went into junior year with that in mind and I had like researched this stuff. And every time I heard something in class, like in history or religion, for example, that I disagreed with. I made it my mission to just put my hand up and say actually like

these are some facts that I've been exposed to that counter that. Like what would you say to that? and my hands would get shaky, like my face would get so red, and I was, like, so nervous at first, but after a while, you get used to it. And, like, I feel like I learned and I grew a lot from that experience and, like, these ideas. And it taught me things about the world with, like, engaging with other people and, like, being forced to research this stuff. And also about myself that, like, actually, yes, I can do this, even though it made me really, really nervous in the moment. And you can get better at telling the truth and presenting it to us. other people. And maybe that can have an effect. Who knows? Thank you so much for tuning into the

Healing Hour. Next week, we are going to be talking about chapter nine, which is rule nine in the 12 Rules for Life, which is, assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't. What? Oh, wait. That relates to it. I just thought I knew everything. It totally relates to what we were just talking about. So that's perfect. Exactly. Beautiful. Amazing. Wonderful. We will catch you guys next week. Same place, same time. Bye. Bye.