https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vvSetcM-f3k
Hi, this video has two components a three-minute announcement of the remaining venues of my American 12 rules for life tour and the new Canadian venues that will open up in July and August followed by a lengthy discussion with Ben Shapiro on the narrative substrate of human cognition derived from his new Sunday YouTube video and podcast Hi there, I’m in Denver, Colorado today. It’s May 7th 2018 I’m going to give the fourth talk of my American 12 rules for life tour tonight, or maybe it’s the fifth First one was Toronto and Washington then Chicago then Detroit now Denver. So yes, I guess that’s the fifth I’m announcing the remaining venues today in the US where tickets are still available and The dates and places for my Canadian tour 10 Canadian cities in July So there’s tickets remaining to 10 venues in the United States on May 23rd Philadelphia on May 29th Houston on June 8th Richmond on June 10th Charlotte June 12th Nashville June 14th Louisville June 15th Indianapolis June 16th Milwaukee 25th Portland 27th Sacramento and in between all that on Wednesday the June the 5th will also be in Reykjavik in Iceland So tickets are available for those and then I’m going to be touring Canada in July and August On the 19th in Toronto on the 20th in Hamilton. That’s July again 21st in London, Ontario 22nd in Kitchener on the 23rd in Ottawa on the 26th in Vancouver on the 27th in Calgary on the 28th in Edmonton in August on the 14th at Regina and on August 15 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan You can find out more about that if you go to Jordanbpeterson.com and look up events. That’s Jordanbpeterson.com under events Also in this video is a discussion that I recently did last week In fact, it was just released with Ben Shapiro as part of his new Sunday podcast initiative and I think we had a very good conversation And so the rest of this video was taken up with the conversation that I had with Ben I think we got farther on the issue of how human perception and cognitive function is nested inside a fundamental narrative substrate and we related that to Modern findings neuropsychology related to hemispheric function. I think it was an excellent discussion And so I’m very happy to bring it to you There’s some ads in it because I took it directly from Ben’s video. So anyway, so that’s the tour Philadelphia Houston Richmond Charlotte Nashville Louisville Indianapolis Milwaukee Portland and Sacramento and that’s all in June and May and Then Rick Jivik in June as well and then the Canada tour in July and August Toronto Hamilton London Kitchener Ottawa Vancouver Calgary Edmonton Regina and Saskatoon And as I said, you can find out about that at Jordan B Peterson comm events Thank you very much. And I hope that you can come to one of the talks They seem to be going really well so far We’ve sold out a very large number of them and the people seemed quite enthusiastic And I’ve been able to get farther in my thinking than I was in my book and each of the talks is designed to illuminate a different element of The let’s say the 12 rules and the topics that are associated with that So thanks very much. And I hope you enjoy the discussion with Ben Shapiro There’s lots of times in your life. You’re not going to be happy and so that’s not gonna work You want to have something meaningful? That’s the boat that will take you through the storm Well, here we are with Jordan Peterson And I could not be more excited to talk with the best-selling author of 12 rules for life And I will talk with him. But first I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Helix sleep So there’s nobody on the planet like you So why would you buy a mattress built for everyone else working with the world’s leading sleep experts? Helix sleep developed a mattress that’s customized your specific height weight and sleep preferences So you can have the best sleep of your life in an unbeatable price. 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Their only pillows are fully adjustable So you can achieve perfect comfort regardless of sleep position or body type Helix sleep has thousands of five-star reviews plus you get a hundred nights to try them out But a helix sleep comm slash Ben guest right now and you’ll get up to 125 bucks toward your mattress order That’s helix sleep comm slash Ben guest or up to 125 dollars off your mattress order again That’s helix sleep comm slash Ben guest get the deal with Ben guest and make sure that they know that we sent you okay So I could not be more excited to speak with Jordan Peterson Well as Jordan knows before the show we talk for an hour before the show just about interesting things We should have caught on tape, but now we’re actually gonna get a chance to do it live So here is the Jordans new book if you haven’t bought it yet. Everybody on planet has bought this book I was walking through the office today We didn’t have a copy in the office the person the front desk had a copy your book just sitting on her desk That’s the way this works 12 rules for life an antidote to cast fantastic book obviously topping all the bestseller lists all over the world Jordan thanks so much for joining the show really appreciate it. Thanks for the invitation Well, you know Obviously your your prominence has just blown up in the last year and a half when we were talking before the show about Why that is and why there are so many people who suddenly are very angry about you? I noticed there’s an article in Politico suggesting that young angry white males you are now their their leader. So congratulations Oh, yes I wanted to ask you about that. Why do you think that number one? Your profile has become so big of late and number two Why do you think it is that so many members of the of the left are so angry about that? Why are they characterizing people who listen to you as angry and enraged young white man? Well, we could we could look at the characterization to begin with you know Because I think it speaks to the pathology of the radical left instantly They’re absolutely incapable of viewing the world except through group identity terms, you know And so if someone comes out and disagrees with them, then they have to characterize them by their fundamental group attribute Whatever that happens to be maybe it’s gender because that’s a favorite or maybe it’s race And so angry white men young there we go sexist ageist and racist all at once right? They’re angry young white men Well, it has to be that way if you’re gonna be the if you’re gonna play the left this game Because that’s the only way that you can look at the world and then if you can’t make your opponent Reprehensible in some manner and It’s strange that they would attempt to make them reprehensible on the grounds of race age and sex since that’s precisely what they stand against Hypothetically, but if you can’t make your enemy reprehensible along some dimension, then you have to contend with them seriously And so, you know if I’m not an alt-right fascist like Hitler, you know or Milo Yiannopoulos Which was how I was characterized in Canada because the radical left is can’t even get their bloody insults straight He’s like Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s like because there’s no difference between them right? No obvious difference It’s just another attempt to pillory as far as I can tell and I think that it’s it’s dreadful I really think it is there was an article written in by the by I believe the editor of the New York Review of Books It was just republished in the Globe and Mail talking about the emergence of hypermasculinity and how I was somehow Responsible for that or contributing to it like Mussolini and I read that and I thought yeah like Mussolini and I thought Okay. So what are you doing? I? See you’re you’re defining Masculinity or conflating masculinity and hypermasculinity at the same time then your virtue signaling by being against hypermasculinity But really what you’re trying to do is bring down whatever it is That’s masculinity and what masculinity is in in this frame is something like competence And so it’s part of the radical leftist general war on competence at all as well Which I think is one of the most pernicious elements of the culture wars the dissolution of hierarchies The the assumption that every hierarchy has to be based on power and serve them the needs of your group Whatever that happens to be that there’s no such thing as competence and so and then the other thing that’s Reprehensible about it because that’s not enough is that it’s just wrong Like there’s I’ve got tens of thousands of letters from people and people come up to me all the time on the street I’ll give you an example. This is a great story. This is really touching so I was in LA about a month and a half ago and I was downtown LA and downtown LA is kind of rough and I was wandering around and With my wife and this young guy pulled a car up beside me and hopped out and he was kind of a stylish looking 21-year-old Latino guy something like that. He was all excited He said he asked me who I was and I told him and he you know That’s what he had presumed and so he was kind of excited about that He said look I’ve watched all your lectures and it’s really helped me and I’ve been straightening out my life and trying to get my Room clean and he laughed about that But you know developing some aims and trying to tell the truth and and look I’ve really fixed up my relationship with my father And so then he said wait wait just wait a minute and I thought sure well sure So he went back in the car and he got his father out of his car and he came over with his dad like they Had their arms around each other and he said look we’ve really improved our relationship and they’re both smiling away and you know, that’s Man, if you’re gonna target me for that just go right ahead. Yeah, that’s real white supremacist. Oh, yeah Yeah, and it’s wherever I go now and this is one of the things this is the thing That’s so wonderful about that all of this as far as I’m concerned is that people come up to me all the time and that’s exactly What they say they say look I was lost aimless depressed nihilistic anxious drug addicted alcoholic wasting my time Masturbating too much, although they don’t generally use that particular example you know lost essentially and and and Hopeless in some sense and I’ve been watching your lectures and they’ve really helped and I’ve really been putting my life together And I’ve been trying to say what I believe to be true and develop a vision and it’s really helped and like and it’s so overwhelming, you know, like if I’m doing book signings after a talk then there’ll be a dozen people or more who And these aren’t they’re like I’m only talking to people for about 15 seconds But you can have a very intense conversation in 15 seconds and they’ll say look, you know I like I was suicidal man like I was really hanging on to the edge of the earth by my fingernails and I’m better and they have tears in their eyes. It’s like That’s a little of that goes a long way man Well, I think that when I look at your rise and look I talk to people who love what you do I mean every time I go on the road and I’m speaking at a campus You’re the number one name that gets mentioned at people by people who come to my lectures And I think that the reason for that that I’ve that I’ve seen is is really twofold one is that one of the things that you really talk a lot about is the notion of Self-discipline and purpose in your life and control and the idea that you are in control of your decision-making and your decision-making matters That’s one and the other is that you have you have a unique capacity to say no to things and when somebody says something to you That is illogical but popular that you have the capacity to say no That’s what happened in that Kathy Newman interview that then somebody was saying something to you that made no sense And you just said well no and then you just stood on that no and when you stand on that no I think it gives people a lot of courage. Yeah Well, I mean the the gender issue is really an interesting one because One of my professional domains of expertise is individual differences I’m I’m a personality psychologist and so I know the gender difference literature and It’s it’s a very solid literature. Well, first of all, it’s very solid It has a 30 year history once per psychologist got the personality models down So that would be the big five model all empirically derived straight statistics, right brute-force empiricism Nobody had a theoretical axe to grind with the big five except to say maybe there are human traits Maybe they’re encapsulated in language. We can use statistical techniques to find out what they are. That was it That’s the whole ideology. So very very neutral as far as ideologies go five traits emerge. Okay Are there differences between the sexes turns out there are all right? They’re not massive Although if you sum them across all the traits you can separate men and women with about 75% accuracy So it’s not trivial, but you have to sum across all the traits then another question comes up Well, are those differences socio-cultural or biological? Okay, we can test that we’ll go around the world. We’ll look at cultures We’ll rank order them in terms of the gender equality of their Sociological policies we can do that with broad agreement from the right and the left Then the hypothesis would be if gender differences decrease among more egalitarian societies Then the gender differences are socio-cultural or at least more socio-cultural. That’s exactly the opposite of what was found Repeatedly that’s pseudoscience. It’s like no that’s mainstream psychology Those papers have thousands of citations and right the average humanities paper has zero citations Right, and then the next most common one has one 3000 that’s an that’s an unbelievable classic and and here’s the other bit of proof like you say Well, how do you know that you can trust someone’s judgment about a fact the fact emerges despite their ideological Presuppositions. Okay. So it’s well known that the social sciences and the humanities have a Left tilt and a lot of that’s temperamental and the tilt has become more pronounced But as Jonathan Haidt has pointed out there are no conservatives among social personality Psychologists or or none to speak very few. Yeah, very few Vanishingly few and if the field has a bias it is definitely and Indisputably a left-wing bias. Okay, so you have to fight that if you’re if you’re a scientist, right? Even if you’re a left-wing scientist, you have to fight that because you want to get to the facts It was these social scientists who generated the data that suggested that the gender differences not only were real But that were bigger in egalitarian societies They didn’t do that to grind their ideological acts because their ideological Presupposition was no no you make the society you egalitarian men and women get more the same. It’s like no they get more different. Oh Hmm, isn’t that something and so then there’s a corollary there Which is alright you could still say and they’re kind of pushing in this direction in Scandinavia Boys and girls are different Men and women are different it looks biological But because people are malleable you could push the socio-cultural structure harder and harder to minimize the biological Differences. Okay. Well, first of all, maybe and maybe not maybe you’d get a rebound and they’d get even like the kids would rebel That could easily happen. But let’s say okay, you could the problem with that is is that if you see that much Power to the state like you’re basically giving the state the right to socialize your kids, right? It’s like you Really? Really you really want to do that. I mean people in Israel couldn’t do that with the kibbutz. It’s right It didn’t work. So people aren’t going to give up their children to the state and thank God for that Well, I mean this is one of the big questions that we were discussing earlier is that we were talking about You know the polarization in politics between right and left and obviously you’re you’re a Psychologist you’re a philosopher But you’ve been dragged almost kicking and screaming into this political sphere because everything has been so politicized And so when you say when you cite social science statistics and they’re scientifically based you’re called a racist You’re called the sexist. You’re called a homophobe and Exactly. So why is it that so why do you think it is that so many folks on the left who purport to be all about? Reason and science and an objective factor so willing to throw those out the window The minute that it becomes politically inconvenient well because you imagine that the cognitive system An interpretation of the world has levels their axiomatic levels some Fundamental presuppositions are more fundamental than others and you could say well the leftists Historically, maybe because of their atheistic rationality are more on the side of science than say the fundamentalists of any sort But when push comes to shove you find out how the axioms are are nested there’s deeper axioms underneath that which is that all hierarchies are based on power and All power plays are based on group identity tribal identity essentially and that the entire history of the world is nothing But a power play between between these different identity groups. It’s like okay. Well if the science Indicates that some of that’s wrong then do you alter those beliefs or do you alter the science and the answer to that question is Well, it depends on how you’ve hierarchically arranged those if the science is at the bottom Then you alter your beliefs right if it’s the scientific facts are the axiomatic Substructure then you then you alter your beliefs if your beliefs are the axiomatic substructure, then you alter the science Well, we’ve seen how that plays out and one of the things I’ve tried to do so to speak is to diagnose the axiomatic structure It’s like okay. What’s the what’s the metaphysical? Presumption structure of the radical left. Well what what it is is you’re basically your group Your groups are basically engaged in warfare, right and the warfare is arbitrary except insofar as it serves your group Okay, I don’t buy any of that. I think that’s I think that’s a route to certain disaster I think it’s a degeneration into tribalism and that we will Seriously pay for it not only because it returns us to tribalism and tribes fight as the anthropological evidence for that is Overwhelming right tribes fight. It doesn’t even matter if they’re chimpanzee tribes even chimpanzee tribes fight so not only do you regress to a tribalism But you also invalidate the one proposition that’s been able to help us arise above the tribal Which is the idea that the individual should be sovereign and so I think the culture war is about what’s the proper framework? within which to view human identity and What’s the relationship between the individual and the group? In relationship to that identity and the leftist answer is it’s all group and it’s all power. It’s like, okay So in just a second I want to ask you a little bit about Some of the some of the more enlightenment minded thinkers who are out there right now because it seems like we’ve been discussing The big gap in in Western civilization right now, which is between the collectivists and the individualists If you were to put it broadly But I want to talk about some of the divisions among the individualists in just a second first I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at birch gold so with the uncertainty of the of the Market right now with all the volatility a lot of Americans are increasingly concerned about the security of their savings and the Federal Reserve Obviously has a loose monetary policy. 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Steven Pinker it has a different perspective on the world than then you do I have a different perspective than Sam Harris does you and I have our differences probably on some matters of philosophy so where do you think the vulnerability lies in the in the possibility of reviving an enlightenment mentality because it seems to me that one of the big problems that’s that’s Popping its head up above the water now is the rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of this old style Tribalism that you’ve been talking about that we’re now going to repeat history because we’ve benefited so much from the Enlightenment And we forget that things don’t have to be this way We’ve got so much nice stuff We live in so much freedom that we forget that if we just toss those Enlightenment ideals out the window things get really ugly again I think that’s what unites well that that’s the question is that what what what do you toss out the window before things get ugly? right and the Enlightenment Proponents you could say Harris you could say Pinker Charles Taylor in Canada They trace back the development of the modern self. Let’s say Taylor wrote a book called sources of the modern self to the Enlightenment and it’s quite interesting because like if you look at the typical Academic psychologists say their historical knowledge generally runs back about 15 years And so because they’re all concerned with the with the modern literature and there’s some utility in that but that the downside is they don’t Have any historical context so you read someone like Taylor and you think wow he’s stretching it back 500 years You know But there’s there’s reading that goes way beyond that to look at the sources of the self and the source of the modern ethos And this is a huge bone of contention between people like me saying people like Harris and I think between people like you and people like Harris is that My sense is that the Enlightenment values themselves are grounded in an ethos That’s much deeper and much less articulated and that would be an ethos of metaphor image drama ritual religion art music All of that dance even for that matter the nonverbal the the pattern recognition Ian McGill Chris has written a book called the master and his emissary which lays that out quite nicely with regards to hemispheric Specialization it’s kind of predicated on Elkone and Goldberg’s observation that the left hemisphere is specialized for what we know and the right hemisphere is specialized for what we don’t know so that’s an order chaos dynamic and The rough idea would be that the left hemisphere generates paradigmatic systems So that would be like the Enlightenment system axiom predicated right even stateable axiom predicated, but that that entire axiomatic system is based in a nonverbal in the nonverbal domain that’s associated with well it would be associated with the right hemisphere, but it would also be associated with deep motivations biological motivations and emotions and So because here here’s one way of looking at it you think well How do you validate an axiomatic system of ethics and the answer is quite straightforward? Jean Piaget figured this out is you play it out in the world literally you act it out in the world and then you watch each other’s emotional responses and If the thing that you’re playing out if the axiomatic system that you’re playing out Satisfies the motivations and the emotions of the people who are engaged in that system Then the system is justified and then you say well It’s not just that their motivations and emotions are satisfied. It’s more complex It’s that the motivations and emotions of each individual are satisfied But not only now but now next week next month and next year So you have to extend it across time and not only my emotions and motivations, but yours as well Now next week next month and across time. So there’s there’s terribly tight constraints They’re all placed upon an axiomatic systems validity now the way Jean Piaget thought of that He said well think about it like a child’s game a bunch of kids get together and they decide to play pretend Okay, and pretend is let’s model the world right and and as a place to act because to pretend you act out right? So the kids get together and they assign roles and they say well, you’re gonna be mom. You’re gonna be dad You’re gonna be the dog and we’re gonna play house and then they they act it out and what they’re doing Is seeing if they can regulate the manner in which they’re constructing the game so that everyone’s emotions and motivations are so well Satisfied that they want to continue the game. Okay, and so that’s so cool So what it shows you is that’s how an ethical system is is Tested and justified. It’s like you play it out and you see if everyone wants to keep playing and so that’s a whole different Methodology than the scientific domain, right? So the axiomatic system isn’t the ethical axiomatic system isn’t justified by reference to the scientific method It’s justified by reference to the emotional and motivational well-being of all the players of the game now that game emerges This is the second part of this and this is so cool then the question is well, how does that game emerge and the answer is the same way that Children’s games emerges. So what Piaget noted is that kids would get together and they play marbles and if they were young kids They could all play marbles say six six years old Play marbles and and if they were in a group they were playing marbles and it all worked out fine Squabbles and all that, you know, the kids would keep playing right validating the game But if you took the kids out of the game and you said what are the rules of the game? They would give completely disparate accounts. So they knew how to do it was like the wisdom was in the group. Mm-hmm The wisdom was fragmented enough among the individuals So if you pulled the individuals out, they’d give disparate accounts, but if you put them all together They could play the game But then if you waited till they were 11 or 12 and you pulled them out of the game Then they could tell you the rules then at 14 or 15 they they would be willing to This is with more sophisticated games. They would be more willing to regard themselves as makers of the rules Okay, so here’s how it happens in an evolutionary sense People going all the way back to our primate forebears organize themselves into functional hierarchies Okay, and the hierarchies are complex and they’re not just based on power despite what the idiot Marxists say even Dewall has noted that Chimpanzee hierarchies are unstable if they’re only based on power. They don’t last they degenerate into violence So you have a hierarchy that’s that works But it’s acted out. No one knows why it works. It works because everyone seems to be happy with it Okay, and so those hierarchies get more complex and more sophisticated and then people start to observe them and talk about them It’s like oh, well, we’ve got this hierarchy here. What’s it like and then they spin off dramas about the hierarchy Here’s a hero who climbed up the hierarchy and here’s what a hero looks like Okay, so then you get the idea of hierarchy and then you get the idea of the hero as the person who moves up the hierarchy And generates it. Okay, then out of that you get the extraction of the idea of the hero And then you get development of that idea and it’s out of that that you get the monotheistic religions And so it’s like the procedure and the hierarchy come first. No one knows what the rules are It’s all played out the same way that wolves play it out in a pack or chimpanzees play it out in a troop Then we wake up and think oh we live in a structure. Here’s the structure that would be Osiris in the Egyptian mythologies Here’s the structure. Here’s how the structure goes wrong Here’s what the structure does. Here’s its tyrannical aspect Here’s what you have to do to generate the structure and to thrive in it Okay, that’s even more important the hierarchy is important enough. But what we want to know is how to master the hierarchy Okay, that’s where you get the mythologies of the hero Okay And then so then there’s generates all sorts of different heroes because there’s different ways of being successful Then you have a panoply of heroes then you think okay. Well now we’ve got all those heroes. That’s a set We can pull back and say okay something about all these heroes is what makes them heroes That’s when you extract out the monotheistic Savior because that’s why in Christianity Christ is the King of Kings It’s actually you can think about it as a literal statement Forget about the religious overlay. It’s like okay, you got a bunch of people some of them are kind of king-like Okay, so you admire them. It’s like for whatever reason that is It’s not easy to figure out why you admire someone right that’s complicated But let’s say you’ve got admirable admirable people you start telling stories about them That’s why you go to a movie right you want to go watch someone you don’t care about you’re bored by no You want to go watch someone admirable and interesting or maybe the opposite of that, but doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing Then you think okay. Well, we’ve got all these admirable people. They’re generating the world properly. That’s what makes them admirable There’s a principle they embody and that principle is the process by which the admirable world is generated That’s the logos. Okay. That’s the thing that’s operative at the beginning of so here’s my here’s my question about about all this because now We’re really not talking about 12 rules for life as much as maps meaning which is your first book which are you’re doing the audio? Yeah, and it’s definitely a harder book than 12 rules for life in a much more complex book in a lot of ways than than 12 Rules for life so how universal are these systems meaning? Why is it that the Enlightenment only arrives at one time in human history in one place in human history as opposed to if human biology is essentially consistent across you know across humanity then why is it that that you know if At the at the apex of the levels you end up with the Enlightenment idea Which is where we started this particular question Then why is it that it only arrives in one place at one time as opposed to arriving in a variety of places in a rat? That’s a great question man, that’s okay the first thing we would say is the process by which this the hierarchy itself and Success within the hierarchy is generated. That’s to be accounted over Millions of years at least hundreds of thousands of years But I would push it back because you can see analogs in the chimps so 20 million years. Let’s say that’s a long time On that time scale the fact that the enlightenment values arose in Europe 500 years ago before anywhere else it’s like well who cares it’s it’s it’s five old men Long right if you put five 100 year old men in line. It’s like it’s yesterday. It’s this morning So we’ve we’ve evolved these Hierarchical structures, that’s our culture We’ve evolved ways of maneuvering within the hierarchical structures that are successful and now we’ve started to evolve ways of mapping our our Adaptation not just adapting but mapping it. Okay, so how does the mapping occur first? Admiration second Imitation of admiration and that would be drama It’s like you you dramatize Shakespeare extracts out what’s admirable and interesting and plays it out So that’s the use of the body as a representational structure of the body. So we act out what’s admirable Okay It’s like well then the literary critics come along the philosophers and they say oh what are the Principles by which the admirable people operate. It’s like chimps woke up and said, oh well some chimps are more successful than others What are the rules of success? It’s like well, there were no rules because they weren’t running by rules Right. There aren’t rules until you describe the patterns then you have a rule Okay, that’s what happens with Moses by the way, right Moses has a revelation Here’s the rules right? Yeah, we’ve been living out those rules forever Yeah, but we didn’t know what they were because they weren’t rules. They were customs, right? okay, so you start by mapping your customs in drama and Story and that way you can represent them and you can transmit them then once you have them in your grip Say they’re represented now not just acted out Well, then you can move one step backwards from them and you can say well, what’s the commonalities among these? What are the general principles that would be the development of something like the code of Hammurabi? Right. It’s like well, we’ve got all these customs What are they right revelation? It’s like oh, here’s how you map the customs. That’s the decalogue. It’s the same idea. So I Took human beings a very long time to evolve their hierarchies to evolve their structures of success and Then to have enough people around with enough spare time to engage in the cultural process of The artistic cultural process of mapping the adaptive structure that all emerges in mythology and drama Then that lays the groundwork for philosophy then the philosophers could come in especially once it’s written like in the Judeo-Christian pantheon It’s like oh now we’ve got it written down. Oh, well, we don’t have to Remember it right we can read it and while we’re reading we can think about it And so then out of that starts to come the semantic codes. Well, then you get the enlightenment It’s like oh, well, here’s a bunch of semantic codes. It’s like yeah. Yeah, those are great So this is really interesting because you know if you read Pinker or if you read Jonah Goldberg’s new book essentially they attribute the Enlightenment to Jonah Goldberg calls it the miracle It’s almost as though it accidentally occurred in a certain place in a certain time. Jonah doesn’t quite go quite that far I think to be fair to him But I think that that philosophy that this sort of sprang up randomly here is is very much embedded in a lot of Sam Harris is thinking a lot of people thinking And you’re taking it further back, but I do wonder if this may be an area of actual disagreements Yeah, that should be fun. Are you attributing the growth of the Judeo-Christian ethic that emerges into the enlightenment as also? Accidentally just pushing the timeline further back. No, I don’t think it’s accidental. Okay, and I’m not making a reductionist argument So the first thing is I’m going to say this is how religion evolved But I’m not saying I’m not saying that this explanation exhausts the phenomenon Because it’s a very strange phenomenon. It’s very very strange, but but that doesn’t mean we can’t generate a plausible evolutionary account It’s like if you have a bunch of motivated emotional limited beings occupying the same territory and competing and cooperating for the same resources Including the resource of cooperation which can generate more resources. It’s not a zero-sum game. There are going to be Patterns of adaptation that emerge from that that are similar So here’s a way of thinking about it if you put a bunch of kids together They’re gonna evolve games right? Well, which games well a bunch of different games. Yeah, but they’re all games Right. So even though so that’s the moral relativist element a bunch of different games Okay, but the moral absolutist element is yeah. Yeah, but they’re all games and the games have to be Playable which means they have to continue right in an iterated way, right? So that’s a big constraint People have to want to play them. So not only do they have to be games No and comprehensible to everybody and enjoyable but people but they have to be self-maintaining and everyone has has to want to play them Okay that’s the answer to the postmodern conundrum a plethora of potential ethical implications of the world an Infinite variety. Yeah, okay fine not an infinite variety of pragmatically applicable interpretations you instantly constrain the universe to well to what well This is why there’s commonalities in mythologies is like if you put enough people together in enough different places the commonality of the groups of people there because of the grounding in common motivation and emotion and embodiment because we’re embodied Means that they’re gonna generate hierarchies that are broadly similar with strategies of success within those hierarchies that are broadly similar with descriptions of the strategies that are broadly similar and so you could say in some sense the Ethic that gave rise to the Enlightenment is in place more or less everywhere now. It’s tricky because not every Hierarchical system is as functional as every other hierarchical system. Some of them can degenerate into tyranny We’re talking about the set of all voluntarily playable games, right? Something like that and that can degenerate out of that You’re gonna get common hero myths you have to and then and then that lays the groundwork That lays the groundwork for even our ability to communicate right, right? So and this is the the Enlightenment guys They just they’re not getting that so and this gets to I think the broader question that I know you and Sam went on For three hours about about the nature of truth because particularly truth in the moral sphere Yeah And would it be fair to say that you guys agree on the idea of truth in the scientific sphere that that you know If something is that there is such a thing as objective truth, or are you I would say we agree on a lot of that The question is to some degree Why do scientists accept the idea that objective truth is true? And then I would say we probably don’t agree about that because I would ground that in pragmatism Right and Sam would ground out in the idea of an independently existing objective world, right? Which is a leap of faith more like my own actually than the pragmatist view, right? And if you believe that there’s a God who’s out there in the universe who created the structures in a particular certain way Then what he created is the truth and it is apart from you that if human beings didn’t exist and they weren’t able to Utilize the truth that truth would still exist out there whereas the pragmatists might say it’s truth is in the use that it has for That’s the thing is that you know, I don’t know if we would consider scientific truth true unless we are also simultaneously Accepting the idea that scientific truth is good for people So there’s one other thing I wanted to bring up that’s relevant because you brought up the idea of God so here’s a way of thinking about it and And I don’t know what to make of this because this is stretching me This is stretching my thoughts out beyond where I’ve been able to develop them So this is the intuition that I have based on a variety of things experiences. I’ve had so imagine that There’s a very wide range of human behaviors, okay And some subset of those are both admirable and not admirable So let’s call them good and evil at this at the extremes. Okay Then we might say well There’s a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are good and a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are evil and that’s a Transpersonal pattern because it’s not just about you or me. It’s about everyone. Okay, and so then that gets personified That’s Christ and Satan. Let’s say or Cain and Abel right that gets personified And that’s a bad guy and a good guy in a movie like it’s personified all the time It’s Thor and Loki, you know in the Marvel movies, you know, so Now you have the let’s say you take the idea of Christ and you think okay, so that’s the abstraction of everything. That’s that’s admirably good about the set of all human behaviors Okay, and then you think well, what sort of reality does that have and this this? Pulls back into the reality of the idea of the logos and the idea that it was the logos that God used at the beginning Of time to extract order out of chaos. So you think well, it’s transpersonal the goodness Because it’s not just characterized stick of any one person It’s more like something that inhabits a person rather than that a person is you can really see this for example on the other end With the satanic end because if you read the writings of people who do absolutely horrific things like the shooters You can see that possession extraordinarily clearly if your eyes are open it’s like and it’s shocking so people don’t usually look at it and They even say that themselves like that the Columbine kids their writings are hair-raising, you know And they were called clearly possessed by an evil that you only encounter If you sit in a dark place and brood on your hatred for months and years, right you go places that You go places where all the dark people go right right and then that if that takes you over Okay, so the good can take you over as well. Okay, so there’s this there’s this spirit of good Let’s say and what the spirit of good does is act in the world on the potential of the world To generate the actuality of the world and the Judeo-Christian Proposition is is that if you confront the potential of the world with good in mind using truth Truthful communication then the order that you extract is good And then that’s echoed in Genesis when God is using the word and he creates cosmos out of potential and every time he does that He says and it was good Which is I think it’s so interesting because there’s a proposition there and the proposition there is that if you encounter potential with truth The cosmos you create is actually good. Well, that’s that’s just an absolutely overwhelming idea It’s like if it’s true if it’s true, it’s the greatest idea there ever was Yeah, so your thoughts on this actually from maps of meaning help generate what we in in Judaism called Zvartor in Hebrew meaning the thought about the about the Bible, but it this Merged with a little bit of Aristotelian thought led me to the idea that when it comes to the Mystical notion of the tree of good and evil in in Eden. What is that supposed to be? What did what did people do wrong by eating from the tree of good and evil? And my feeling is that what they did wrong is that God created a universe in which the value was embedded in the object right in the same way that you in your in your book talk about if you’re teaching a child about An object the rules of the object are embedded in the teaching about the object So you use the example of a vase we were discussing this earlier But you use the example of a vase where you teach a child don’t touch the vase because the base will break So that the rule is embedded in the object in the same way in Aristotelian thought the rules for behavior are embedded in the nature Of the universe meaning what makes a man good is what makes a man unique Which is reason the idea is the reason is what makes a man unique So acting in accordance with right reason is what makes something is what makes an action good so if you believe that God created the universe along these lines and that what natural law is is just The human attempts to understand the lines along which create God created the universe Then where human beings went wrong is when they decided to separate values from the universe when we decided to take values and say This is a completely separate thing. So this vase has no rules attached to it anymore It’s just a vase and we can construct the rules arbitrarily as to what to do with this vase And so eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil Changes the nature of good and evil from the universe comes along with a set of rules to human beings think that they can use their own Intuition to supplant God’s rules and to supplant universal rules with their own particular vision of what the universe ought to be and at that point They have to be expelled. Yeah. Well, okay. Okay, so that’s also associated to some degree I would say with Milton’s warning in Paradise Lost because Milton basically portrays Lucifer Who’s the bringer of light weirdly enough as the spirit of unbridled? Rationality which accounts for the say the Catholic Church antagonism the Catholic Church’s antagonism towards rationality The idea was same idea in the Tower of Babel that human beings have a proclivity to erect their own dogmatic Ethical systems and then to expand them into a grandiosity that challenges the transcendent and that that’s a totalitarian catastrophe and For Milton Satan was the spirit that eternally does that right who says everything I know is enough And that supplants what I don’t know that supplants the transcendent and that that’s a catastrophe How that’s tangled up with the with the knowledge of good and evil while you’re making some headway towards towards sorting that out I mean there is a cataclysm that’s that’s explained in In in the story of Adam and Eve, right? The cataclysm is the coming to to wakefulness And it’s associated partly with recognition of nakedness Which is recognition of vulnerability and mortality and the discovery of death and then also the discovery of good and evil that goes along with that so you said well, that’s partly the The cognitive division of ethics from the facts of the object. So I have to think that through I would also recommend to people I think I mentioned this before is Ian McGilchrist’s book and the master and his emissary because he looks at this neuropsychologically right and and looks at the left hemisphere as the hemisphere that’s dealing with the Explicitly axiomatic systems and the right hemisphere that’s dealing with what those systems are embodied in Okay, so part of what happens with with the emergence of good and evil as far as I could tell it took me a long time to think about this is that And this is different than the than the hypothesis that you laid forward which is why I can’t reconcile it exactly Yes, you recognize you’re naked You know you can be hurt You know, you’re vulnerable and insufficient You hide from god because that’s what happens next and the reason you hide from god say god is your destiny or god is the You’re walking with god is a manifestation of your ultimate proper destiny You you doubt whether you’re capable of that because now you realize your embodied finitude your nakedness and insufficiency So you hide and you’re ashamed So there’s that You also realize that you can be hurt and suffer and that kind of goes along with god’s command that you’re going to work In the sweat of your brow and that you’re going to die and that women are going to be subjugated to men Which is put on as a curse not as a moral imperative, right? Right, but then what emerges out of that is that as soon as you you know that you can be hurt This is what differentiates us from animals And you really think that through here’s all the myriad ways I can be hurt Then you’re angry about that because you can be hurt but even worse you can figure out how to hurt other people And and so that’s part of that knowledge of good and evil you associated with this dissociation of the of the object from its ethical Container of the universe as created by god from our interpretation of the universe that there is a gap between the two and that once human beings begin to supplant their own rationality for Atelos right in in the universe Ateliology, what we end up doing is creating all sorts of awful systems that end up destroying us in the end There’s something about that. That’s right I mean part of what happens in the new testament as far as I can tell is that What christ says so he’s trying to transcend the rule structure, right? Not because there’s anything wrong with the rules. They’re necessary precondition for discipline, which is actually why I wrote 12 rules, right? It’s like you need rules But they’re but rules conflict and they don’t always apply and so there has to be an ethic underlying the rules And you should have more respect for the ethic than for the rules, right? okay christ’s idea and this is part of the idea of the reestablishment of paradise is that You should orient yourself towards the good And that’s something like an alliance with god and then that you should tell the truth and that’s that’s the ethic that generated the rules To begin with okay, and then we could be serious about this, you know, we could say well How do you adjudicate the reality of that claim? All right, so then we might think well we already walked through the fact that the heroes of the past Acted on potential to extract out the world of actuality and if they did that properly then the world they extracted was good And that that is a divine principle and then we might say well Is it a divine principle? And you might say well, what is it that’s acting through people in the good? Like the christian theological answer to that would be the logos, right? That’s the idea That’s the idea of the holy spirit roughly speaking right might think well, is that a real thing? It’s like well to me It’s real the same way that consciousness is real And we don’t know the role of consciousness in determining reality even but even if you’re an evolutionary biologist and this is so interesting because the evolutionary biologists actually discriminate differentiated themselves from darwin on this point like darwin was very very forthright in his claim that sexual selection Was as powerful as natural selection or even more so and so that so here’s where that goes and and because that was Because that brought consciousness into the world as an active player the materialistic evolutionary biologist ignored that for like 150 years and only Concentrated on natural selection where they could play while this is all chance, right? It’s like Sexual selection is not chance. Okay. So here’s a hypothesis Human beings separated themselves from chimpanzees One of the reasons they did that was because human females are sexually selective chimps aren’t Chimps will female chimps in estrus will mate with any chimp The main chimps the dominant ones chase the subordinate males away So they’re more likely to have offspring, but it’s not because of female choice Right now female human females have done this whole different thing is that they’ve they’ve they they have hidden fertility And they’re much more likely to go after guys who have Climbed up the hierarchy So, let’s say heroes will give the women some credit for intelligence right and say that that’s what they’re after Even if they’re using wealth and so forth and status as a marker They’re actually using those as a marker for competence. Yeah, and and I think that’s I think the evidence I think the evidence for that is clear. Okay, so you might say oh well it was human Female conscious choice that selected us Okay, and you think well, that’s not random. That’s not random at all It’s the farthest thing from random that there is and that means consciousness is making its choices with regards to what propagates But then it’s even more complex than that So here’s what happens among men the men all get together in their hierarchy. They posit a valued goal They all accept that as the goal because otherwise they wouldn’t be cooperating Right then they arrange themselves into a hierarchy and they let the most competent guys lead because they want to get to they want To get to the promised land. They want to get the most Competent leaders leading right competent defined by that value Okay, so here’s what happens essentially The men all get together and vote on the good men and the good men Are then chosen by the women and those are the people who propagate and so It’s like men are voting on which men get to reproduce And women are going along with the vote and and and being even more stringent in their in their choices Let’s say and so then what you get is that the consciousness that through its active expression transforms the potential of the world into actuality also selects the direction of evolution Right, and that’s where the meme Dawkins term turns into the biological reality. It’s not so yeah, this is something that’s so cool about Dawkins It’s like i’ve often thought this about Dawkins is if he would push his thinking to the limits He would fall right into young well, and then he’d be lost Because that’s a whole other universe, but if you take that meme seriously like and I mean really seriously you think yeah, there’s some ways of Conceptualizing that becomes so All encompassing that they yeah, that’s right. They start to become an actual force of evolution itself And so then here’s the case you could make consciousness Extracts the proper world of being from potential through truth and then it’s good It’s like okay That’s our hard one man that manifests itself in human beings at the individual level of individual consciousness That’s the logos within that’s the Metaphysical foundation of the idea of natural right and responsibility. Okay. That’s a bloody killer idea That’s expressed in the hero of heroes that idea That hero of heroes is the driving force behind human evolution So not only do you get the action of the logos metaphysically as The process that extracts order out of chaos at the beginning of time you also get it as the major driver of evolution And so then you ask Okay, then what kind of reality does that have? Because you you chase consciousness back and like it disappears into the mystery of the past and we have no idea what its relationship is with matter But it’s the force that gives rise to the cosmos and drives evolution. It’s like you’re getting pretty close to god there Yeah, even just pragmatically speaking and you’re certainly you know not close to but in the midst of an argument about free will because obviously if you if you make the Hard determinist argument that free will doesn’t exist and that consciousness is merely a sort of trick that your brain is playing on itself then how exactly does How does culture propagate how do how do these memes propagate? How are people choosing sexual selection and natural selection become one of the same as soon as you boil sexual selection down to natural selection? Well, and also I think the the free will argument I mean I see why harris gets tangled up in that you know because Well, first of all deterministic arguments are unbelievably powerful and when we use deterministic models for many things they really work So you could say well, we’re going to use that by default. It’s like fair enough. We’re going to deviate from that with care But I don’t see people as driven like clocks winding down First of all, we don’t wind down in any simple way We’re dissipative structures to use He wrote schrodinger. What is life a human being is a dissipative structure? We’re not we’re not an entropic structure like a clock running down We are in some sense, but as living beings we pull energy in and so we’re not winding down like a deterministic structure We’re something other than that And the way we treat each other Is as logos as far as I can tell the way I treat myself Right if i’m going to be good to myself In the proper sense is that i’m an active agent of choice confronting an infinite landscape of potential And casting that potential into a reality for good or for evil Okay, and if I Treat myself that way then I have proper respect for myself and proper fear of myself Because I can make bad decisions and warp the structure of reality And I think if you read frankl for example or solzhenitsyn And you see how your bad decisions can warp the structure of reality then that wakes you up, right? Okay, so there’s that If you don’t treat yourself like an an active agent imbued with logos, then your life doesn’t go well But more if you don’t treat other people that way they do not want to play with you If we set up societies that aren’t predicated on the idea that people are like that Then the societies become they dissolve or they become totalitarian almost instantly So then I would say well You’ve got the problem of determinism. It’s like fair enough, man how do you reconcile the fact that if you Lay out a society at every level of analysis on strict deterministic grounds it fails So doesn’t doesn’t that mean your hypothesis has a flaw? I mean, maybe not maybe you can say no the facts are independent of the ethical consequences, right? This is where the truth this is where the truth pragmatism question comes back into being right because sam was saying well It’s true regardless of what the effect is and you would say well it’s obviously not true if Morals are constructed for a pragmatic reason and if this pragmatism doesn’t work if it falls into nothingness Well, it also it also depends to some degree on what you’re willing to how you’re willing to test your hypothesis because I might say well If your hypothesis is factually correct, wouldn’t you assume that if people base their their their behaviors Individually and familial and socially on that set of facts Which is basically what sam claims about facts to begin with if you base your ethos on that those facts wouldn’t it work? Right. Well, he claims that that’s a test and i’d say well then it fails that test. Yeah, it doesn’t work We have to treat each other like divine centers of consciousness in order for society to work Yes, and I think well, that’s I can’t see any way out of those arguments. Yeah, I I can’t see there obviously Which is why you and I agree on so much about this kind of stuff And I think that it’s also the reason why people find your work really inspiring You know while the left wants to claim that you are an angry person or they’ll claim similarly that i’m a deeply angry person I don’t think there’s been quite an angry conversation. I’m pretty sure it has not been But i’m horrified by what the radical left is capable of but that doesn’t make me angry Exactly, and and I think that it’s it’s demonstrative of why so many people find what you’re doing inspiring because Unlike the radical left which is consumed with the idea of victimhood and victimology and we’re victims of the system like Marxism makes the claim that the only way that people suck is the claim that marxism makes but the only way to cure people Of sucking is by changing the entire system, which will in some magical fashion transform the nature of humanity Yeah in the proper direction, right? Exactly the claim that you’re making and I hope that i’m making as well Is that human beings do suck unless they decide to stop sucking? Right and that and your whole goal is to tell people exactly how it is that they can clean up their rooms your famous phrase Goes. Yeah. Well, they might as well start with what’s right in front of them it’s a lot harder than it looks because to clean up your room means To accept that it’s actually necessary for you to take that little bit of chaos That’s in front of you that chaotic potential and cast it into habitable order and then you have to develop the right attitude towards that It’s like, okay. Well, i’m going to put my room in order. Well, what do you mean? Order is in relationship to something, you know Like if your desk is ordered it means you’ve ordered it because you’re going to work there and you’re working there on something valuable And so the order is conceived of in relationship to a telos. It’s like, okay, you’re going to order your room Well, what are you going to do in it? Like what’s your room for what’s the purpose? What’s the purpose? You can’t order your room without Falling into purpose and I would say well if you’re going to fall into purpose, it’s like try it out on a local scale first Right, you don’t want to go out there and change the system. It’s like what the hell do you know leave the system alone See what you can do locally see if you can put yourself together See if you can put your immediate environment together and you’ll find if you’re in a chaotic household And a chaotic household would be one where No one has any discipline. No one has any aims and there’s a terrible battle between cain and abel going on all the time right, so So life sucks and everything’s miserable and we’re cynical and that’s what wisdom is It’s like and there’s no point in trying anything because everything’s meaningless and who the hell is going to care in a million years? And you’re a fool to move forward in any case. It’s like there’s your household. Okay, and so now you decide no Despite all that i’m going to put my room in order It’s like you will have a war on your hands because the first thing the people around you who are aiming down will do is Think oh you you really eh you think you’re so much better than we are Do you you really think that you and your fancy goddamn plans? It’s like we’re going to put every psychological obstacle we can possibly think of in your way Because if you succeed even in something that trivial you shed a very dim light on our existence And so we’re going to put we’re going to do everything we can to take you out And so this people think oh well cleaning your room. That’s just a cliche. It’s like yeah, really, right? Just go ahead and try it you see how much of a cliche that is and if you’ve got your room in order Then put your office in order See and then you’re going to encounter the as soon as you do that you step out into the social world you’re going to encounter the Antipathy between men and women you’re going to encounter the identity politics in the workplace You’re going to encounter how you regulate your sexual morality while you’re working with people of the opposite sex You’re going to encounter the ethics that are necessary to move your business forward It’s like the whole it’s a microcosm it really is and so to take those microcosm Seriously, well, that’s what i’m asking people to do and i’m saying look It isn’t only about you being happy it’s like yeah, whatever happen There’s lots of times in your life. You’re not going to be happy and so that’s not going to work You want to have something meaningful? That’s the the boat that will take you through the storm right when you batten down the hatches But there’s more it isn’t even that it isn’t even me Meaningful engaged life will see you through the catastrophes even though that’s a big deal, right? That’s a great proposition and I really believe it’s true because you can say to yourself. Yeah, it’s worth it Right, right and great and but there’s the other part of it too, which is Don’t be thinking that your errors aren’t linked to hell Because they are if you look at what happened in the 20th century the the brilliant commentators on the on the 20th century Totalitarian states and all of their atrocities said the same thing over and over It isn’t top-down evil leader manipulating innocent masses. That’s not it it’s the Moral failings of every single individual unwilling to say their truth unwilling to act out what they know to be right that accumulate and produce the catastrophic state and so when you’re Fussing about with your life when you’re not manifesting your potential when you’re falsifying your speech and your actions in the service of short-term Expedience you are working to bring about hell on earth and that’s true It’s true literally and then it’s true It’s I suspect it’s also true metaphorically and that’s a real truth man when you get the literal and the metaphorical working at the same time It’s like that’s that’s real So it isn’t just that you have to fix up yourself so that you know, you can have a better life It’s like who cares about you for a moment You know It’s you have to fix up your life because if you don’t every time you make a mistake that you know to be a mistake You’re leading the world toward hell and I believe that I think it’s true. Well, jordan peterson’s book is 12 rules for life Honestly, I we could do this all day long and we’ll certainly have you back. I really appreciate the time There’s a reason so many people follow jordan There’s some reason so many people are buying this book. The book is fantastic and his other book maps meeting is also fantastic So go ahead get a copy of that as well jordan. Thanks so much for stopping by really appreciate it. Thanks ben. It was great. Yep The ben shapiro show sunday special is produced by jonathan hay executive producer jeremy boring associate producers Mathis glover and austin stevens edited by alex zingaro audio is mixed by mike karamina hair and makeup is by jessua alvarez The ben shapiro show sunday special is a daily wire forward publishing production copyright forward publishing 2018