AC Harris⧸Murray⧸Peterson Discussion： Dublin (ZZI-FwSQRn8)

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Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming out. Well, good evening Dublin. As you’ve just heard, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris met for the first time in person two weeks ago now in Vancouver. They covered an enormous amount of ground and there is, I think, an enormous amount of ground still to cover. But I’ve asked them if they would start this evening in the following way. You’re all familiar with straw manning. Anyone who follows politics knows straw manning. But I’ve asked them to do the opposite tonight, to start by steel manning the arguments of each other. To present in the best possible, most fair, most rigorous light what they understand to be the other’s argument on all of the major issues we’re about to discuss. I’m going to ask Sam Harris to go first and we’re going to go from there. Sam. Thank you. So first, thank you all for coming. It’s really, it’s an immense privilege for us to do this. And I should say many of you have sacrificed a lot to come here. People have come from other countries. I’m told you all dealt with a ticketing system that seems like it was run from a cave in Afghanistan. So again, thank you all because it’s one thing for us to put this date on the calendar and say we’re going to speak here. It’s another for all of you to show up. And this is a privilege we certainly don’t take for granted. So it’s an immense one. So Jordan, and I should say that though much of our conversation together will often sound like we’re debating, none of us are in the habit of pulling our punches. There’s an immense amount of goodwill here. And it’s true on stage, it’s true off stage. And we’re all trying to refine our beliefs together in conversation. So none of us view this as a debate, though we might stridently disagree about one thing or another. So what Jordan, I think, disagrees with me about, I think he’s worried that I, we clearly have a common project. We are both concerned to understand how to live lives worth living. How can we do this individually? And how can we build societies that safeguard this project for millions of people attempting to do this in their diverse ways? And so many questions immediately come online when you try to do that. But what is the relationship between facts and values, for instance, or science and spiritual experience or ethical lives? And we have, as for the moment, differing answers to those questions. Jordan is concerned that I, in my allergy to religion, insufficiently value the power of stories in general and religious stories in particular. There’s something more than just nakedly engaging with facts as they are. We don’t simply come into contact with reality. We have to interpret reality. We interpret it through our senses and with our brains, obviously. But you need frameworks and, as Jordan would say, stories with which to do that. You don’t get facts in the raw. And Jordan believes that I, because my purpose so often is to counter what I view as the dangerous dogmas within religion, I ignore the power and even the necessity of certain kinds of stories and certain ways of thinking about the world and our situation in the world that not only bring many, many millions and even billions of people immense value, are in fact necessary for anyone, however rational, to build a society where all of our well-being can be conserved. So I think if in brief, that’s Jordan’s concern about me. So Sam is concerned, I would say, above all, with the minimization of unnecessary suffering, which seems to me to be a pretty good place to start. And he’s concerned that in order to do that, we need to develop an ethic. And that ethic should be grounded in that realization that unnecessary suffering is worth contending with and dealing with. And that if we make too much of the divide between facts and values, then we end up in a situation where our value structure has no super subordinate foundational grounding. And this is a big problem. So generally in the philosophical community, it’s accepted, although not universally, that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to derive values from facts. But the problem with that proposition is that you end up in a situation where either you lose all your values because they’re just arbitrary, or you have to ground them in something that isn’t, that’s revelatory. And Sam is concerned that one of the negative consequences of grounding your fundamental ethic in something that’s revealed is the emergent consequence of irrational fundamentalism. And so obviously that’s worth contending with. And so he’s taking issue with the philosophical idea that facts and values have to be separate and formulating the proposition that we can, in fact, ground a universal system of values in the facts and that we can mediate between the facts and the system of values using our facility for truth, but even more specifically, our facility for rationality. And so the problem I have with that, I guess if we can skip briefly to problems, is that it isn’t obvious to me how to produce an ethos with sufficient motivating power to ground that conception of the minimization of suffering, say, and the promotion of well-being in a way that grips people and unites the society. And so I think that’s part of what we’re discussing and trying to sort out with regards to the potential role of narrative and religious belief as an underpinning to this ethos. We seem to agree on the necessity for the universal ethos. We even seem to agree, I would say, on what that is, because certainly the minimization of suffering seems to me to be a very good practice. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And so I think that’s part of the problem. And I’m hoping that not that rationality is irrelevant or unimportant, because it clearly is neither of those, but maybe the devil’s in the details, and hopefully we can get down to the details tonight. And we’ve brought Douglas into the conversation. He’s here to serve as much more than a mere moderator. And partly we’ve determined that, as Sam alluded to, that what we’re actually trying to figure out is what are the minimal necessary preconditions for the construction of engaged, productive individuals with meaningful, responsible lives in a society that’s stable enough to sustain itself and dynamic enough to change? What are the minimal preconditions for that? What are the… And how do we ground those presuppositions, those preconditions? And what price do we pay for having them? Because you never get something without a cost. And we thought that Douglas would be a very interesting addition to this conversation, because, of course, he’s concentrated on such things as borders. And when you set up preconditions for social order, you also automatically produce such things as hierarchies and borders, and they don’t come without a cost. And so we hope to expand the conversation to include a discussion of those issues as well. Yeah. But before Douglas chimes in, I just want to reiterate the fact that he has not been cast here as our moderator, though if Jordan and I run off the rails, I expect Douglas to put us back on in the King’s English. I’m not moderate enough to be a moderator. No. But you’re more moderate than either of us are. But so I want you to reset the part of your brain that is poised to begrudge the moderator taking up too much time, because every moderator has felt that, and Brett Weinstein was brilliantly aloof and uninvolved in much of our exchange together. But Douglas really is a third participant here, and he stands between Jordan and I on some issues in an interesting way. So we have a three-way conversation here where none of us is really sitting in the same spot. Can I make a quick observation about some of the progress that you’ve already made in Vancouver, some of the progress I hope we can make tonight? It seems to be… I see one thing that hampers it, and let me go straight to it with Sam, which is I discovered a terrific phrase the other day that our mutual friend Eric Weinstein came up with. We were talking about the manner in which you can discuss within the sciences certain scientific problems. And he said, look, if you’ve got a scientist who you know is also basically a very literalist Christian, you will listen to their argument a whole long part of the way, and there’s somewhere at the end of it you know you’re going to be worried about it. And he came up with this phrase, I love this phrase, he says, Jesus smuggling. Right. Jesus smuggling is you’re going to follow all the way, yes, yes, and then the worry is that when you get to the bit that you’re not so good on, that’s when they’re going to smuggle in Jesus. My suspicion is that you have a reservation about some of what Jordan is saying on substructures, on stories, and much more, because you’re worried that at some point, either on this stage or off it, at some point when you’re not looking… No, no, or when I am looking. He’s going to Jesus smuggle you. Right. I was thinking maybe I’d just carry him in on a cross. Well, that is an all too apt analogy, because it is what worries me, but it’s more subtle than that, because it’s not… To think that you’re consciously doing it is a different claim. I don’t think there’s anything insincere about your argument for the importance of religion, but it’s also possible… We’ve all met the people who we believe are making insincere arguments, and they’re consciously putting the rabbit in the hat and then pretending to be surprised when it pops out. The analogy to magic is actually interesting here, because we at Over Dinner were talking about the difference between real and fake art, and we were talking about this paradox that art seems to be incredibly valuable, and yet the value isn’t located in the object itself, or can’t be obviously located there, because a forgery that is materially the exact copy of some masterpiece is essentially worthless, and the real masterpiece, even if it suffered some damage, would be incredibly valuable. So where is the value to be located? What worries me about your enterprise, Jordan, and the way in which you seem to be linking our rational project and our scientific project with religion is right here. There’s a difference between… And magic is a decent analogy. There’s a difference between… Paradoxically, real magic is fake magic, and fake magic is real magic. The only real magic in the world produced by magicians is the fake magic, where the magician, someone like Darren Brown, will tell you, actually, no, I can’t read minds, and I did put the rabbit in the hat, and this is fake, but the surprise is that even knowing it’s fake, you can’t understand how this effect is being achieved, whereas the fake magicians are the ones who are pretending to be real, who are hiding, who are not acknowledging the mechanics, the real mechanics, behind what is, in fact, effective, the illusion that the rabbit pops out of the hat. And what I worry with some of your… The way in which you discuss the power of story, the power of metaphor, and the religious anchoring there, is that the leverage and the utility can be had even while acknowledging the real mechanics of it, the fakeness of the magic, right? And you seem to suspect that it can’t, that it takes all of the wind out of the sails. I’m not so sure what if it’s fake and what if it isn’t. So, I would say that I do consciously participate in the process that you described. But you see, I would also make the case, and this is certainly one of the things that we’ve been discussing, that you do it unconsciously. And let me make the case for that for a minute, because I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’d like to see your response. I really read the moral landscape a lot, and I thought about it a lot. And so, this is what it looks like to me. So, you make the proposition that we have to breach the gap between facts and values, because otherwise our values are left hanging, unmoored, and that certainly brings about the danger of nihilism, but also a potential danger of swing to totalitarianism, something we agree about. I truly do believe that. And then you perform an operation, a conceptual operation, and you say, surely we can all agree that. And then you outline a story about this woman who lives in this horrible country, who’s basically just being starved and disease-ridden and tortured her whole life, and having just a hell of a time of it, to put it in a phrase. And then you say, well, surely we can all agree that that’s not good. And then you contrast that with, at least in principle, the sort of life that we would all like to have, if we could choose the life that we have. And then you say, well, we could start with the proposition that we should move away from this terrible hellish circumstance, and we should move towards this more ideal perspective. And you say, if we could only agree on that, then. And so, so far so good. But there’s a couple of things that go along with that that are quite interesting. And so the first is that actually what you’re claiming is that the highest moral good isn’t existing in that better space. The highest moral good is acting in the manner that moves us from the hellish domain to the desirable domain. It seems to me to be implicit in your argument. So there’s a pattern of behavior that constitutes the ethic. Well, I would say that existing in that better space is good enough as well. I mean, there’s the question of what it takes to move from where you are to someplace better. And then there’s just the someplace that’s better. Yes, there’s both of those. Well, but perhaps we could say, look, what’s the ultimate hell? It might be existing in the hell that you described, but it also might be… This is something worse, I think. I think that participating in the process that brings about that hell is actually a hell that’s even deeper than the hell. So it’s an analogous argument. There’s the state of being in a good state, but there’s also the state of being that brings you to that good state. And then there’s the state of being that’s a terrible state and the process that brings you to that terrible state. And one of the things that I’ve learned from the archetypal and religious texts that I’ve studied, as well as the philosophical texts, is that the process that transforms society into something approximating hell is a lower hell. Let me just close the loop on that, because I’m pretty sure I disagree. You can imagine two counterexamples. One is you can imagine a sadistic being, you might even call him God, who would create a circumstance of hell and populate it with innocent souls. Now, presumably, that action need not be attended by a lot of suffering. Or you could imagine some… No, but it’s still wrong. It’s still wrong. It’s still wrong. No, you could even imagine someone who enjoys generating hell. Exactly. But that would even be more wrong than not enjoying it. Right. Okay, so we want to separate out two things. We want to separate out the states of being and the process that brings them into being. And I do believe you do that in your work, because basically what you suggest is that the appropriate way to act ethically is to act in a manner that moves us away from hell and moves us towards a desirable state. Now, the thing is that as far as I’m concerned, there’s a couple of things about that. The first thing is that I wouldn’t say that that mode of acting is a fact. I would say it’s a personality. And that what you’re suggesting is that people embody the personality that moves society away from hell towards heaven, for lack of a better term. And the reason I make that argument is because I think that you recapitulate the essential Christian message precisely by doing that. Because symbolically speaking, at least as far as I can understand, stripped of its religious, of its metaphysical context, let’s say, the purpose of positing the vision of the ideal human being, which independent of the metaphysical context, it’s certainly what the symbol of Christ represents, is the mode of being that moves us most effectively from something approximating hell to something approximating heaven. And then part of that, part of that message is, and this is also something that’s dead along the lines of what you’re arguing, is that the best way to embody that is actually to live in truth. So because I would say that the fundamental Christian ethic, metaphysics accepted, once again, is to act in love, which is to assume that being is acceptable and can be perfected, and to pursue that with truth, and that you should embody that. And then I would say that the purpose of the representation, we could call them metafictions or archetypal representations, is to show that in embodied format so that it can be imitated, rather than to transform it into something that’s diluted in some sense to an abstract rationality. Because I don’t think the abstract rationality in itself has enough flesh on it, so to speak, which is partly why in the Christian ethic there’s an emphasis that the word, which is something roughly akin to rationality, has to be made flesh. It has to be enacted. But is the flesh made of dogmatism and superstition and otherworldliness? Is that part of what gives it its shape and necessity? I think traditionally, historically, it has been, and that’s been the problem with religion. If you denuded it of everything that is unjustifiable in the light of 21st century science and rationality, I think what you have to get down to is something quite a bit more universal and less provincial than any specific religion, much less Christianity per se. Well, it’s interesting, too, that one of the points that you do make is that you do appeal to or assume the existence of a transcendental internal ethic, something like that, which I would say, by the way, since we’re going down this direction, seems to me to be something very akin to the idea of the Holy Spirit, which is something like the internal representation of a transcendent universal ethic. Remember, I’m trying to strip these concepts of their metaphysical substrate. I’m not making a case at the moment for the existence of the great man in the sky. We can get to that later. I’m saying that what seems to be the case is that we have underneath our cognitive architecture and our social architecture a layer of symbolic and dramatic and narrative representation that instantiates the same concepts, but in a multi-dimensional context. One of the things we talked about in Vancouver, for example, is that the religious enterprise doesn’t only emphasize rationality. It brings music into the play, and it brings art into the play, and it brings drama, and it brings literature, and it brings architecture, and it brings the organizing of cities around a central space. It’s pushing itself, it’s manifesting itself across multiple dimensions of human existence simultaneously. To me, that gives it a richness that cannot be diluted without loss, and also a motive power that a pure appeal to rationality, I don’t think, can manage. See, one of the things, and this is maybe a good place for Douglas to leap in, see, one of the things that Douglas, who’s claimed upon multiple occasions to be an atheist, and I don’t know how he’s feeling about that at the present time, but it doesn’t matter. One of the things Douglas has pointed out was that there are things that we’ve done in free countries, let’s say, broadly speaking, in the West, that are worth protecting, and that in order to protect them in the longest sense, it’s conceivable that we need a cognitive structure, something like that, that can act as a bulwark against those forces that would seek to undermine and destroy it. And Douglas has been driven, I would say, to some degree, to hypothesize that Christianity, for all its faults, or we could say Judeo-Christianity, to broaden it, for all its faults, might provide something approximating that bulwark if we could only figure out how to utilize it properly. So, yes. I mean, one of my problems on this is that it seems that we are where we are with belief, whether we wish it to be or not. We cannot believe as our predecessors believed, even if we wanted to. We know too much more now, and it puts us in this very difficult position. But to denude ourselves of the entire story seems to me to be a fool’s errand, for a set of reasons. One of which is that from a lot of travel, a lot of speaking to people from all around the world, it doesn’t seem at all obvious to me that what we have in countries like this one is the default position of human beings. In fact, it strikes me as being very rare. Order, even. Political order. Political liberalism. Political freedom. Very, very unusual things. And if you like the things that help to get you there, with all of the caveats, with all of the caveats we could throw in all evening, and it’s not the only thing that got us there, obviously, but that if you like, broadly speaking, where we are, you’ve got to be very suspicious at the very least of saying the whole story is no good. We don’t need the story. We can move on. I quote quite often the radical theologian Don Cupid, who was often described as an atheist priest. And Cupid says somewhere in a recent book, he said, you know, we can’t help it. He said, for instance, the dreams we dream are still Christian dreams, whether we like that fact or not. And without being able to believe myself, certainly not being able to be a literal believer, I worry. Yeah, I worry about what happens when the square is denuded completely. And that’s why this discussion tonight, and you two in particular, are right on the cusp of this, because this is where I think a lot of us are. Even if we really wanted to believe, we basically can’t. And by the way, very quickly, that’s why I think there’s an additional just to refine my previous point to you, Sam. That’s why there’s this additional thing. I think there is a fear which you may have, which I also have, which is if there’s a risk that even what I’ve just said, never mind what Jordan has also said, there’s a risk I think some people feel that you’re going to soften up the land somehow. And that even if neither Jordan nor I are going to suddenly start Jesus smuggling, we might create the conditions that make it easier for someone else to do that. Yeah. Is that a fair? Yeah, and it is. No photos. This is very Christian of you. So thank you. Let me see if I can sharpen up what my concern actually is here, because it’s not even true to say that I think you need to get rid of the Jesus story or even or even not. I don’t even think there’s something problematic with orienting your life around the Jesus story. I think that that can be reclaimed. But for instance, I was walking yesterday in this fine city of yours and saw someone on the sidewalk giving tarot readings to people. He had a tarot deck spread out. He had a few cards spread out and he was soliciting people. And I’m sorry to say I didn’t sit for a reading. But, you know, tarot cards, if you’re familiar with them, are the quintessential artifact of New Age woo. Right. I mean, these are not thought of as legitimate tools of divination, except by people who think that they’re legitimate tools of divination. And yet a tarot reading can be truly powerful. Right. I mean, this is built on something. Right. This is not just a massive example of self deception on the part of people reading and people getting their cards read. These cards can seem prescient. I could give you all a reading right now. And 95 percent of you would find what I would what the cards would say to be relevant to your lives. I mean, I could do it with an imaginary deck. I don’t even an invisible imaginary deck. I don’t know anything about tarot cards, but I’m going to turn over two cards now. One is the sun and the other is the fallen man. Now, I know so little about tarot that I’m not even sure the fallen man is a tarot card. I think it was the hanged man. Okay. So I’ve got these two cards and, you know, the sun is clearly the representation of wisdom. And the hanged man is the is the representation of lost opportunity. And I can tell you with some degree of certainty that all of you are at a crossroads in your life. All right. Where you have you you have good reason to believe that you’re not making the most of your opportunities. Right. Now, I could go on like this for an hour. Right. And pretend all the while that it has something to do with the cards actually being working in concert with the dynamics of the cosmos, such that these cards that I turn over, were they real, would be the ones that of necessity were revealing something about your mind in this moment. And obviously, people think in these terms about astrology and sympathetic magic and all the rest. And religion is built upon this kind of superstition. There’s a way of understanding the utility of using a device like this and the real effect it has on you. I mean, if I turn over the cards and ask you to look at your life in this moment as though for the first time through this lens, considering in this case lost opportunities. Right. Of course, it’s going to be valid. That doesn’t make it could be an incredibly useful thing to do. The met my main concern is that at no point do you have to lie to yourself about your state of knowledge about the mechanism. Right. You don’t have to believe tarot cards really, really. There’s deeper. There’s deeper mechanisms that work with someone who’s actually good at that. And so I agree with what you’ve said, but they need not be supernatural. No, I don’t think they are supernatural. In fact, I think what happens when you use a projective technique like that, because that’s essentially what it is. If I’m good at interpersonal attunement and I’m quite intuitive, what I’m going to do this and everyone does this in the course of a dialogue that’s actually working well. I’m going to flip over the cards and I’m going to start with generic archetypal statements that are that are true in some sense for everyone. But then I’m going to watch you both consciously and implicitly unconsciously with all of my social intelligence. And I’m going to see through very, very subtle signs on your part when you respond positively to what I’m saying and when you respond negatively. And I’m going to continue down the lines that you established by your positive responses. That’s what Sharon Brown does. He’s a mental. Right. Well, it’s exactly what happens when children are interviewed, for example, by people who lead them as witnesses. Right. The children infer from the emotional expressions of the person who’s interrogating them what it is that they actually want to hear. And so they’ll even work with that horse. Clever Hans. Exactly. Right. That’s right. Exactly. Even horses can do this. So tarot card readers can definitely do this. So the mechanisms behind something like that, even if it appears entirely superstitious on the surface, are often deeper than is revealed at first approximation. So I wanted to talk a little bit, if you don’t mind for a minute, about rationality, because the. We’ve already agreed, I think, and definitely stop me if I’m wrong, that there has to be an intermediary mechanism between the world of facts and the world of values. And well, since we’ve talked, I’ve been reading a variety of commentaries on Immanuel Kant. Mostly these have been written by Roger Scruton, by the way. And this is actually the issue that Kant, what obsessed about for most of his philosophical life. And what he concluded was that empiricism can’t be right and rationality can’t be right as philosophical disciplines, because you need an intermediary structure and that we have an inbuilt intermediary structure. And that structure is what mediates between the thing in itself, the world of facts, let’s say, and the outputs, the values. So then I was thinking, the truth is, we don’t quite agree on this. I mean, in my summary of your view of me, I would have agreed with that. But for me, it’s just facts all the way down. OK, OK, great. You’re describing more facts. Glad to hear it. Why do you need a brain then? Well, the brain is yet another part of reality. I mean, what I mean by a fact is anything that is there. What does the brain do? It has to do something because otherwise you don’t need it. Well, it does a lot. But the the. I mean, so you’re concerned to jump to the where I think we’re going in this conversation is how is it that values can be another order of fact? That seems problematic to you. It seems problematic to David Hume. Well, it’s problematic for me for a technical reason, which is that in order to act and we see if we agree on this. In order to perceive and to act, which I believe are both acts of value to perceive as an active value, because you have to look at something instead of a bunch of other things. So you have you elevate the thing that you’re perceiving to the position of highest value by perceiving it, by deciding to perceive it. So it’s an active. I just that gets translated in my brain into just more facts. You’re just giving me the facts of human perception. That’s fine. That’s no problem. I’m perfectly happy about that. And then in order to act, you have to select the target of action from among an infinite number near infinite number close enough of possible mechanisms of action. And so what a biological organism does is take the facts and translate them into perception and action. And the only organisms that do that with one to one mapping are organisms that are composed of sensory motor cells like sponges, marine sponges, which are composed of sensory motor cells. They don’t have an intermediary nervous system. So what they do is they sit in the water and they make a sponge. They’re so simple that if you grind a sponge through a sieve and in salt water, it’ll reorganize itself into the sponge. So that’s quite cool. The sponge sits in the water. Don’t do that at home. And what it does and what it does is there’s waves on it. And so those are patterns. And then the sponge opens and closes pores on its surface in response to those patterns. So it maps the pattern of the waves right onto its behavior with no intermediary of a nervous system. But it can only map waves. That’s all it can do. And it can only open and close pores. That’s it. So it does one to one fact to value mapping. Now, what happens is that as the complexity of a biological organism increases, two things happen. The first thing that happens is that the sensory and motor cells differentiate. So now the organism has sensory cells and motor cells. So senses to detect and senses to, sorry, cells to detect and cells to act. OK, so then it can do, it can detect more patterns because it’s more sophisticated at the sensory perspective. And it can do more things because it has specialized motor systems. But then what happens is that as it gets even more complex, then it puts an intermediary structure of nervous tissue in there. And that structure increases in the number of layers of neurons. And what that means is that as as that happens and as the sensory cells become more specialized and as the motor output cells become more specialized, many more patterns can be detected. Those are roughly equivalent to facts. And many more motor outputs can be manifested. But a tremendous number of calculations have to has to occur in that intermediary nervous tissue. And that’s the structure that I’m talking about. That structure exists and it translates the patterns into motor output. And it doesn’t do it on a one to one basis because there are more patterns, more facts than there are motor outputs. So what has to happen is this tremendous plethora of facts that surrounds us has to be filtered to the point where you pick a single action because you can’t act otherwise. And so the mechanism that reduces the number of facts to the selected action is the mechanism that mediates between facts and values. And it’s not simply in and of itself. It’s a fact that that exists. But it isn’t a simple that what it does isn’t a simple fact. You can’t you can’t explain it. You can’t understand it. Why not? Why not? For the same reason that you can’t look for the same reason for the same reason that you don’t know what a neural network is doing like you can train a neural network. There’s a distinction between facts and facts that we know. Right. There is whatever it is the case. Right. And then there’s our understanding of it and our misunderstanding of it. So there are many things that we think we know that we’re wrong about. There are many things that we are aware we’re ignorant of. And there’s this there’s this larger always this larger space of reality that we’re struggling to engage with. And it may in fact be the case that in evolutionary terms we know it’s the case that we’re we have not evolved to understand reality at large perfectly. That’s not the sort of monkeys we are. Right. And you could even argue that one one cognitive scientist who some of you may have heard of Donald Hoffman. Is arguing now very colorfully that human consciousness or the human mind is is actually evolved to get things wrong in a fairly specific ways so that so as to maximize survival. And that was the argument I made in our first discussion. No. But but but here was not quite because there’s still this still preserves the difference between getting things right and getting things wrong. His argument is that getting things truly right. Having a nervous system and a cognitive architecture that could really understand reality quote reality as it is would be maladaptive. And he has some he has some mathematical demonstration of this that that that the the true the quote true representations of reality are categorically maladaptive. And you had that there’s a certain kind of error that is I’m not sure I buy this argument. But the fact that you can make this argument the fact that you can differentiate the adaptively useful misunderstandings versus a true understanding that’s maladaptive. The fact that we can even talk about that demonstrates to me that we have this larger picture of what is in fact true whether we know it or not. And this is what this is what religion gets so catastrophically wrong. Religion gives you some other mechanism whereby whereby to orient yourself in this case revelation. Religious does religion does provide those those functional simplifications. That’s actually a simpler that’s their simplifications appropriate to the Iron Age. Some of them are some of them are for sure. And that’s why we have to have this discussion because because mere mere revelation and mere tradition is insufficient. And I truly believe that we can agree on that. But back to the back to the biological argument. So because I thought that tonight I would make a very strict biological argument is that. So now the question is now. So now you’ve got your sensory systems that are detecting the world of facts and you have your motor output system which is a very narrow channel because you can only do one thing at a time. And that’s one of the things about consciousness that’s quite strange. It’s a very very narrow channel. So you have to take this unbelievably complex world and you have to channel it into this very narrow channel. And you don’t do that by being wrong about the world. But you do do that by ignoring a lot of the world and by using representations that are no more complicated than they have to be in order to attain the task at hand. It’s like you’re losing using low resolution representations of the world. They’re not inaccurate because a low resolution representation of the world isn’t inaccurate any more than a low resolution photo is. But there are no higher resolution than they need to be in order for you to undertake the task at hand. And if you undertake the task at hand and that goes successfully. Then what you’ve done and this is basically the essence of American pragmatism. What you’ve done is validated the you validated the validity of your simplifications. So if the tool you have in hand is good if the axe you have in hand is sharp enough to chop down the tree then it’s a good enough axe. And that’s part of the way that we define truth pragmatically in the absence of infinite knowledge about everything. Okay, so now you build up this nervous system between the world of facts and the world of values and it and it narrows the world of facts. And the question then is how do you generate the mechanism that does that narrowing? And this is what’s useful. That’s not quite how the cake is layered. What? Because the facts are up here too. Right? For me to even notice that you’re a person. Right? Or to attribute beliefs to you or to have a sense of being in relationship at all. This is one of those higher order interpretive acts based on a many layered nervous system. Yes, it’s not only bottom up. Yeah. But yes, bottom up and it’s top down. Yes. And and but fat but facts are also on the top. Right? It’s not that we have facts here and values here. It’s it’s well, I think what I’m trying to do. You can’t get to a fact. But through going through a process like I’m trying to do, I think maybe it’s one way of thinking about it is that you you are using your policy. That we can use rationality as a mechanism for mediating between facts and values. I believe because otherwise there’s no use for rationality. We can just have the facts. But it’s even simpler than that. It’s just that for me and I think for everyone, if they will only agree to use language this way for me, values are simply facts about the experience of conscious creatures. Good and bad experiences give us our values. Yeah, but they’re not simple. That’s the problem. But neither are the goods in the bad summer. Very simple. You know, having your hand put on a hot stove is incredibly simple and not if it’ll save your child if you do it. Well, but again, the unpleasantness of it. Right. So it’s that’s an orthogonal. No, it’s not. No, it’s not. If you look at the way the reward and punishment systems work in the brain, you can easily train an animal using reward to wag its tail. If it’s being shocked electrically, you can do that and you can wire it very low to do that. There’s a range of unpleasant experiences we can have where we can construe them as pleasant or necessary. Right. And that’s a kind of a higher level frame around it. That’s the top down issue. But I’m talking about the worst possible sensory experience that all of us will agree is unpleasant. Right. That doesn’t require a story for us to feel aversion to. And there’s there are many things like that in life that are just just rudimentary. We’re just we are we are organized in such a way that if you put us into fire, we don’t like it. So are you are you claiming then like this is another problem. This is where I think that the argument that you make, although accurate in its rudiments, let’s say, is insufficiently high resolution because now it sounds to me like you’re including the domain of qualia unquestioningly in the domain of facts. Now you can do that. And but we need to know if that’s what you’re doing. Like what are these facts you’re talking about? Are they mere manifestations of the objective world or do they shade into the subject? There are there are objective facts about subjective experience. So I can make I can make true or false claims about your subjectivity. And you can make you can make those about your own subjectivity. You can be wrong about your own subjectivity. We’re not subjectively incorrigible. And I might have said this last time in Vancouver. I mean, the example I often use here is to speculate about what JFK was thinking. The moment he got shot is not a a completely vacuous exercise. There are literally an infinite number of things we know he wasn’t thinking. Right. So we can make claims about his conscious mind at that moment in history, which are as scientific even though the data are unavailable. I mean, many people get confused between having answers in practice and there being answers in principle. I mean, there are many trivial fact based claims we could make about reality where we can’t get the data, but we know the data are there. So, you know, do you have an even or odd number of hairs on your body at this moment? You know, we we don’t want to think about what it would take to ascertain that fact. Right. But there is a fact of the matter. Right. And and so it is with anything. So what does somebody what does a person weigh? There’s many, many facts are blurry because you’re going to weigh weigh him down to the one hundredth decimal place. No. So it’s like at a certain point you’re going to be rounding and someone’s weight at that point is changing every microsecond because they’re exchanging atoms with the air. So there’s so there are facts that can be loosely defined. This is still this is true of our subjective lives, too. So if it is a fact about you that when you when you were praying to Jesus, you felt an upwelling of rapture. Right. Subjectively, that can be an absolutely true thing to say about you. We can we can pair that subject of experience with an understanding of the neurophysiological basis for it. You can think about it in terms of a larger story about your life. But all of this can be translated into a fact based discussion about what’s happening for you. And my only claim is that the value part and hence the ethics part relates to the extremes of positive and negative experience that people have in their lives. I’m not. First of all, I wouldn’t dispute. I don’t want to dispute the fact that there are stable quality of pain and pleasure, for example, and also that there are fundamental motivational systems that structure our perception. So as the nervous system increases in complexity, these underlying nervous system subsections that produce these rather stable qualia evolve hunger, thirst, defensive aggression, sexuality, all these subsystems that that label experience with certain somewhat inviolable labels. I understand that happens. But the point that I’m trying to make here is, I think, to try to increase the what would you call the breadth of the conversation about how facts get translated into into values, because it seems to me the other thing that your account doesn’t take proper. And this is what surprised me so much about your thinking when I first encountered it. See, I think the manner in which facts are translated into values is something that actually evolved and it evolved over three and a half billion years, the three and a half billion years of life. And it built the nervous system from the bottom up and it built this reducing mechanism that takes the infinite number of facts and translates them into a single value per action. And it does that in layers. And so there is a relationship between the world of facts and the world of values. And there has to be. But it isn’t derivable one to one in the confines of your single existence through pure rationality. It’s way more complicated than that. Well, there’s more to it than rationality. Yes. Again, it’s not rationality that causes you to remove your hand from a hot stove. And it’s not rationality that causes you to like the experience of love and bliss and rapture and creativity over or more than pointless misery and despair. Right. So things other than rationality are clearly necessary. Absolutely. Absolutely. But the question is, do we ever have to be irrational to get the good things in life? And I would argue that the answer to that is clearly no. There’s nothing irrational about loving your wife or your best friend or yourself or even a stranger. If what you mean by love there is genuinely wanting happiness for that person, genuinely taking pleasure in their company, genuinely wanting to find a way of being where you’re no longer in a zero sum condition with a stranger or with a partner, but you’re collaborating together to have better lives. It seems to me that you’re not. So rationality moves through that situation continuously because rationality is the only way that you and I can get our representations of the world to cohere. When I say, OK, there’s a lion behind that rock. Don’t go over there. That only makes sense to you if you’re playing this rationality game the way I’m playing it. If I mean something else by lion or I mean something else by don’t go over there, you’re confused and very likely dead or not. Well, sorry, if we’re trying to establish the proposition that rationality is the mechanism by which we make our worldviews cohere, I would agree with that. But in part, we also make them cohere because we’re actually biologically structured the same way. And so there’s a proclivity for them to go here to begin with. But we iron out our differences through the exercise. I wouldn’t call it rationality. I would call it logos because I think it’s a more it’s a it’s a broader and that this is where he’s smuggling it. Well, yeah, yeah, I’m not unconscious of that. Let’s say so. I think I get this a point of order here. I want to I’m I’m disconcerted by Douglas’s silence. I want to pivot because I know I know how good he is when he actually speaks. So I want to pivot to another subject because we can return to this at some point. We need to do this before you pivot. Yeah, go for it. I mean, having said to you what I think your concern is with Jordan, I mean, it strikes me that Jordan’s concern and I share this just as I share some of your concern expressed at the outset. And Jordan’s fundamental concern, it seems to me, is a one I fundamentally share, which is rationalism isn’t enough. And it’s or let me put it another way. But then let me get two of you. Can you both show me where it where it’s obviously insufficient like music? But but there’s nothing. But again, so to say that it’s not to say that there’s more to life than being rational is not to say and perhaps never to say you need to run against rationality. You need to be irrational in order to get something good. Let me express it a different way. We haven’t tried the purely rational approach yet. We haven’t tried it for very long. Well, many of many of us have been trying for a couple of centuries, at least. Which is a blip. Yeah, I mean, the tiniest dot at the end of human evolution. So I think that a concern which Jordan has and certainly concern I have is if we try this, we can think of all sorts of ways in which you can go wrong. If you take away all that supporting structure, can think of any number of ways in which you can go wrong. And that I suppose that that’s the root of the concern about where you might be taking us. Or to put it another way, if we enter the world that you would suggest, not everyone may necessarily come out as Sam Harris. Well, give me one way where you think it can go wrong. And again, we can’t forget your caveat, which you started with. What if you’re not very smart? Well, what was it? I don’t mean that person. So then you’re basically saying that the stupid people need their myths. You know, we smart people on stage don’t need them. Right. Well, I am. I actually am. Look, I actually am saying that to some degree. Look, look, if you’re if you’re if you’re not exceptionally cognitively astute, you should be traditional and conservative. Because if you are, if you can’t think well, you’re going to think badly. And if you think badly, you’re going to fall into trouble. And so it is definitely the case. And this has been what would you call a cliche of political belief for a long time. If you’re not very smart, it’s better to be conservative. Because then you do what everyone else does. And generally speaking, doing what everyone else does is the path of least error moving forward. Now, that doesn’t mean that rationality is unnecessary. What does it mean that all conservatives are stupid? It doesn’t mean that either. Right. It doesn’t mean that either. Very important caveat. But all all conservative structures are not the same either. And that we have many warring and incompatible versions of being conservative. True, true. And this is exactly this is where rationality actually does play its role. Although I don’t think it’s best conceptualized as rationality precisely. It’s it’s definitely the case that we it’s to take Douglas’s point that we need to be bound by our traditions. But we need to be judicious in their re-representation and update. And we have to do both. This is what the dialogue on religion. This is what Schopenhauer says. He says he describes the tragedy of the clergy. He pretty much he pretty much says, look, if they don’t believe it, they recognize it’s a very useful metaphor. But they don’t need to believe it. It’s they tell it. And he says the tragedy of the clergy is they can never admit that what they’re saying is just a metaphor. Right. Right. Before or after he threw his housekeeper down the stairs. Look, we can all find flaws. We all have skeletons in our closet. But that but that yes, that there is a way in which religion is what he describes as philosophy for the masses. And that if you recognize that most people are not going to spend their lives studying philosophy, they’re not going to be reading about the differences between Leibniz and Kant. That religion has to do. I’m not saying that I agree with that particularly, but there’s a heck of an argument within there which a lot of people will be living their lives in. I don’t think it’s a good argument if you recall or I just just imagine what it’s like to be a child, especially from the perspective of being a parent. I mean, I have two young girls and they, you know, they’re very smart young girl. They’re smart. But, you know, one of them is four and a half years old and those almost nothing. Right. So she knows what I and my wife and our society tell her at some level. At what point is she going to think for herself about these fundamental questions? And I mean, she again, she’s currently spending half the day dressed up like Batgirl or Catwoman. Right. So if I told her that these superheroes were real, she would believe that for the longest time. And if she if we lived in a cult that thought they were real or a whole society that by dint of its geographic or linguistic isolation managed to maintain a conversation about, in this case, Batgirl and Catwoman, that they were real and that it was absolutely important to honor them and you’d burn in hell if you failed to do this. This would be we would be meeting fully grown adults who believe this sort of thing. But it seems to me, Sam, that you bring up the superhero thing quite a bit. So I think I’ll go after that directly. Then I want to. I love superheroes. So you make the case in a moral landscape that an ideal is real because the ideal that you define an ideal is real and the ideal is whatever maximizes well-being and gets us away from hell. You said not only is that real, you also say that’s the fundamental axiom. That’s the claim in the moral landscape. So you do make a claim that there is a real ideal. And I would say it will I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way. But there’s a real we are in a circumstance where things can matter. Right. Consciousness is the case is the condition in which things can matter, where there can be a range of experiences, some of which are very, very bad. If the word bad means anything, they’re bad. And some of which are very, very good. If the word good means anything. And we are navigating in that space. We can’t help but navigate or seek to navigate in that space. Absolutely. And religion is one form of conversation about that navigation problem. And I would argue a often diluted one. Jordan rolls his sleeves up. Bad girl. He means business now. Bad girl and catwoman are approximations to a higher ideal. That’s what they are. And and to attend this with a biblical idea, I’m I’m fairly sure from personal experience that a lot of parents are perfectly content with bringing their children up vaguely within the story they’ve inherited. And at some point, the children realize that the fairy doesn’t bring them money when their teeth fall out. And at some point, maybe around the same time or a bit later, they discover that Santa Claus doesn’t really come down the chimney. And at some point, they realize that actually the whole religious thing is a kind of metaphor, but it’s got them through the formative years in some way. Often with terrible damage along the way, I can see that. But also with something else. And I’m struck by the number of people. And this is why I share some of what I think is Jordan’s concern about the possibility of the world you’re envisaging, which is I can think of a lot of parents now in my country and other countries as well who I’m just very struck. They themselves a kind of baby boomer or 60s atheists, humanists, whatever. And I start to notice, for instance, that they’re enrolling their children in Christian schools and I say to them, why are you doing this? And they have fairly coherent arguments along the lines of what I’ve just had. Look, I don’t particularly believe this myself, but I think it’s a pretty good way to bring up the kids. It’s a structure of a kind. And I’m not sure I can find all sorts of flaws in that. But enough people are doing it that it’s something that needs to be addressed. I would say yes. It speaks to a real failure of imagination and effort in the secular community to produce truly non-embarrassing alternatives. Exactly. And this is across the board. This is not just school. This is how do you conduct a funeral? How do you get married? You know, all of the what rights of passage can you offer a 13 year old? What are you doing here? What are we doing here? Yeah, yeah. To have the first people in history to have absolutely no explanation for what we’re doing at all. Yeah. It’s a big moment. Yeah. Yes. And that’s the night. And that sharpens up my concern perfectly because to shrink back from that moment and resort to one of the pseudo stories of the past, I consider to be a failure of nerve, both intellectually and morally. Okay, so let’s go back to the superhero idea. One of the things you might notice about superheroes is that some of them are actually deities. Right? So in the Marvel pantheon, you have Thor, for example. And so there’s a very thin line between the idea of a superhero and the idea of a god, especially if you think about it in a polytheistic manner. So the modern superheroes and the Greek gods, for example, share a tremendous number of features in common. And so here’s something to think about. So there’s a reason that people admire superheroes, and it’s because they act out parts of the hero archetype. That’s the technical reason. They’re obviously acting something out because that’s how you can tell they’re superheroes. They share some set of characteristics across the set of superheroes that makes them superheroes. Now, the question might be, what is the essential element of being a superhero that makes you a superhero? And the answer, the way that that was solved historically is that as polytheistic societies developed, and that was usually a consequence of isolated tribes coming into contact with one another, they each had their separate deities. And then over the course of time, those deities warred in actual wars with people, but also conceptually. And out of that polytheistic framework was extracted something that was vaguely monotheistic, as all of those cultures came together to try to determine what their highest ideal should be. So that’s the God of gods. That’s a way of thinking about it. Or the King of kings. That’s another way of thinking about it. And that’s an implicit ideal. And you could make the case that there’s nothing more. Tell that to the Hindus. Tell that to the Hindus. We’ve got 1.2 billion people, or maybe it’s 1.4 now, who are operating in a religiously saturated system that does not conform to that ideal. There is no one on top of it all. Well, there’s still, there’s still associated. Arguably, there’s three on top of it all. Well, there’s still an attempt to generate that polytheistic, to integrate that polytheistic reality underneath a single rubric, or you have nothing but continual dissociation of the culture. And I’m not saying this is necessary. That’s a pretty good description of what’s going on in India at the moment. Well, I’m not saying that this is inevitable either. And there is a tension, the problem, this is Nietzsche’s observation, and Merchea Eliade as well, the problem with extracting out the highest God from the panoply of gods is the ideal becomes so abstract that it disappears. That’s the death of God. And Eliade has tracked that phenomenon over multiple cultures. It’s not something that’s unique to the West. So the danger of that abstraction is that it gets too abstract and disappears and leaves us in the situation that Douglas just pointed out. Can I throw us back to the key, the key issue of Elton John’s glass, which you came up with the other night? Because there’s something I wanted to add to that. If you could explain why I said Elton John’s glass just now. Oh, well, it came back to this question of what makes something valuable. And I used as an example in Vancouver, one of those nights, if I had a glass here, which I said was actually it was the glass that Elton John used the last time he played in this theater, suddenly it seems to be a more valuable glass. And then Jordan and I argued about what the status of that value was. I don’t know where you want to take this. Well, it’s just one thing in particular, which is that the whole issue of what it is you give value to. And let’s say that that glass was demonstrated for a time to having been drunk from by Elton John at his final concert, latest farewell tour, whatever. So that’s already a glass with some meaning. Let’s say that over the years, the whole attribution of that glass becomes debatable. Over a long period of time, a lot of things are going to have happened around it. And to stretch this to breaking point possibly, let’s say at some point people lose their lives over whether that is Elton John’s glass or not. Let’s say that people start to lose blood. Let’s not just say that. Let’s recognize that is the world we’re living in with respect to other religions. So the problem is that we end up when we’re talking about religion, when we’re talking, it’s the same thing when you’re talking about land. You’re not just talking about any inherent worth. You’re talking also about the worth of things people have given up for this. And so we end up giving the layers of things. No, it’s more than that. We inherit more and more layers of the meaning because other people before us have given that meaning to it. So that by the time you have this object, it’s an object of worth, even if it’s of no worth in itself at all, but because of the amount of worth that people before you have given to it. And that seems to some extent what we’re doing with the religion discussion. Yes. Yes. Well, so OK. So that’s extraordinarily productive, I think. So see, when you start with a hypothesis of facts, then you kind of have to define what a fact is. And so I think the simplest way of doing that to begin with is that there’s a set of objective facts. And that’s the facts about objective reality. You can think about that from a scientific perspective. And we’re going to we’re going to agree that that exists, although it’s very complicated and difficult to understand. That exists as one set of constraints on what we can do and what we can’t do. That’s the objective world. And then on top of that, and this is where things get very, very complicated. You have this layered system of meaning, which is partly a manifestation of these layers of the nervous system that I described, but also partly a manifestation of those layers of the nervous system operating in social space over vast periods of time. So that would be the sociological agreement. That’s all layered on top of the objective world. And it actually constitutes part of the lens through which you view the world. To the degree where you actually see the layering in the thing. So like when you go to a museum and you look at Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley’s guitar, you don’t look at the guitar and think that’s Elvis Presley’s guitar. That’s not how your brain works. You actually see Elvis Presley’s guitar. It’s an act of perception. So it becomes built right into your nervous system, even though the fact that that is Elvis Presley’s guitar and the reason that that’s valuable is because of a sociological agreement about what position Elvis Presley occupied in the dominance hierarchy that we’re all part of. And so what you see when you look at an artifact like that is you see a layer of dominance hierarchy overlaid on top of an objective reality. And that’s actually your phenomenal reality. Now, the thing that’s so interesting is that that layer of perception that’s mediating between the facts and you has a structure. And that’s the structure that I’ve been insisting is a narrative. And I think Sam thinks it’s a narrative, too, because his fundamental ethic is that you should act in a way which means to embody a mode of being, which means to be a personality that moves us from hell to something approximating heaven. OK, but what I’m back, Jordan, what I’m struggling to understand, what I don’t understand is how any of that is a counterpoint to my concern about religion. So because I agree with all that, I mean, there are some caveats I would issue. For instance, it’s quite possible to walk into a museum, be shown a guitar, not know it’s Elvis Presley’s guitar, and then be told it’s Elvis Presley’s guitar. And you can see in real time the change in significance. So you can see the layers of the perceptual, the meaning accrue. You might actually not even know who Elvis Presley is and not care. So there are many different things on the menu here as opposed to just beholding, awestruck Elvis Presley’s guitar. And the same is true of the Jesus story or anything else that people, you can find layers of engagement with it that may be more and less useful. My fundamental concern is that the way you are tending to dignify the religious subset of stories as being foundational, necessary, just we criticize at our peril, is giving people license to believe things that they clearly shouldn’t believe, things that are intrinsically divisive, intrinsically less than optimal as far as organizing an individual human life. We can do better than Christianity on almost every question, with the possible exception of building churches. Okay, so the first thing is that I deeply agree with you that that mechanism can go wrong. Okay, so you have the objective world and it’s one set of constraints and then you have this interpretive structure. And I’m not saying that that interpretive structure is infallible. It clearly isn’t and neither is the process that gives rise to it. You see this, for example, in conditions like manic depressive disorder with religious delusions or schizophrenia. You see what you see in those situations is a pathologization of that overlay of meaning. That can clearly happen. Okay, now the question is what do we do about that? How do we keep those perceptual structures, which are somewhat arbitrary, how do we keep them functional? And this is, I think, where your discussion of rationality is so important, particularly when you say rationality is what enables us to establish what we agree on in our shared reality. Okay, so imagine this. So part of the way you orient yourself in the world of facts, objective facts, is through your senses. So you basically have five dimensions of triangulation, so to speak, to help you determine what’s there in the objective world. And then you have this multi-layer structure that’s partly biological and partly sociocultural that enables you to distill that. But it can go astray partly because it ages and becomes archaic and demented for that matter, which is partly your objection to the fundamentalist types. This has been known for a very long time that this sort of thing happens. So what we do, the way we solve that, we have a solution to that. So partly the way we solve that is through articulated discourse, right? Because you have a way of looking at the world and I have a way of looking at the world and we have to occupy the same space. So you’re probably wrong about some things and I’m probably wrong about some things. And hopefully if we talk, we can sort out the differences and make things more stable. Right. And I would put rationality right in that place. That’s why rationality is primary. But the problem, fair enough, but there’s a problem with that too. And I think, see all the times we’ve talked so far, you’ve been, I would say, the avatar of a scientific viewpoint. And I’ve been cast, let’s say, as the avatar of a religious viewpoint. But I’ve actually thought this through scientifically a lot. And I can make a biological argument for all of this and a developmental argument. So it isn’t only rationality that does this. So this is the thing that was so cool about studying, for example, Jean Piaget. Because one of the things Piaget pointed out is that children engage in negotiation. They negotiate their reality just like adults do. But they don’t do it only through articulated speech and neither do adults. What children do is they get together and play. And this is why play is so important for children. That starts to happen when they’re about three years old. Because they can look outside their own idiosyncratic perspective at three. And they can start to take someone else’s viewpoint into consideration. Which is what you have to do if you’re going to play. And then what children do is they invent little fictional realities. That’s what they do when they’re pretending. And so they assign each other roles. And they assign a plot and a drama to the pretend play. And then they act it out. And in that action they bring themselves into harmonious union. Which is the act of generating a game that everyone wants to play. And Piaget’s observation was, and this is Nietzschean’s observation as well, that the morality that characterizes society isn’t rationality top down. Although it’s partly that. It’s also interactions that are, say, play-based and bottom-up. And that’s actually how it evolved to begin with. Because animals generate societies that are functional. But they don’t do it through rationality. They can’t because they don’t have rationality. They don’t have articulated speech. They have something like an embodied game. Now what happens, and this is a Nietzschean observation. He’s the first person I learned this from. Our morality emerged from the bottom-up through thousands, hundreds of thousands of years of shared games, let’s say. And the interweaving of those shared games into something approximating a morality that we could all live within peacefully. That happened bottom-up. And then what happened was because we didn’t know the mechanism behind that, because it’s instantiated in our nervous system invisibly, we watched ourselves act, which is what we do. And then we told stories about that, because that’s what we do when we watch ourselves act. And then we encapsulated the morality that evolved in the stories. And that’s the religious essence of the story. I’ve got ten seconds. So we have to pivot to Douglas for an important question. But I would just say in response to that, Jordan, I don’t disagree with much of consequence in that. My concern, however, is that there’s a reason why we differentiate childhood from adulthood. And all of us are stunted to some degree or another in a fairly perverse childhood. And the reason, what we confront now is a world largely populated by dangerous children, right, who are in their fifth and sixth decade of life. You mean run by. Populated and run by, yes. And if anything typifies the childhood of our species, in my view, it is religious orthodoxy. And insofar as we’re breaking free of the orthodoxy part and getting something that’s more scalable and can survive a more pluralistic and cosmopolitan world, it is because it is being winnowed at every point by rationality. And I think that at some point we could have a fully defensible, rational honoring of many of the things you think are essential, like the power of story or the power of ritual or the power of art that is focused on some sacred purpose. And the question is how to get there. Well, hopefully we have a point of order here. That’s one question. But I want to hand over to the audience for Q&A. And for a couple of minutes I’ve had a sign being waved at me saying Q&A. And we really should obey the sign. So I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to use your computer. We’re going to ask the audience first, I think. That was what we decided. And I guess you guys get to vote by noise. There’s an inflection point here. We can do one of two things. And I’ll let the first people yell and then the second people yell. But the question is we can either continue the discussion or we can stop and go to Q&A. So the first thing we’ll do is say, okay, how many of you would like us to stop and go to Q&A? Okay, second question. How many of you would like us to continue with the discussion? That’s a successful vote. I thought the first shout was good. I want to go, I’m going to seize the floor. I want to ask a question of both of you. It’s about the three of us, but I think it’s more about the two of you. Each of us, to one or another degree, has been described as a gateway drug to the alt-right. We’ve been attacked by people left of center as somehow inspiring or pandering to right of center and in many cases far right of center ideas and ethical and pseudo-ethical commitments. I’m wondering, yes, I’m wondering if we can steel man the concerns that people have with us for a few minutes before addressing them. How do you view this reaction to your work? Well, I’m happy to do that first. Can I just say before I do, I was going to say it if we were going to go to audience Q&A, I understand, I was reminded today that there’s still a blasphemy law in Ireland. Am I right on that? I await the police. I’m right, aren’t I? In which case, can I just say that I’m not going to be happy if we leave the stage tonight. You and I have not both committed blasphemy. And if Jordan would like to join in. I prefer to do that in private. We could make it a full house. I really do think we should be blasphemers. I think I must have done that already, but I’ll have to go to the tape on that. So, well, here’s the thing. We’ve all had similar-ish experiences on that, and there were a number of people among our friends and colleagues, perhaps you might say, who’ve had it as well. And I think what’s happening at the moment is that there’s a set of tripwires that have been put across the culture. And for a long time, if you went across these tripwires, you died, reputationally speaking. Because of the nature of the media, new media, among other things, that sudden death isn’t possible anymore. Or at least it’s not always possible. So, for instance, if the New York Times says that Jordan is a sort of leading member of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s not just that people don’t believe the New York Times anymore. It’s that they can go and find out for themselves that this is a lie. And that’s the fundamental difference, and it means that people are surviving the tripwire experience. But there’s a whole set of these tripwires, and I think they’ve been planted very strangely, among other things. I mean, the one I tripped on was the Islam one. I think to an extent it was the one you tripped on. Jordan, it was more to do with forms and pronouns, was the first one. The great thing about this, by the way, is that once you survive the first tripwire, in my case, I sort of merrily jump along in no man’s land, landing on IED after IED. And strangely, I’m still here. But you said I should steel man it. Here’s what I think is probably happening. There is a fear that in this realm of uncertain values, which we might concede at any rate that we’re in, there is only one thing we all agree on. The one thing we all agree on is we mustn’t become Nazis. Broadly speaking, that’s the basis of our ethics. It’s the only bit of history anyone knows, and they don’t even know it. They think they’re all over the Hitler thing. Haven’t got a clue, most of them. All they know is Hitler’s a bad person. This is why, by the way, anyone anyone doesn’t like in politics is Hitler. Like Joyce W. Bush, Hitler. If you had any sense of historical reference, you might say, Henry V. Domineering father whose shadow he had to step out of, for instance. But Henry V. Smith, who knows about that? So everything’s Hitler. So if we agree that the one thing we’re all meant to do is not become Nazis, you build these incredibly deep, big trenches around anything you think could be, as it were, something that would lead us back to that. The problem is that people who have done that trench building include people who are doing it for their own personal political gain. So they build a set of trenches around their political views, and they say, if you come near this, then you’ve trodden into that trench and you’re a Nazi. Some of it is for short-term convenience, and I have no doubt that some of it is sincere. But the amount of lying about it makes me doubt that last bit. And let me add one other thing to that. One of the books I recommend people read most to do with politics is a brilliant book by Paul Berman, who I think you know as well, called Power and the Idealists. It has, by the way, the worst subtitle of any book. It’s called Power and the Idealists, The Strange Passion of Joschka Fischer. Distinguished left-wing German politician, though he is, it doesn’t leap off the shelf. Anyhow, The Strange Passion of Joschka Fischer is an amazing book, which I wish was taught in schools, because he describes in this book how this group of Germans who grew up in the 1950s had one aim. The one aim was, we’re not going to become like our parents. Okay. They think it’s enough to orient their politics around. What happens? The Green Movement melds with a part of the German left. A whole set of things happen. They end up agreeing with the PLO and the hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s. And before you know it, one of Joschka Fischer’s housemates is on the plane as it’s on the tarmac, and he’s separating out the Jews and the non-Jews. We’ve done it again. The one thing we were meant not to become was the people standing on the ramp saying, that way, that way. And we did it. We went all the way around. So there’s something about this that I just wish was better known. But it’s not as damn easy as all that. Your enemies don’t come with jackboots and swastikas like this. It’s just not that easy. No, they live inside you. That’s really the case. So let me try the steel man approach. The first thing that people assume about me is that I’m no fan of the radical left. And that’s absolutely true. I am no fan of the radical left. And that’s primarily because, there’s a variety of reasons, but it’s primarily because I believe that the radical left errs in insisting at every possible opportunity that the proper defining characteristic of each individual is their group membership. I think that that’s… You do have a group membership. In fact, you have a whole plethora of them, which makes things quite complicated, as the intersectionalists have already figured out. But whenever someone brings a primary orientation to the world that is group-centered rather than individual-centered, I think they’ve already made a catastrophic mistake. And so I don’t approve of the collectivists. Now, I don’t approve of left-wing collectivists, and I don’t approve of right-wing collectivists. But the right-wing collectivists haven’t overrun the universities, and the left-wing collectivists have. So that’s a distinct difference. Now, the left-wing collectivists enjoy acquiring a certain linguistic hegemony, because they know that that’s part of the way they can win the battle, and that’s what they were trying to do when they passed compelled speech legislation in Canada, as far as I was concerned. So I made a video saying, I’m not going to abide by that, because I’m not using the reprehensible linguistic maneuvers of collectivists, who I detest. So now, when I did that, you see, it was a very strange thing for a Canadian to do, because Canadians don’t do that, partly because Canada works just fine. And so nobody comes up and says, waves the flag, saying, look, we’re wandering off a dangerous cliff here. And so then if someone does stand up and say that, then the first thing that all the other Canadians think and should think is that there’s something wrong with that person. And that would be me. So then the question would be, well, what variety of things could be wrong with Dr. Peterson? That’s a very long list, but the ones that might come… That’s actually a better subtitle than that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. A terrific title. So what happened was, I objected to the radical left, that was my perspective, but the people who objected to me or who were even critical of me or curious about me thought, okay, well, if Peterson isn’t part of the left, then where the hell is he? And the answer could be, well, anywhere on the political spectrum, including Nazi. And of course, that’s hypothetically true. And if I was a Nazi, then that would be really useful for all the radical leftists, because if you’re a Nazi, as Douglas has already pointed out, we’ve already decided that you’re a bad person. And if I was a bad person, then no one would have to listen to me. And so it was in the interests of the radicals whose positions I was disputing to cast me as a Nazi. But it was also a reasonable cognitive maneuver, because there was some possibility, although it’s infinitesimal, given the tiny proportion of actual Nazis in our society, that I would in fact be one and have gotten away with hiding that at two major universities for 25 years. And also, at that point, I had 250 hours of my lectures on YouTube, which was basically every word, in essence, that I ever uttered to a student since 1993. And a huge part of that actually consisted of very trenchant criticisms of Nazis. So it was difficult to pin that on me. But to give my critics credit, they had the reason for vilifying me. And the reason was, if you object, you might be a villain. Okay, so that’s Steel Man number one. I’m not at least the kind of villain they think I am, although I might be some other kind of villain altogether. So then the next Steel Man issue is, the left has a place. Okay, so why? Well, here’s why. In order to act properly in the world, you have to do things. Everyone agrees on that. And to do things, you have to do them in the social world. You have to cooperate and compete with other people. And when you cooperate and compete with other people in the service of valid goals, valuable goals, productive goals, you produce hierarchies. You produce hierarchies of competence and hierarchies of power. Those aren’t exactly the same thing. But either way, you produce hierarchies, and hierarchies dispossess people. They dispossess people because the spoils go to a few. That’s the problem of the unequal distribution of wealth. And because in any hierarchy of competence, a disproportionate number of, a small number of people do most of the creative work. And these are ironclad laws. Okay, so the problem with hierarchies are necessary. But the problem with hierarchies is they produce dispossession. And the left, in principle, speaks for the dispossessed. And someone has to speak for the dispossessed. And so when the lefties look at me and they say, well, Dr. Peterson is always speaking about the necessity of hierarchies, and how can we be sure that he’s not trying to justify them in their current position and obscure the fact that they tend towards tyranny and deception, which they clearly do, how do we know that he’s just not reifying the present power structure for his own aims? And why should we trust him? And that’s a perfectly valid objection. Now, I believe it happens to be wrong, because I understand the downside of hierarchies, and I also think I understand how to go about rectifying that. But that’s why they’re objecting insofar as they don’t, insofar as they’re playing a straight political game and not some ideological form of grandiose behavior. So there’s one other thing in this which is worth mentioning, which is the perception is that, as it were, aside from, let’s say this is the center of the political axis, and I’m going to have to do this for you, but that’s the right. The presumption is that it’s just a cliff. Like, if you start by saying, I don’t know, I think people should pay smaller taxes or whatever, you’re there, and you’ve just gone like that. Just gone like that, and then it’s Nazism. Right. And here’s the really weird thing that is… Because all of this, look, all of this is just a footnote still to the 20th century, and we’re still trying to work out what happened and why, and we don’t know. And in the history books, the period we’re living in will be the post-holocaust, post-World War II, post-GULAG world, when they were still trying to sort out what happened behind the crime scene tape. Okay. So on the left, there’s a very interesting thing, which is that you can go pretty much all the way like this. And first of all, there’s not a very wide recognition that you have the GULAG. There’s not very much. And then about that, people don’t read Solzhenitsyn. So you can go pretty happily… If you go too far left, you just hit the vegans. Yeah. But there’s actually the GULAG. You might be like radical in your fairness. Okay. So the problem here is not just they don’t know what happened on that side, but it’s worse than that. There was a young girl, a commentator on the TV in London a couple of mornings ago, arguing about Trump and so on, as usual, not very enlightening discussion. She’s arguing with Piers Morgan, and she says, you keep on saying I’m some supporter of Barack Obama. I mean, I’m a communist. She said I’m literally a communist. And if this girl had said, you know, you should be more careful. I’m literally a fascist. By the way, edit that one carefully on that. No, I’m alive to YouTube. That would be the New York Times headline. Yeah, exactly. Literal fascists admits. But if this guy… Everyone is busy searching around. Like in Canada, one of the big discussion forums, the Human Rights Commission found that there were like 11 people on this neo-Nazi forum, and it turned out half of them were working for the Canadian government trying to find neo-Nazis. The Canadian government constituted 50% of the neo-Nazis in Canada. So they’re scurrying around looking for the Nazis like this. And on the other side, it’s like mainstream on the television. Yeah, I’m a communist. I’d love to go through that again. Well, okay, so here’s another problem. This is a really interesting problem. Okay, so you brought out two things, and one is no one knows about what happened in Maoist China or what happened in the Soviet Union, which is absolutely appalling because we should all know that. And so there’s obviously a cliff on the left side. Now, I would say actually there is the possibility that as you move farther out on each end of the political spectrum, the rate at which you deteriorate accelerates. So it’s not linear. I think that’s possible. But having said that, that’s also the case on the left. Now, one of the things we could say is, well, those idiot leftists should get their house in order because they won’t differentiate themselves from their radical brethren. Okay, so now we might ask, well, why? We might ask two things. Why and whose problem is that exactly? Okay, so the first issue of why is, well, people who are left-leaning have a hard time drawing boundaries. That’s what makes them left-leaning. And I mean this technically because left-leaning people are high in openness to experience, which is a creativity trait. So they like information flow, and they don’t like borders between things. And they tend to be low in orderliness. So disorder doesn’t disgust and upset them. Okay, so they can’t draw boundaries, and that’s why they’re on the left. But boundaries have their problems. So there’s some utility in people who don’t like them. Okay, but the second problem is, and this isn’t the problem that’s only germane to the left. It’s the problem of the damned 20th century. It’s like, okay, when does the left go too far? And the answer is, nobody knows. Like, with the right-wingers, you can tell, man. It’s like they make a claim of ethnic or racial superiority. It’s like, box Nazi. And then you can see that this happens because even back in the 70s when William F. Buckley was sort of the leading conservative, he put a box around the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch types, and he said, I’m not you. But none of that’s happening on the left. Okay, why? Well, they say, well, we stand for diversity. It’s like, well, everyone likes diversity. Well, what about inclusivity? Damn right, man. Let’s include some people. Well, what about equality? That’d be good. That’d be good. Let’s have some equality. It’s like, okay, well, how much equality exactly? Well, then it’s gradations, right? Well, equality of opportunity? Damn straight. Equality of outcome? Sounds good. How about no? Under no circumstances whatsoever. But, you know, I can’t… Look, but here’s the problem, man. You get somebody saying race or ethnicity group member X is detestable because of their group identity, and you think evil Nazi, but then you see someone say, well, I just wish that everybody could have an equal outcome. What are you going to do? Are you going to punch them? That’s what you’re supposed to do with Nazis. No, you’re not. You’re going to think, oh, that’s a pretty nice person. And it’s like, just because you’re nice doesn’t mean you’re good. And just because you stand for equality of outcome doesn’t mean… Right. But the thing is, it’s a complex technical problem, right? Because it looks like you need a multivariate equation to define pathology on the left. It’s like, well, if you believe this and this and this and too disproportionately, then we have to put a box around you. But it’s not like someone wears a symbol on their damn shirt or tattooed onto their face that enables you to identify them. So we have a real structural problem here. We don’t know how to box in pathology on the left. No one knows, including the moderate leftists, but none of us know. An additional problem is that many of these issues may not have a solution that we can happily live with, right? Let’s sharpen this up, and this is more in the interest of steelmanning our critics. You take a problem like immigration right now. The intuition that’s driving the left, let’s take the extreme case of an open borders ethic. Borders are illegitimate. Borders are just in principle a sign of selfishness and xenophobia and unearned privilege. None of us can take credit for the fact that we were born into the societies we’re born into, and yet we have all of the advantages of having been born there, and so it is with all of you. None of us are currently living through the civil war in Syria now, and that’s a good thing for all of us. And so the concern here is that the moment you say, well, immigration is potentially a problem, we can’t just throw open the borders to all of humanity, because what would happen? What would happen is people would continue to cross those borders until the level of well-being in the developed world diminished so much that there was no reason to cross the borders anymore. It would be some principle of osmosis. Okay, so it’s even worse than that. But the concern is that this is totally, ethically speaking, this is a totally illegitimate situation. And to shine a bright enough light on any particular story in Syria, say, you give me the right family with children, and I learn enough about them and their plight, and I recognize within 30 seconds that if I were them, I would be desperate to get to Dublin or New York or San Francisco or anywhere but Syria. And it seems like a completely… It seems evil to in any way perpetuate this lottery, where you pulled a bad ticket and, sorry, this defines the rest of your life and the lives of your children. And there is no bright line where any of us, well-meaning people, wherever we are in the political spectrum or wherever we are in any other question, there’s no bright line where we can say, aha, that’s exactly the… That’s the solution that we know is ethical, that we know we can defend against all comers, and it can survive every test of narrative. I mean, this goes straight to the power of stories. You tell people a compelling enough story about one little girl, and it changes policy. I mean, isn’t that what happened to Angela Merkel? I mean, she just was faced with one denied refugee, and all of a sudden the policy for Europe changed. And so this is, again, I’m not saying there’s a solution to this, but this is the fear… There’s an imputation of callousness on the part of… I’m speaking specifically to you, Douglas, because it’s been your issue more than ours. How callous must you be to be worrying about immigration? And that’s… Obviously there’s a counterargument from the right side, but there’s an ethical core to it that is difficult to dismiss. And this is something which… I mean, it’s not just that issue. It’s almost every issue. We were talking a bit about this at dinner. We seem not to be… Well, we just aren’t ready for the communications age we’re in. And we’re just not ready for it. Our brains are not yet able to cope. Let me give you an example. The notion of private and public speech that’s just basically evaporated, so that if you… This is the problem. Try out an idea with your friends. Just throw around an idea. We’ve all done it. Throw around ideas with your friends if even one person is videoing it and might post it. This is the world we’re all in. It’s too dangerous to try things out for most people. That’s a problem of no borders. And so this is it. So we are always vulnerable that are… For instance, most people in Europe, for instance, want borders. I mean, the overwhelming majority in every country want there to be borders. But if you show them footage of somebody being turned away at a border that morning, there’s… We don’t know what to do with it. We have abstract principles we need to abide by. We want to abide by. Everybody wants to abide by it, but we don’t know what to do in this, precisely this era. And I think we’ve just got to, among other things, work in all sorts of ways to find ways to think about this that are deeper than the ones we’ve managed so far. One of them, yes, is to cope with the idea of the unbelievable luck that we’ve all got. Unbelievable luck. And then the questions from that. If I’m lucky, what are my priorities? What are my obligations? Because I’m lucky. What are my obligations? And some people say my obligation is to share my home with the rest of the world. In fact, it’s not that. It’s worse than that. Because I know lots of people who’ve taken in a refugee and things like that. And I have unbelievable admiration for them. That’s really walking the walk. These are the people who called your bluff when you said, I don’t see you taking in refugees into your home. And they said, oh, there’s one in the living room right now. I always want to turn up to their houses with some refugees and say, I’ve got yours. There also aren’t 50 in the living room. Exactly. Okay, so let’s elaborate on this a bit more. Okay, so the issue is borders exclude. Right? And that’s a postmodern proposition. Or maybe you could take that even further. That borders exclude and privilege those within the borders. It’s like, yes. Okay, so let’s take that seriously. Now part of the seriousness is poor, innocent children are hurt at borders. That happens all the time. Okay, the question is, are you willing to give up the borders? Now let’s think about what borders are. Your skin is a border. Okay. And you’re prejudiced in protection of your skin. For example, you won’t just sleep with anyone. You reserve the right to keep that border intact. Right? And to be choosy about the manner in which it’s broached. You likely have a bedroom. It probably has walls. You have clothing. You have a house. You have a town. You have a state. You have a country. And those are all borders. It’s borders within borders within borders within borders. And you need those borders because otherwise you will die. So we could not be too hypocritical about the damn borders. It’s like we don’t know how to organize fragile things without putting boundaries around them. And you see that in Genesis, right? As soon as people realize that… I’m sneaking in a little religion here in case you didn’t notice. As soon as people realize they become self-conscious, they wake up and realize their vulnerability. The first thing they do is manufacture a border between them and the world. And we need borders between us and the world. And we pay a bloody price for borders. And I say those words very carefully. We pay a bloody price for borders. And it’s often in the price of other people’s blood. And so then the question might be, well, how should you conduct yourself ethically in a world where other people are paying in blood for your borders? And the answer that I’ve been trying to communicate to people is, get your damn house in order. Mayor, as much responsibility as you can. Act as effectively as you can as an individual in the world. Because then you can justify your privilege. You can justify your luck and your good fortune. And maybe within the confines of your border, you can be more productive and useful than you would be in the absolute absence of borders altogether. And it seems to me that that’s the case. And then we have to have a discussion, okay? The left doesn’t like borders and the right is more fond of them. And they’re both right. And so because we don’t know how strict the border should be or how permeable it should be, it shouldn’t be absolute. So nothing moves between borders. Everything dies then. But if the borders disappear, then we can’t survive. So we have to have a discussion about borders all the time. And that’s partly what we’re doing here. We have to be more sophisticated about these sorts of things. Very few people end up getting held accountable for their own views in this matter, among so many others. There’s an enormous amount to gain by saying something that’s wrong. And there’s very little to gain by saying something that’s right on this. I mean, it’s just a world of suffering. And look, the problem with this, I mean, this is your area of politics more than it is mine. But these lines that are being put down on the left at the moment, of which this is one, these other ones that are now coming up, I mean, today’s one, you can’t now act a role that you’re not. Scarlett Johansson, yeah. You can’t pretend to be someone else. This is a brand new rule. I’m talking about Scarlett Johansson, who was cast in the film as a trans… Transgender woman, I think. A man who become a woman. It might have been the other way around, but it scarcely matters. Oh, it matters. Oh, that’s your fascist moment. Yes, that’s my privilege talking. Well, it’s interesting because that’s actually a boundary too. That’s actually a border too. So it’s another case where these things reverse in a perverse manner. But where did that one come from? Yeah, well, it probably came from the West Coast. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it seems to me that we need to somehow get comfortable with the increasingly public moments of uncertainty on topics like this. Because so much of reputational safety, as you were just alluding, is predicated in the public sphere in either pretending to be certain or falsely being certain on a safe answer, a safe and wrong answer to a complicated and important question. Well, part of this is the pathology of basal instinct. And so because the rule now is, if I feel sorry for you, I’m good. Right, and so let’s say there’s a complex situation that requires a tremendous amount of adult cognitive computation to solve. Like, what do we do about the borders? Because tearing them down is not the answer. Well, the person who stands up and says, well, I see someone who’s hurt by a border and I feel empathy for them, then immediately says, therefore I’m good, which isn’t so bad, but therefore I’m also morally superior to you. And this is one of the true pathologies of the empathic collectivists, is that they presume that their reflexive empathy marks them out as morally superior. And that’s appalling because part of it is, A, it’s too easy. Just because I feel sorry for you doesn’t mean I’m good. Partly because I can feel so sorry for you that I’m actually harmful to you. And that’s what happens in the case of overprotective parents, for example. So we know perfectly well that empathy is not an untrammeled moral virtue. It has to be tempered by other virtues and carefully tempered by other virtues. And so we have to stop allowing in our public discourse the unquestioned assumption that just because I manifest more pity in the moment than you do, that I’m somehow a morally superior individual. In fact, not only do we have to question that, we in fact have to deeply question it and say, what makes you think that you’re just not taking things too far, right there? Because there’s just as much error on the side of too much empathy as there is on the side of too little empathy. And that’s a hard thing for everyone to learn because empathy feels so good. Like if you feel mercy towards a suffering child, that is kind of an indication that you’re an ethical person. But that’s not the basis for complex and sophisticated foreign policy. We know it isn’t because we know our empathy diminishes in an almost linear way with the numbers of people to empathize with, right? So we spoke about this one night in Vancouver, but this has been tested where if you tell someone about the plight of one little girl, you will elicit the maximum empathic response and the maximum of an altruistic response. They’ll give the most amount of money they’re going to give to any cause to one compelling story to say one little boy or girl. But if you start adding boys and girls to the one, keeping the one the same, people’s empathy degrades and their actual altruism degrades. So empathy is non-quantitative almost by definition. It’s also partly because in your life, if you see a person in trouble, you might be able to do something about them. But if you see a million people in trouble, what you should probably do at least to begin with is run. And what are you going to do? Maybe you could give a thousand dollars to one person, but if you divided that up among a million, all that would happen, you would have no money and they wouldn’t be any better off. But this is to say that so much of moral progress today entails unhooking from the highly salient empathy-driving story and connecting with the actual quantitative reality to learn that it’s 500,000 people dying every year from heart disease or whatever it is, or there’s 500,000 people dying in this famine. The fact that that can’t be made sexy for our news cycle, the fact that we lose attention is something we have to figure out how to correct for. It’s also akin, it’s very interestingly akin to your objection that you raised before, is that there are adult forms of solving problems that aren’t akin to children’s play, which is something, by the way, I agree with, because I don’t think that the manner in which children organize the world is the end of the way that things should be organized. It’s the basis for some of the organization, but this is akin to the same issue, is that the basal motivational responses, the emotional responses, no matter how well-meaning, aren’t of conceptual sophistication to deal with incredibly elaborate and complex systems. And then you have another problem too, is that, well, that’s really troublesome for people, because they want to do the right thing globally, and then you tell them, look, you don’t know anything. You don’t know how to take this insanely complicated system that we have and improve it, and just because you’re feeling pity doesn’t mean that you’re an expert in the retooling of hydroelectric systems, for example. And there’s one straightforward way to do that. I mean, I’ll give you an example. There’s a brilliant Kurdish demographer who’s a Swedish citizen now, cited this fact that it costs the same amount to bring one refugee and keep them in Sweden as it does to look after 100 refugees in Jordan, Turkey, or Lebanon. So the obvious thing from that is you say, look, it’s madness then to be, for instance, bringing in thousands of refugees to Sweden. You could be looking after hundreds of thousands of people in the region. Why is that still a tainted argument? It’s because people aren’t sure you’re not going to smuggle in racism with that. That’s why. I think, are you sure you’re not just coming up with this demographer stuff in order to… It’s like you’re smuggling in Hitler, like a religious type smuggle in Jesus. You’re going to start with NGO figures, and before we know it, it’s Auschwitz. That’s what they think. Right, right. But here’s the thing. The shortcut solution to answering almost every single one of these problems is, assume that your interlocutor has good motives. Assume that they are being honest in the way that they’re looking at it. And that’s why I say… I have a comment about that. Okay, so this is something I deal with in my clinical practice all the time. Okay, so imagine that you’re naive. And then what you are when you’re naive is someone who thinks you trust people, because you think everybody has good motivations, which is some sense what Douglas is recommending. And they say, well, that’s just naive. It’s like, just wait a second though, because here’s the developmental pathway. First, you’re naive and you trust everyone. And then someone cuts you off at the knees, or multiple people do. Or maybe you cut yourself off at the knees because you trusted yourself too much, and you didn’t take into account the malevolence that lurks in your heart and the hearts of others. And so that you get traumatized by betrayal, and then you become cynical. And you think, Jesus, I’m a lot smarter now that I’m cynical. And you are, because cynical is actually a move up on naive. But it’s not the last move. The last move is to transcend cynicism. And to say that even though I know that there are just as many snakes in your heart as there are in my heart, I’m going to hold out my hand in trust, because that’s the best way to elevate both of us. And that is the prerequisite for a sensible discussion. And to concede that, this is why I’m always going on about Aristotle on this, to concede that it’s not between good and evil, but between competing virtues. That when it comes to something like the borders discussion, you’re dealing with justice and mercy. You cannot only be driven by one of those virtues. Mercy itself will lead you to hell. Justice on its own, blind, unseeing, can lead you to hell. Yes, exactly. Well, and so this also, and we’re running very short on time here, so we should figure out how to wrap up. This is also why your emphasis on truth and thy emphasis on truth is so absolutely important, because you and I obviously differ on a variety of different things, and as Douglas does with both of us. But that doesn’t mean that I think that you’re a bad person. I don’t think that. Actually, what I think and what I fervently hope is that some of the things that you think are wrong actually turn out to be right in a way that would be extremely helpful to me and everyone I know if I incorporated them. Like, I really hope that, because I’d rather not be stupid and wrong if I could help it, because then I don’t have to wander into a pit. And so I’m hoping that if we can have a genuine dialogue and we can tell each other the truth, which is the crucial issue here, then I can find out what you know that I don’t know, and that’ll make me stronger and it’ll fortify everyone around me. And that’s the basis for the right and responsibility of free speech, right? You have the right of free speech, but that’s so that you can be a responsible bearer of free speech, so that you can say the truth, so that you can set the world right and adjust the hierarchies and make sure the borders are properly functional, and so that we can keep this thing going properly. And that is all dependent, at least in part, well, in large part on the truth, but also to some degree on this faculty that you described as rational, because we’re engaged in a rationality. I know rationality isn’t enough, that’s my sense, you know, but it’s certainly an adult form of communication and it’s definitely the prerequisite to a discussion like this, which seems to me highly useful, and which I’m so happy that you’re all willing to participate in, how strangely, how strange that is, notwithstanding. Yeah. Yes, well, we’ve been showing various cards that had diminishing increments of time, and now they have just stopped showing us cards because we’re totally incorrigible. But, yeah, I just want to reiterate what Jordan’s just said there. You all really are the occasion for this conversation. I mean, though you are in the audience and we’re on stage, we very much feel that this conversation is with all of you, and we know the conversation continues in your lives, and again, it’s just a tremendous honor to show up and meet all of you in this space. So thank you for that. And I want to thank both of these men. We have never gotten together before like this, and it’s really a great pleasure to be confronted and cajoled in your company. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all very much. It’s been a great pleasure to be here.