Iceland： 12 Rules for Life Tour： Lecture 1 (EM_QPCxCkws)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EM_QPCxCkws

I hope I can do better than this when Jordan comes out. Thank you for coming. I’m going to switch to English since we have, since Jordan hasn’t had, Dr. Peterson hasn’t had time to learn enough Icelandic yet. So thank you all for coming. This has been amazing. First when I got the idea to book him to Iceland I had no idea that others had been watching him on YouTube. So as it turns out a lot of people have been and of course he’s exploded since then in popularity. So we’ve sold out this venue which is almost three times larger than the first one we had and we’ve sold it out two times. So that’s pretty good. So he’s going to come up here and he’s going to speak for one hour and 15 minutes just about. Then he’s going to take a four minute break and go off stage before the Q&A. You can submit questions to the Q&A and we’re going to use a similar system that he’s been using on his trips in America with Dave Rubin. So I’m going to serve as a surrogate Dave Rubin here, a slightly less gay Dave Rubin. So and I’ll bring, I’ll ask him the questions and you will put them online on a site called Slido. So it’s spelled S-L-I dot D-O, Slido. I’ll say it in Icelandic as well, S-L-E punctur D-O, Slido. So it is customary to introduce the speaker as if you know me better than him. And usually when someone is being introduced, people tell things about him, things that are true about that speaker. Now of course you’ve all come here because you know who that guy is. And I’m going to do a different thing because I think it has, tells you more deeply something about what is going on with this guy. So I’m going to read you a few things that are wrong about him. So these are actual things that have been said about him in media, mostly in hit pieces and you know, character assassination attempts. And there has been one each day just about for a long time and some of them in big media. So he’s a far right guy, Hitler. He wants to force young women into marriage. He’s the stupid people’s smart person. That’s actually not that bad about him, but… So, and that’s the reason they say that, they want you to become afraid to admit that you like him or go to his talks. Well groomed alt right. At least he’s well groomed. A messiah comes surrogate dad for gormless dimwits. So that’s another one directed at you. I’m one of you as well because I don’t know what gormless means. But I suspect that having a gorm is preferable. So just stay away from this guy, dimwits. Jordan Peterson has nothing of value to say. He’s a patriarchal pseudo-scientist. He encourages young men to see themselves as victims. He delivers a mashup of Cosmote tips and my first book of myths. He’s a professor of Piffle. He seems like a terrible therapist. He’s a bad political and social thinker. An angry white guy. And the line between Peterson’s authoritarianism and Richard Spencer’s paleo-Nazism is a blurry one. He’s a Jewish shill. And if you’re going to be a shill, you want to be a Jewish shill. And he’s a fascist mysticist. This is just a small sample of what has been going on. And it’s all wrong. Perhaps, depending on how you define shill, shill is okay. But it’s all wrong. And that tells you something. A new one every day to misinform people about that man. And you can demonstrate it. It’s demonstrably false. Everything. And there are some people that see him as a risk to their agenda and their world. And their world view for some reason. But he’s a reasonable, balanced, moderate, truthful man. And I’ve never seen such a campaign against any thinker ever in the world. Not even someone that is untruthful or as despicable as they make him sound like. So this tells you something. This is the reason I was reading this. This tells you something about the importance of his message. And I’m not going to theorize about exactly what that is. Because there are lots of theories about exactly what it is in what he’s saying that is threatening. And to whom it is threatening. And I think actually many of them are correct. But let’s just listen to him. And let’s hear what he has to say. And we’ll figure out why it’s threatening later. So please give a warm welcome to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Thank you. Well that’s an introduction that I’m going to have to live up to. So I was thinking the other day about numbers. You know there are mathematicians who think that there isn’t anything more real than numbers. And that’s an interesting proposition. I mean it’s obviously the case that once you invent or discover numbers that confers on you a tremendous power. Who knows the limits of that power? And the claim that numbers are more real than anything else is predicated in part on the fact that when you discover them or invent them And start to utilize them that your ability to operate in the world expands immensely. And so that’s one of the ways of judging whether or not something is real is whether or not when you use it that facilitates your means of operating in the world. Interestingly numbers are abstractions. And so that raises another question which is well what’s more real? The thing that’s being abstracted from or the abstractions. And again that’s not obvious. And maybe the question of more real isn’t germane. Maybe it’s a question of equal reality. But it’s not obvious that abstractions aren’t real. And you can make a damn strong case that they’re more real than anything else. And so then you might ask yourself well then what are the most real abstractions? And so that’s what I’m going to start to talk about tonight. I’m going to talk about it in relationship to as many rules as I can lay out simultaneously. I’ll go through the rules first. So rule one is stand up straight with your shoulders back. And rule two is treat yourself like you’re someone responsible for helping. And number three, which is very tightly associated with number two, there’s sort of variations on a theme, is make friends with those people who want the best for you. And by the way these last two rules aren’t injunctions designed to make your life easier. They’re actually injunctions designed to make your life more difficult. Kierkegaard said at one point that his role in life, given that everything was proceeding to become easier and easier in all possible ways, that there would come a time when people would cry out for difficulty. And so that’s partly how he envisioned his role in the world, interestingly enough. As a universal benefactor of mankind who would strive to do nothing other than to make life more difficult for everyone. And so rule two and three are like that because treat yourself as if you’re someone responsible for helping isn’t the same as be nice to yourself. It’s not that. And to associate with people who want the best for you means that they get to demand the best from you. And that’s also not an easy thing. Rule four is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today. And that’s an injunction about envy. Right? It’s easy. You need people who, you need things that are above you. Because you need to do something worthwhile with your life. You need something to aim at. But one of the consequences of that is that you can become envious of people that you believe have attained more in a deserved or undeserved manner. And that can make you bitter. And so it’s much better to compare yourself to yourself and to use yourself as the target for improvement and comparison. Rule five is don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. And the rule of thumb there is if you dislike them, then other people will. And it’s a bad idea to allow your children to act in a way that makes other children dislike them or adults dislike them. Given that they’re going to have to deal with children and they’re going to have to deal with adults. So your primary responsibility as a parent is to help your child learn how to behave so that the social world opens up its arms to them and welcomes them at every level. And you’ve done your job if you can manage that. And it’s not a simple thing to do. Rule six is put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And that’s not take no action for others until you have your act together. That isn’t what the rule means. It means that bind your ambition with humility and work on what’s right in front of you that you will suffer for if you get wrong before you engage in the large scale transformation of other people. Rule seven is do what is meaningful and not what is expedient. And I would say in some sense, in some sense, that’s the core ethos of the book. Not exactly because rule eight, which is tell the truth or at least don’t lie, is a necessary conjunction to that or a necessary additional element. Because I don’t think that you can pursue what is meaningful without telling the truth. And the reason for that is if you don’t tell the truth or let’s say if you lie, which is an easier way to think about it, you corrupt the mechanisms, the instinctual mechanisms that manifest themselves as meaning. And then you can’t trust them. And that’s a very bad idea. So the fundamental reason to not lie is because you corrupt your own perceptions if you lie. And when you corrupt your own perceptions, then you can’t rely on yourself. And if you can’t rely on yourself, then well, good luck to you. Because what are you going to rely on in the absence of your own judgment? You’ve got nothing if you lose that. Rule eight is, as I said, tell the truth or at least don’t lie. Rule nine, assume that the person that you’re listening to knows something you don’t. And that’s not so much a mark of respect for the person, although it is that. It’s a mark of recognition of your own unbearable ignorance. You know, one of the things you have to do in life is decide whether you’re more. You have to make friends more with. Let me see. Let me just let me rephrase that properly. You have to decide what’s more important, what you know or what you don’t know. First of all, there’s a lot of what you don’t know. And so if you make friends with that, if you decide that’s important, then well, that’s a good thing. Because you’re going to be surrounded by what you don’t know your entire life. And so if you’re appreciative of that, then that’s going to make things go better for you. But the other element of that is, well, why should you be appreciative of what you don’t know? And the answer to that is, well, you shouldn’t. If your life is absolutely perfect in every way, you have exactly what you need and want. You’ve put everything in order around you, then what you know is sufficient. But if you believe that things could still be put right around you in your own personal life, and with regard to the effect that you have on other people, then obviously what you don’t yet know is more important than what you do know. And you should be paying attention to find out what you don’t know at every possible moment. And if you’re fortunate when you have a conversation with someone and you’re actually interested in what they say, then even if they’re not very good at communicating, even if they’re awkward, or even if they display a certain amount of enmity towards you, there’s always the possibility that they might tell you something you don’t know. In which case you can walk away from the conversation less ignorant and corrupt than you were when you started the conversation. And if your life isn’t everything that you would like it to be, then being slightly less ignorant and corrupt is probably a good thing. And so rule ten is be precise in your speech. And that’s an observation, I would say, that’s a variant of a New Testament injunction, which is, or maybe a description of the nature of the world, which is knock and the door will open and ask and you will receive, which is a very strange theory, let’s say. But, which I would say is far more in accordance with what we know about the psychology of perception, let’s say, than you might imagine. Because it is the case that you don’t get what you don’t aim at. You might get what you do aim at. And your aim might get better as you aim as well, which is something to consider. If you specify the nature of the, actually if you specify the nature of the being that you want to bring into being, then you radically increase the probability that that’s what will occur. And of course you all know that because you regard yourself, at least to some degree, as active creative agents, right? Your fundamental attitude towards yourself, at least in the manner that you act towards yourself, is that you wake up in the morning and you have a landscape of possibilities that lay themselves open to you and you make choices between those possibilities and determine in consequence how the world is going to manifest itself. So you confront a field of potential, that’s a good way of thinking about it, and through your choices you determine which elements of that potential are going to concretize themselves into the real world. And you are very unhappy with yourself if you don’t do that properly, and you’re very unhappy with other people if they don’t do that properly, and you’re very unhappy with other people if they don’t treat you like that’s what you’re like. Because part of what you demand from people, let’s say, in terms of sheer civility, is that they act towards you as if you’re the locus of voluntary choice in a world of potential. And you upbraid each other for that as well. If you have children and parents, your parents will say to you, if you’re fortunate, you’re not living up to your potential. Which is actually a compliment, in a sense, even though it’s also a judgement, and the compliment is, I know perfectly well that you could be more than you are. And you’ll hang your head if you have any sense and you’ll think, like you think in relationship to your own conscience, that yes, I have a lot of potential that I’m not fully realizing, and that actually constitutes a transgression against the good. And I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t believe that, if you have a reasonable conversation with them. It just seems self-evident. I mean, maybe now and then you meet someone who’s narcissistically self-satisfied, but then they’re narcissistic, and that’s not good. As a medium to long-term strategy, that’s a catastrophe. That ends in disaster. You know, it’s a short-term, it protects people, but long-term, it’s not good, in the least. And of course, other people don’t appreciate it as well. Rule 11 is don’t bother children when they’re skateboarding. And that’s actually a discussion of courage, of encouragement, more specifically, because I’ve been trying to understand, for example, what role parents play in the lives of their children. And I would say this is a role that is of fundamental importance, as well as attempting to guide your children, so that they act in a socially desirable manner, so that the world opens itself up to them. You also want to encourage them, which is not the same as sheltering them. It’s not the same at all. And to encourage someone is to say something like, or to act out something like, look, kid, the world’s already difficult, because the world isn’t easy for children any more than it’s easy for adults. The difficulties are, they’re not the same, they’re child-sized difficulties, but they’re still difficulties. The world is a very hard place, and it’s a bitter place in many ways. And it’s not only a hard and bitter place, it’s also touched with betrayal and malevolence. And that’s the fundamental bottom line. But there’s something in you that is capable of taking that full on and transcending it. And that’s encouragement. You say, well, as difficult as things are, you’re up to the challenge. And to interfere with children when they’re skateboarding, for example, when they’re doing, let’s say, inadvisably dangerous things, which kids, of course, do if they’re skateboarding. To interfere with that is to interfere with the child’s willingness to voluntarily expose themselves to the risks that they need to expose themselves to in order to develop the sort of competence that allows them to thrive in a world they cannot be sheltered from. And so to interfere with children when they’re taking necessary risks is not love or empathy, but cowardice on the part of parents. And it’s deeply damaging to children. And I can tell you, as a clinical psychologist, I’ve never had a client come to my office in all the hundreds of encounters I’ve had with people in my office. I’ve never had a client say, my parents made me too independent. Right. That hasn’t happened once. Right. Now, my parents made me too dependent, or I conspired with my parents to perpetuate my dependence. That happened all the time. So there’s a rule of thumb, which I think is a good one, which I believe is often applied in nursing homes by people who work in nursing homes, which is, of course, a very difficult job. And the rule is, do not do anything for anyone they can do for themselves. And the reason for that is that it’s a form of theft. Right. You don’t, first of all, if you do something for someone, and it facilitates their movement forward, then they move forward because you helped them, which is something I was very careful about as a therapist. I don’t want to give my clients advice. First, it might fail, in which case they are going to pay for my advice. And second, if it succeeds, then I get to be the successful one. And I don’t want to steal the success from my clients. That’s a bad idea. I want to help them figure out what it is that they should aim at, and then help plot out a strategy for attaining that. But I want to ensure that it’s their destiny, not something I’m imposing. And, of course, the imposition of that sort of thing is the hallmark of a bad, I would say, therapeutic relationship, but also a bad relationship, period. Right. So one of the things you want to do with your partners, your spouse, say your husband or wife, and also with your children, is to listen to them so that you can figure out what their problems are, and figure out with them, because they’re going to figure that out by communicating, and then perhaps aid them in the development of a strategy, but you have to ensure very carefully that you’re not imposing your own structure in a manner that’s going to steal from them what’s rightfully theirs. So, rule 11 is an injunction to courage as the fundamental… Because you could say, well, what’s the antidote to the catastrophe of life? And one answer might be safety. It’s like, well, you know, look, everyone’s sensible enough to know that a certain amount of provision for safety is worthwhile. You should probably wear your seat belts when you’re driving around in your car, because why take foolhardy risks? But given that there is no security in life in the final analysis, then encouragement is a much better medication than sheltering. And so… And that’s, I think, in keeping with the idea that what life is essentially is not a place to attain happiness, or even to aim for happiness, even though you should be grateful if some comes along now and then, but a call to something like adventure. And I think that’s the proper way of conceptualizing it. Certainly, if you go watch a story, a movie, you read a book, something like that, if you encounter a narrative that’s gripping, whether it’s a romance or a classic adventure story, then the element of it that’s gripping is the adventure. And so to portray life as an adventure in romance and in the world is the proper way to portray it. And the way that you facilitate the adventure is through encouragement. I had a client once. I really liked him. He was a good guy. He was a smart guy. Good-looking young guy. Had everything going for him, you know. He was a good musician. He was a talented athlete. But he hadn’t been encouraged, I wouldn’t say. He told me about his relationship with his girlfriend. He said his girlfriend wanted to go biking around southern Ontario. She was about 19 or 20. And he thought he might join her. And when she went and talked to her parents, they made every provision possible to help her prepare for the journey, to make sure her bike was in good shape. To make sure she had the right equipment to help her plot out a route. And when he went and talked to his parents, all they did was worry that he was going to get hurt. And like, he might get hurt because people get hurt. But they didn’t understand that they were choosing between the hurt that he might encounter by going out in the world and having an adventure, let’s say, with his girlfriend, or the hurt that he would encounter by staying at home, cowering in his basement under the protection of his over-loving parents, while his girlfriend ventured bravely into the world. You think, well, which of those two things is most likely to be damaging? And the answer to that is, well, his parents wouldn’t worry as much as if he was in the basement. And that’s the wrong worry, even, because they should worry more, not less. So in Rule 12 is, pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. And it’s, oddly enough, a meditation on fragility. It’s a discussion of what you do when you don’t know what to do. And that’s really when things have gone badly for you, when you face a terrible tragedy in your own personal life, or in your familial life, or perhaps even in the life of your community, when things come crowding in at you too quickly. In the case of a death in the family, or a terrible illness, or the collapse of a dream, or any of the things that can flip your world upside down, is how do you cope with that? And that chapter contains discussion of the necessity of narrowing your time frame. Because sometimes the right way to look at the world is across years, and sometimes it’s across months. When things are more out of control, perhaps it’s across days, and when things are really, when you’re really up against the wall, it’s across hours or even minutes. And during those minutes, then you concentrate on doing as well as you can with what’s right in front of you, for the longest unit of time that you can tolerate conceptualizing. Maybe that’s what you do at someone’s deathbed. And while you’re doing that and suffering away madly, then you also take the time to appreciate everything you can that manifests itself, that allows itself to be appreciated. And so that’s the metaphor of the cat, I suppose. And so that’s the 12 rules. And I’ll return to rule one, which is stand up straight with your shoulders back, and I’m going to use it as a platform for laying out the abstractions that I talked to at the beginning of the lecture. So, some of you might be familiar with the central Taoist symbol, and it’s a symbol of Tao. And Tao is a very strange word. It doesn’t have an easily translatable single meaning. At least in English, it means a variety of things. It means the path of life. So that would mean the path that you take as you move forward through life. But it would mean more also the proper path. So it’s that. It’s the proper path through life. So the idea Tao is a symbol of reality. And one of the things it means is the path you take through life. And so there’s an implicit idea there that the fundamental reality of life is the path you take through life. It’s not a materialist idea. It’s a different kind of idea. It’s the idea that life is a journey while we’re mobile creatures and we’re on a journey. And the best way to conceptualize reality is as the place that you journey through. And the question is, well, what are the elements, what are the constituent elements of the place that you journey through? Because that’s also part of Tao. And the Taoists believe that that’s yin and yang. Yin is the black serpent, because those are two serpents head to head that make up the totality of the world. And the black serpent is yin. And yin is feminine, classically speaking, from the Taoist perspective. It’s a symbolic representation. It doesn’t mean that women are yin and that men aren’t. It’s not that. It’s an attempt to use sexual symbolism to represent a deeper underlying reality. And yang is masculine. Yin is dark and night. And there’s a white dot in the black serpent and there’s a black dot in the white serpent. The white serpent is the daytime and masculinity. And it’s the interplay between those two things that make up reality. And one can transform into the other at any moment. And so that’s the Taoist idea of reality. And so there’s yin and yang and they make up the world. And the question is, perhaps our question is, well what exactly does that mean? Well, it actually means something. It’s a kind of abstraction. And it’s actually an incredibly helpful abstraction, once you understand the abstraction. It might be the most real abstraction there is. So I’m going to lay out a little bit, I’ll lay out for you a little bit about what these two domains refer to. And then I’m going to make a case that they’re real. And then I’m going to tell you what it means that they’re real. So you could think of yin as chaos. Now we need to know what chaos is. Now, chaos is what God made the world out of at the beginning of time. So one of the things that chaos is, it’s something like potential. And so you can imagine, and this is not how we think as modern people. Because we tend to think in a materialist way. But it is how we act. And as I said already, you act as if you confront potential. And you treat potential as if it’s real. And if your attitude towards it confers on you a certain moral obligation. Which is why you know what people mean when they say you’re not living up to your potential. No one ever says, well what do you mean by potential? Not unless they’re being argumentative, because you already know. And very few people say, well I’m fully living up to my potential. So you admit to the reality that undergirds the conception that makes that question a possibility immediately. The potential is, well potential is the future. That’s part of it. And we believe in the future. We believe that it exists. Even though it isn’t here and it’s not measurable. It only exists as a potential set of realizable possibilities. That’s what the future is. It’s really what we contend with. We don’t really contend with the present precisely. We orient ourselves towards the future. And the future comes at us from every direction. And we decide as we encounter the future which parts of it we’re going to interact with. And how we’re going to construct the present and the past as a consequence of doing that. And so part of chaos is potential. And that’s the positive part. It’s like if you’re in a bind, what you look for is potential. Is there another way of conceptualizing this? Do I have a different way of acting? Can I make another plan? Is there something that I’m not taking into account that would make this terrible situation tolerable? That’s all an attempt to call upon potential. And to use it to transfigure a reality that’s intolerable. And maybe it’s intolerable because of the way you’re conceptualizing it. Now I’m not being naive about that. I understand perfectly well that people can find themselves so badly cornered in life. That they’re basically done no matter what they do. People obviously develop fatal illnesses and they die. Their businesses collapse. Genuinely terrible things can happen to you that aren’t your fault that you can’t fix. I’m not saying that you can just gerrymander the world by changing your attitude. It’s not that straightforward. But I am saying that you have a tremendous ability to transform the landscape of possibility that reveals itself in front of you. And that when things are terrible, that’s your best bet. It doesn’t mean it will succeed. It just means you don’t have a better option. And so chaos, that potential, is also something that manifests itself in a terrible manner. So imagine this. This is a good way of thinking about it. So imagine that you have an intimate relationship. Let’s say a marriage. And the marriage is predicated on trust and fidelity, which is a variant of trust. And that the trust and fidelity is an axiom of your memories. You might think, well, what does that mean? It’s like, well, let’s play it out. Imagine you’ve been married for 10 years. And then your wife tells you that she has had three affairs. Each of them lasted three years. And the last one has lasted five years. And it’s still ongoing. Or maybe you discover that. Okay. So then you might say, well, what happens then? Well, what happens is that everything you thought was wrong. Right? And this is such an interesting thing, because it actually means you had the past. And you think the past is fixed. It’s done with. That’s why it’s the past. But all of a sudden you find out that one of the things that you thought about the past, and it happens to be a very important thing, wasn’t true at all. And so what that means is that whole past that you thought was what it was, wasn’t what it was at all. And so it transforms itself from an actuality into potential. And most of that potential is negative. Unless you’re relieved that your wife had an affair. Well, but that’s an important consideration, because you can imagine a situation where your marriage is dreadfully unhappy, and you’re just looking for an excuse to leave. It’s possible that that revelation, even though it would be shocking, would also come with a fair bit of relief. And so the potential that manifests itself, even when it’s unexpected, doesn’t only necessarily manifest itself in a negative guise. It can also free you. And if your marriage was unhappy, even if you wanted to cling to it, if your marriage wasn’t happy, and the betrayal was revealed, and you’re divorced and you set yourself up in two years, you might be in a better place than you were. It’s not a pathway I’m recommending, by the way. I’m just saying that it’s more complicated than it looks. That’s the introduction of chaos into order. And the oldest story we have is something like, order is susceptible to disruption by chaos. And the fundamental demand that’s made on the human being is to contend with the chaos that disrupts order. Not to live in order, and not to live in chaos, but to be able to contend with the chaos that disrupts order. And so when you encourage your children, for example, what you’re doing is encouraging them to become the masters of the chaos that can disrupt order, rather than denizens of order, which makes them tyrants, or denizens of chaos, which makes them nihilistic and hopeless. So you train your children, you encourage your children, and yourself and your partner, if you have any sense, to be a master of emergent chaos, and to be able to contend with that. And so chaos is potential, and it’s this disruptive… It’s the capacity of the infinite world to disrupt your finite considerations. That’s another way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is it’s the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And the reason that that story is set up the way it is is because it’s trying to represent that. There’s no place that’s so bounded and secure, even if it’s set up by God himself, that doesn’t have an agent of chaos inside it. It’s exactly the same idea that the Dalits put forward with their symbolic representation. It’s just portrayed in a different manner. And the question is, well, what do you do in the Garden, given that there’s a snake in it? And the answer to that is something like, you become the master of snakes. And so… and that’s a deep idea. That’s the same idea as confronting the dragon and getting the treasure. That’s the same idea as going to the bottom of the ocean and rescuing your father from the belly of the whale. It’s the same idea. And that’s an element in the greatest of stories, and the greatest of stories is the heroic story. And the heroic story is to voluntarily confront the unknown when it manifests itself and to gather something of value as a consequence and to share it with the community. There isn’t a story that’s more emblematic of what it means to be human than that. That is us. That’s our best bet. Alright, so chaos. Chaos is the catastrophe that will suddenly enter your life. Chaos is the flood that’s definitely coming. Chaos is the ever-present possibility of apocalypse in your personal life, in your familial life, and in this broader social life. Chaos is the consequence of your finite fragility existing in a world that’s beyond you. Chaos is potential. Chaos is what lies before you. Chaos is what you can call on when you need something to rescue yourself from malfunctioning order. It’s a permanent element of existence. Chaos is what you don’t know. Chaos is what’s outside the fire. Chaos is what’s outside the walls of your house. Chaos is what’s outside the walls of your town. Chaos is what’s outside of the borders of your country. All of that is chaos and potential. Order. Order is where you are when what you’re doing is working in the manner that you intended. Okay, it’s a very specific definition. How do you know that you know what you’re doing? Well, you don’t, because you don’t know what you’re doing, because you don’t know everything. Everything you do is bounded by ignorance. Well, you still have to operate in the world. And so what you do is you make finite plans, and then you execute plans, and then you execute strategies to make those plans manifest themselves. And if the plans manifest themselves the way that you desired, then you regard your knowledge as sufficient. That’s your definition of truth. And it’s the only definition of truth that you can use, because you don’t have everything at hand. And when you’re aware what you’re doing is working, that’s order. And you might think, well, I should just stay there, because that’s a comfortable place to be. And there’s a certain amount of truth to that, except for one thing. If you’ve defined a domain of order, and you stand in it, and you wait, the disorder will enter all by itself. Because things aren’t static, things change all the time. And your attempt to bind yourself within a static structure is destined to fail, because everything around you is in flux, and the thing that you’ve parceled out as permanent will transform itself across time. Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a perfectly well-adapted 11-year-old. And it’s actually possible to meet 11-year-old children who are often very delightful, because they’re like adult children. They’re not teenagers. They’re the most mature form of children. And they can be really delightful people. And then, like, three years later, you hate them. And the reason for that is that, of course, as soon as they hit puberty, which is the emergence of chaos into the already developed childhood structure, it’s really the emergence of sexuality into a structure that didn’t have to adapt to sexuality, and maybe even the emergence of aggression to some degree, but mostly sexuality, if the child maintains only the 11-year-old personality, by the time they’re 16, they’re no longer a delightful 11-year-old. They’re a very immature 16-year-old. And the reason that I’m pointing that out is just because something works for you now doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you five years from now. And so, in order to remain stable, you can’t be stagnant. They’re not the same thing. Stability is a dynamic, not something static. And so, not only do you have to be where you are, but you have to be going to where you’re going, and you have to be participating in both of those things actively. So, it’s stability plus transformation. And I would say that manifests itself. You know when you’re there because that manifests itself as meaningful. That’s actually the instinct of meaning, which is an instinct, and perhaps the deepest instinct is precisely the instinct that tells you when where you are is sufficiently stable, but you’re transforming yourself at a sufficient rate to keep up with everything that’s changing. And you know that because if you’re at your job, you might say to yourself, well, my job is really secure, but it’s not very challenging. And you think, well, why do you care about that? It’s very secure. And the answer to that is, well, if it’s not challenging, it’s deadening in a sense, right? The spirit goes out of it if it’s not challenging. You need to be challenged. And why is that? Well, the answer is, well, tomorrow is coming. And whoever you are now isn’t enough for tomorrow. And so today you also have to be preparing for tomorrow and next week and next year. And if your job isn’t challenging, then it isn’t doing that for you. And you find it deadening, not meaningful. And the reason for that is that it violates your most essential instinct. And your most essential instinct is the instinct for meaning. And it signifies that it actually signifies that you have the balance between chaos and order right, deeply right, which is why it’s the most fundamental of instincts, because chaos and order are the most real of things. All right, so you have the chaos that surrounds you and in some sense infinite in scope. And then you have the order that you produce, which is your mastery of it. Well, let’s take order apart for a minute. I want to think about the structure of order. And I’m not saying that chaos is bad and order is good. I’m not saying that at all. That’s not the right way to look at it. It’s the balance between them that’s of crucial importance. They exist as superordinate categories. Whether you like them or not is really not that relevant. They’re the fundamental constituent elements of reality. You might say, well, what’s your evidence for that? And I can tell you one piece of evidence, which I won’t go into for very much time. You have two hemispheres. And each in your brain, your brain is composed of two hemispheres, which implies something about the nature of the world, given that your brain is hypothetically adapted to the structure of the world. It’s not just your brain, because animal brains have the same fundamental structure, this bifurcated structure. And the bifurcation indicates that there’s two fundamental realities, because otherwise why would you need a bifurcated structure? Or maybe you’d need a triune brain or one that’s divided into four, but that isn’t what you have. You have one that’s divided into two. And if your working definition of reality is scientific, biological, let’s say, then your definition of reality is, reality is that which shapes life. You can’t actually do better than that from a Darwinian perspective. And if the reality that shaped life produced a bifurcated representational structure, then that implies that the proper way to represent reality, and perhaps that reality itself, is in fact bifurcated. And I believe it’s bifurcated in the manner I just described. And the neurological evidence for that is actually quite overwhelming. It’s come from multiple sources, some of them Russian, some of them American. That’s where most of the work has been done. Your left hemisphere is specialized for operation in those situations that you know and understand. And your right hemisphere is specialized for operation in those situations that you neither know nor understand. And the proper way to orient yourself in life is to get the balance between those two sets of operations correct. And the way that manifests itself in your subjective experience is as meaningful engagement. And so, that’s not a bad first pass. What would you say? Justification for the view that these two domains are the most real domains. Okay, so order. What is order? Well, if you just sit there and do nothing, that will be chaos. Why? Well, because you’ll suffer and die. That’s what will happen. So, without action on your part, deterioration and death is a certainty. Okay, so you need to act. Well, then we built on an action platform. We’re the consequence of three billion years of evolution for action. Action, movement forward in the face of necessity is the prime dictum of life. That’s a good way of thinking about it. We’re embodied action. What do you have to do when you act? Well, at minimum, you have to do whatever keeps you able to act. These are truisms, right? I mean, you have to have something to eat. You have to have some fresh water. You need some shelter, right? You need some companionship. You need a sexual partner. You need children. You need play. You need to be touched. And I actually mean need, by the way. People deprived of play go insane. People who aren’t touched die. These things are necessary. Well, assuming that survival itself is necessary. But we’ll start with that. We’ll start with the assumption that just sitting there and suffering and dying is not the right solution. Okay, so you have to act in the world. You have to act in the world in a manner that stops you from deteriorating and dying at minimum. And that means that you have to address the problems that are intrinsic to that destiny. Now, you have all sorts of systems that have evolved to help you do that. Motivational systems. You have to eat so you get hungry. You have to find water and consume it so you get thirsty. You get lonely. You get curious. There’s specialized biological systems that are very, very old. You get aggressive. You get afraid. You suffer pain. All those specialized systems for all of those unidirectional systems of orientation in the world. And they help you figure out what to do. So when you’re hungry, it’s time to eat. And when you’re thirsty, it’s time to drink. And when you’re lonesome, it’s time to seek out some companionship. And you have specialized systems that help you do that. But they’re not enough because, well, they’re not very bright. That’s one way of looking at it. They’re kind of unidimensional. And you also have the problem of organizing all of them. It’s like, well, you have to eat now and you have to drink now and you need a companion. And it’s probably time to play. And you have to do something about shelter. And there isn’t just you right now. There’s you now and tomorrow and next week and a year from now and five years from now. So you have to plan across all those stretches of time. And there isn’t just you now in the future. You, there’s you plus your family and your community. And so all of that has to be taken into account while you’re plotting your movement forward. It’s very, very complicated. You have all these problems to solve simultaneously. And your motivational systems, anger, hunger, and so forth, can help you solve one of those problems now, but not all of them permanently. That requires higher cognitive function. And that’s part of what drove the evolution of our complex cognitive systems. That’s how do you propagate the game across time in a complex environment. The left hemisphere operates when what you’re doing works. And so a lot of what you do during your life is to keep your right hemisphere off. People don’t like it going on accidentally. It’s the home of negative emotion. It’s the home of pain and anxiety. It’s the thing that turns on and freezes you in your tracks when something that you deeply did not expect happens. And it prepares you to deal with the onslaught of what you didn’t expect. Now, it’s not all bad news because to use the right hemisphere in a judicious manner is also something that adds intrigue and interest and artistic expression and all sorts of positive things to your life. So because potential is not only negative, it’s also positive. It can be dealt with in ways that are deeply enriching and meaningful. Order. Okay, so you have to do something. Otherwise, the consequences are dire. To do something, you have to value something. It’s a definitional issue because to do something is to act out the proposition that the thing you’re doing, the thing you’re aiming at, let’s say, is preferable to the thing you have. And preferable means you’ll do it. So those things are tied together so tightly you can’t disentangle them. If you say, I’m aiming at X, but I don’t value it, then you’re not going to be able to do it. If you don’t value it, then there’s something wrong with the way that you’re conceptualizing the statement because to aim at something and to work to bring it into existence is the same as valuing it. And if you say, well, I don’t value it, then something’s out of kilter. Either you’re acting out of falsehood or you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s one of those two things. You meet people like that who are deeply confused. They’re their action patterns and their verbal self representation don’t mesh. But that doesn’t mean that they’re critics of value. It just means that they’re deeply confused. So you have to act or you suffer. In order to act, you have to have a value structure because to act, you have to value one thing more than another, which means that you have to inhabit a structure of value. You have to. OK, so you need a structure value because it’s the antidote to catastrophe. Now, if you act out a structure of value socially, which you will because you’re social, you’re not going to pursue your aims in isolation because you’re not you’re not a solitary animal. You’re a social animal. You’re a tribal animal. Deeply tribal. We live in groups. We live in families. We live in communities. We live in large societies. We’re social at every level of analysis. And we’ve been social for as long as we’ve been primates. So maybe that’s that’s at least six million years. And it might be more like 60 million years. It’s really a long time. So it’s not an arbitrary social construction. It’s far, far deeper than that. Now, what happens when you act out a structure of value in a social environment? You produce a hierarchy. Inevitably. Well, let’s think it through. Why? Well, let’s say that you say that one thing is more worth doing than another, whatever it happens to be. And then you tell a bunch of people about what you’re doing, and they decide that they’re going to come along and help you do this thing that’s valuable because they also think it’s valuable. And maybe you get 20 people together to do this thing, whatever it happens to be. And the first thing you discover is that some of the people are way better at doing whatever it is that they’re doing than other people. So and that and who knows why that is, because it depends on what you chose to do. You know, if you chose A, then it would be a different group of people who were good at it than if you chose B, because people differ in their abilities. But one thing you will not escape from if you make an organization to do something valuable is the brute fact that it will be a minority of the people who are good at doing it. And there’s actually a law. It’s called Price’s Law. And it’s a real law. It even governs the size of cities and the mass of stars and the heights of plants in the jungle. It just doesn’t govern human interactions. And Price’s Law says that the square root of the number of people engaged in enterprise will do half the work. So if you have 10 people doing something, three of them will do half the work. But if you have 100 people doing something, then 10 of them will do half the work. And if you have 10,000 people doing something, then 100 of them will do half the work. And you know how wealth distributes itself such that a minority of people have most of the money. 85 richest people in the world have as much money as the bottom 2.5 billion. It’s something like that. And everybody goes, oh my god, the 1%. It’s like, well first of all, you’re all the 1%, so get over yourself, because you’re Western European, roughly speaking. And by current world standards and certainly by historical standards, you’re all well ensconced in the 1%. So if that’s a problem, well, it’s a problem for all of you. And some of you might be richer than that, but that doesn’t mean all of you aren’t in the same boat fundamentally. The fact that wealth aggregates in the hands of a small number of people is part of the general expression of Price’s Law. There’s nothing special about the distribution of money. You see the same thing in every creative domain. I mean, how many of you have recorded a gold record? How many? Looks like zero. Oh, there’s one. One person. Okay, there’s 850 people in here. So there’s one in a thousand, so that’s one tenth of 1%, something like that. How many of you have written a piano concerto? How about painting that’s hanging in a national museum? Oh, look, it’s none of you again. Right. Well, and how many of you have been a member of a professional sports team? Okay, look. Oh, one. One. So that’s one in a thousand. Well, you get the point here. Well, there was a couple. There was. Okay, so it looks like it’s easier to be a member of a professional sports team. Or my audience is biased. The sample is biased. But it is the case. If you look at high levels of creative achievement of the sort I’ve just described, they characterize a staggering minority of people. And so the rule is that you produce a value system, which you better produce, because otherwise you suffer and die. And it isn’t only that. It’s like, look, here’s something else you all know, as far as I can tell. We start with the idea that there’s an intrinsic chaotic element to life, and that includes the inevitability of suffering and malevolence, betrayal at the hands of yourself and other people. So that’s the baseline. And that’s intolerable in many ways, because life is in many ways intolerable. And the question is, well, what do you do in the face of something that’s intolerable? And the answer is, well, you try to find something that justifies it, right? You want to have something that gets you the hell out of bed in the morning. And not just any old morning, but a morning when your father has Alzheimer’s disease and your daughter has an incurable illness. Because you need something to get out of bed for in those mornings, too. And that better be the purpose that you found in life. And if the purpose is going to be such that it gets you out of bed in those mornings, it better be a pretty damn noble purpose. Because otherwise, why would you bother? And so not only do you need a value structure, you need one that’s of sufficient tension, let’s say, or sufficient value or sufficient nobility. So that it’s worth suffering for. Because you’re going to suffer, and you better have something that makes the suffering justifiable. And so not only do you need the value structure so that you don’t just deteriorate and die, you need the value structure so that when the flood comes in your life, as it certainly will, that you have built a vessel that will sustain you through the catastrophe. And that’s not this pursuit of happiness. It’s not even the pursuit of security. It’s none of that. It’s the orientation that you’ve managed to produce in your own life towards a higher good that’s so high that it’s worth bearing the burden of being to produce. You implement that in the world, you produce a hierarchy. Now you might say, well, and then you have the problem of hierarchy. And the problem of hierarchy is a very few people are going to be very good at whatever that hierarchy does. And then you have the second problem with hierarchy, which is the problem I just laid out when I asked you about your spectacular levels of attainment and found out that they were very, it was very unlikely. I’m not saying that you haven’t attained worthwhile things. That’s not my point. My point is that very high levels of attainment are extraordinarily rare. And that’s an inevitability. As soon as you decide that something’s worth doing to inevitabilities, people stack up at the top minority of people stack up at the top and take most of the proceeds, whatever they happen to be or deserve them or earn them, whatever. However, I don’t care how you conceptualize it. And almost everybody else stacks up at the bottom. And so the problem with hierarchies is that even though they’re necessary, they tend to produce a situation where most people stack up at the bottom. And so that’s the next thing that we have to contend with. You can’t get rid of the hierarchies because if you get rid of the hierarchies, there’s no value structure. And if there’s no value structure, not only do you deteriorate and die, you want to deteriorate and die. And that’s not a good solution. But if you do generate a hierarchy, then you have the problem of the hierarchy. And the problem of the hierarchy is that it will dispossess most people. Now, to the degree that the postmodernists have something to say, that’s what they say. Is hierarchies dispossess. And then we can look at that clearly and carefully. And we can say that doesn’t mean, A, that hierarchies themselves are corrupt or that we can dispense with them. But it also doesn’t mean that we have no moral obligation to the dispossessed. And we say, well, how do we deal with that politically, conceptually? And the way we deal with that, at least in part, is to produce a political spectrum that ranges from left to right, that deals with hierarchy and the problems that hierarchies cause. So one of the things that you can reliably assume about someone who’s on the right is that they will be patriotically in favor of the current hierarchy. Or even more abstractly, they’re in favor of the idea of hierarchy itself. And you say, well, more power to the people on the right, because you need hierarchies. So they should support them. But then you have to take the people on the left who say, yeah, but what about the people who are dispossessed by the hierarchy? And what you have to say to them is, yeah, we actually have to do something about that. And you think, well, how do we do something about that? And the answer is, we don’t actually know. Because there’s no permanent solution to the problem of dispossession by the hierarchy. We don’t know how to fix it. You say, well, we could flatten the hierarchies. It’s like, not without disrupting the value structure. That’s a price you don’t want to pay. Well, we could take from the top and put it at the bottom. It’s like, yes, hypothetically, we could. But it turns out that when you try that in practice, it’s very, very easy to rapidly go too far. And then what you end up with not is less dispossessed. You end up with no one who has anything. And that’s not a good solution to the problem of scarcity, right? To make everyone equally dead or equally starving, which is essentially what the communist states did. Across the entirety of the 20th century is not the proper way to address the problem of hierarchy. Now, it has to be addressed, even if you’re on the right. Because here’s one thing that happens. Hierarchies tend to ossify, you know, because what happens is that the people at the top, maybe they got there by merit. But it’s easy for them to gerrymander the system so they can stay there without merit. Or perhaps their children can stay there without merit. Or the hierarchy becomes corrupt so that people who only use tyranny and power can climb it. And so you don’t have a hierarchy of competence and value anymore. You have a hierarchy of brute power, which looks like a tyranny. So there’s all sorts of ways that hierarchies can deteriorate. And we have to be awake to ensure that that doesn’t occur. Also, if the hierarchy gets so steep that everybody stacks up at zero and no one can climb it, which is basically the definition of a malfunctioning tyranny, then all the people at the bottom rightly think, well, why don’t we just destroy the game? Because we’re already at zero, so what the hell do we have to lose? And so one of the things that you want to do if you’re a sensible conservative is make sure that the hierarchy maintains its rooting in competence, that it’s transparent, and that it’s climbable, because otherwise it will ossify and steepen. And then it will destroy itself. And if you’re a conservative and you value stability and the hierarchy, then you don’t want to set up a situation where the most likely outcome is that the hierarchy destroys itself. So we can be intelligent about this. We can say, look, don’t be thinking you can get rid of hierarchies. They’ve been around. This is why I wrote chapter one. I talked about lobsters. The reason I talked about them is because not only is the hierarchical structure itself as a permanent feature of existence at least a third of a billion years old, which, by the way, means that you cannot attribute it to capitalism, the free market, or the corrupt patriarchal West, unless you’re willing to make the case that all three of those elements contributed to the existence of dominance hierarchies among crustaceans, which seems highly unlikely. And this is actually something that you can think about it as an idea that’s actually directed towards the productive left. If you want to help the dispossessed, don’t blame the existence of hierarchies on capitalism. Because it’s wrong. It’s wrong. The problem is way deeper than that. And here’s something else that’s very interesting about capitalism. A couple of things you might consider. You know, we have become spectacularly wealthy since 1895, right? First in the West, Iceland’s a classic example. I mean, you guys are so much more wealthy than you were 100 years ago that it’s absolutely impossible to believe. And so that’s first happened in the West, exponential economic growth, starting in about 1895. There’s a long tail. I mean, people were improving before that, but it really kicked in around 1895. It first happened in the West, and now it’s happening everywhere in the world. I don’t know if you know this, but you know, the UN set a goal in 2000 to have the level of absolute poverty in the world by 2015. Which is the fastest rate of economic growth ever recorded. We attained it in 2012, three years ahead of the most optimistic projections. And so people are being lifted out of poverty at a rate that has never been seen in the history of the world. Hooked to the power grids, provided with cell phones, provided with access to fresh water, provided with access to medications that decrease child mortality. Like, if you look at the statistics, there are so many things getting better so fast you cannot even believe it. And that’s a consequence, as far as the data indicate, of the operation of the free market system, which does produce inequality. That’s the thing. But as far as I can tell, the only system that has ever produced wealth, and has law, or has… every system produces inequality. But the only system we know of that produces wealth and inequality is the free market. So here’s a question for everyone, left and right. How many units of inequality will Utah write to produce one unit of wealth? And if the answer is zero, then you’ve gone too far. You’re outside the appropriate political debate. That’s the wrong answer. And if you try to impose that, all there will be is mayhem. Because the price we pay for wealth is inequality. Now that doesn’t mean that you can let inequality run to its ultimate extreme, because then you run to the other problem, which is the monopoly problem. You’ve all played Monopoly, I presume. What happens in every Monopoly game? If you play it out, everyone stacks out at zero, up at zero, except one person. Now if you play it 50 times, you’ll find that it’s hardly ever the same person, because it’s basically a game of chance. And there’s a fair bit of chance, by the way, operating in the distribution of money in the world. It’s not all chance, but there’s a fair bit of chance. But the logical conclusion to a hierarchy that can play itself out totally is that one person has everything and everyone else has nothing. Obviously, that’s not a useful outcome. There are ways that we fix that in our society. We have progressive tax policies, and you can argue about their utility, but that’s one way of rectifying it, potentially. Another way of rectifying is that we don’t have one game. In a pluralistic society, we have many, many games that people can play. And so if you can’t be a successful lawyer, then maybe you could be a successful plumber. And if you can’t be a successful plumber, maybe you can run a small restaurant. There’s a diversity of games. And so that’s a good way of increasing the robustness of the system so that you don’t get hierarchies that are so steep that they collapse in upon themselves. And so those are sophisticated approaches. Perhaps there are other approaches, too, but it’s an intractable problem. It says in the New Testament, it’s one of the things you’d swear would be edited out because it’s such a harsh statement. The poor will be with us always. Well, what’s that in reference to? It’s also in reference to the Matthew Principle, which is another New Testament statement and happens to be an economic axiom. To those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken. That’s the structure of the world. And you can’t lay it at the feet of the West. It’s the structure of the world. Now, that means we have to contend with it. And it’s not an easy thing to contend with. And part of the reason that we have a continual political dialogue and that we need to have a continual political dialogue is to make sure that our hierarchies exist and remain intact, but don’t become so steep and corrupt that they destroy themselves. And you need a left and a right for that. But that means the left has to admit that hierarchies are not only necessary but valuable, and the right has to admit that despite their necessity and value, they tend to stack people up at the bottom, and that actually constitutes a continual problem. You see that in the Old Testament. Because one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is Israel struggles up to state and empire status six times. It struggles out of the chaos up to empire status. And then it gets corrupt. It loses the way. It isn’t balancing things between chaos and order properly. The kings get arrogant, and so do the people. And they forget their relationship with God. That’s another way of thinking about it. And then a prophet comes up and says, You aren’t paying enough attention to the widows and the orphans. You better look out, because that displeases God. And the Israelites who are stiff-necked and arrogant think, What’s God going to do to us? Which is not a very wise way of thinking. And so they don’t take the steps necessary to rectify their deviation from the proper path, and they get absolutely flattened. And the consequences of that last for generations, like seven generations. And then they struggle their way up to something approximating empire status again, and exactly the same thing happens. They forget. And they collapse. There’s six stories like that in the Old Testament. It’s all documented by a man named Northrop Frye, who is a Canadian literary critic who wrote a couple of books on the Bible. One called The Great Code and the other called Words with Power, which I would highly recommend. It’s an analysis of the Bible as literature. Brilliant. For those of you who might be interested in Jungian thinking, Frye’s thinking is a nice adjunct. So, alright. So, that’s the nature of the world. Order, chaos, and order. And your goal is to keep the relationship between those two things optimized. And you do that by doing what’s meaningful, not what’s expedient. That’s rule six. And you ensure that you have the world construed properly by following rule number eight, which is tell the truth, or at least don’t lie. You don’t want to pathologize the instinct that orients you in the world. And you will pathologize it by engaging in habitual deceit. And the reason you do that is when you practice something, you build structures that specialize in that. And then they run automatically. So, if you’re living a lie, which is a very common thing for people to do, then you’re building neurological mechanisms that view the world through that lie. And once they’re built, they’re you. And good luck unbuilding them. It’s very, very difficult. That’s in part what happens to people who are addicted, by the way. They build mechanisms of search, neurological structures that are focused on the drug. And those systems are alive, and all they want is the drug. And they’re not, it’s not psychological exactly. It’s psychophysiological. Don’t build structures of cognition predicated on deception, because you will pay for it. And so, if you’re going to guide your life with the orientation of the instinct of meaning, then you have to be very careful with what you say and write and think. Because every time you say or write or think something, you build a little neurological structure that’s specialized for that. And it participates in this parsing of the world. So, alright. Chaos and order. Then you can say the order is a hierarchy. Okay, so here’s the next question. Next two questions. Is order a hierarchy? And then a subsidiary question would be, if order is a hierarchy, what’s, either what is at the top, or what’s at the bottom? Either what is at the top of the hierarchy, or what should be at the top of the hierarchy? Instead of hierarchy is a structure of value. So that’s the question is, what should be of ultimate value? Okay, so now we’re going to take that apart a little bit. The first thing I would say is, order is not a hierarchy. Order is a set of hierarchies. That’s a different thing. So, I’ll tell you how to think about that, I think. So, imagine you have a child, and they’re playing soccer. And your child’s a pretty good soccer player. No, I’ll tell you a different story. This actually happened. So, I’m going to tell you a story about hockey. And since I’m Canadian, what the hell, I might as well tell you a story about hockey. My son played hockey, he still plays hockey. He’s a pretty good hockey player. And my wife and I used to go watch him play hockey. There was an arena just down the street from us. And there was a nice neighborhood league there. And so, they’d sort the kids into teams, and then they’d let them play a few demo games. And if any team was getting stomped flat, or any other team was winning too much, then they’d rebalance the teams so that they were approximately equal in skill. So, that was the sorting of the teams. And then they were on their teams, and then they’d play 15 games during the regular season. They’d have a little tournament to see who won. And it was really good. It was a good, friendly league. And so, my son’s team was in, I think it was the championship game, if I remember correctly. And there’s one kid on his team who was the best player on the team, by quite a margin. You know, he was very fast on his feet. He could skate rings around a lot of the kids. He was good at stick handling. He was a good hockey player. But he had some problems, this kid. One problem was he wouldn’t pass the puck. Now you think, well, why the hell should you pass the puck if you’re the best hockey player? Which is pretty much what he thought. And the answer is, well, you’re part of a team. Right? You want to be the best person on the team. Fair enough. And you want to win the hockey game. But you also want to, what? Make your teammates better players. How’s that? Maybe you even want to make the people on other teams better players. I mean, I know that’s going a little bit too far. But you certainly want to make your teammates better players. And you might think, well, why would you do that? Because if they’re better, then maybe you won’t be the best. Well, that’s a boneheaded way of looking at the world. Because, first of all, if you amp up the competition around you, maybe that’ll motivate you to be even better. And it’s a hell of a way to win by making everyone else lose. That’s not much of a victory. And so if you have any sense, you pass the damn puck. Even if you’re the better player. Especially. You especially do that. Let’s say you’ve got a comfortable two goal lead. Well, then maybe you can risk taking the time away from that specific game to build up the confidence and ability of your teammates. And then maybe everybody thinks that you’re a bit of a leader and they make you team captain. Not even so much because you’re the best hockey player, but because, well, because why? That’s the question. Okay, so we’re watching the game and it’s pretty exciting. And it’s a real close game and it’s like 3-3 and it’s a minute left. And the other team zips down the ice and scores a really brilliant goal. And so my son’s team loses. Except that they were in the championship and it was a really good game. So, you know, whether or not they lost is not all that obvious. They lost that game. But, you know, there’s a broader context to take into consideration. Okay, so this kid, the star, goes off the ice and he takes his hockey stick and he smashes it onto the cement. And he’s all angry because as far as he was concerned, he was robbed. Maybe that’s because of his useless teammates, who he didn’t really spend any time helping, by the way. And maybe it’s because the referees were unfair and who the hell knows why, but it wasn’t fair. And his idiot father rushes over to him and consoles him on his loss and supports him in his notion that he was robbed. And I thought, you unspeakable son of a bitch. Because he was an arrogant narcissist. And it was way more important to him that he had a son who was a star than that he had a son who was a good person. And that’s absolutely inexcusable. He made the wrong choice. He sacrificed his son’s soul, in part, to help him save face for a hockey game. That’s not acceptable. Okay, so here’s what you tell your children. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. And so that’s what the father should have told the son. And he should have meant it. And even better, he should have known what it meant. But who knows what that means? Because you tell your children that, and maybe they’re not so happy because they lost a game and they look at you like you’re an alien. And they think, well, what the hell do you mean by that? Because obviously it matters whether you win. And it does matter whether you win. What is it that you mean when you say that? And your kid asks, well, what do you mean by that? And you go, well, I don’t know what it means, but it’s a good rule. So what do you mean by that? Here’s what you mean. And it relates to rule five, which is don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Because other people will dislike them then. And you don’t want other people to dislike your children unless you want your children to inhabit a world where everyone dislikes them. And maybe you do because you don’t like your children. And maybe you don’t like your children because you let them behave in ways that makes you not like them. And so the way you take revenge is by not correcting them so that other people will punish them because you don’t have the courage to discipline them. And if you think that people don’t play that game, then you don’t know much about people because they play that game all the time. All right, so it matters how you play the game. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. Let’s take that apart. Well, so the first thing is, and this goes back to the idea of the hierarchy, is order a hierarchy? And the answer is no. It’s a set of all hierarchies. Or you could say it’s the set of all possible hierarchies. Because, you know, in a society at a given time, there’s hierarchies that function, but that transforms, and then there’s new hierarchies that function. The specifics of the hierarchies change, but the fact of the hierarchies remains. And so you can imagine a hierarchy as a meta-structure that consists of a multitude of possible hierarchies. And that’s going to change as life continues. And so what you want for your children is not to be the master of a hierarchy. You want for your children to be the master of the set of all possible hierarchies. Because then no matter how things change, they’re ready. You say, well, how is it that you get ready for things to change? And the answer is play so that people will invite you to play. Right, and there’s a rule for children, for raising children. And really, it’s a rule. One of the things you can do with your children, this is something good for men, because men are more likely to do this than women, although women can do it too, but men are more likely to do it. It’s really good for children to engage in rough-and-tumble play, play fighting. First of all, if you have children and you’ve played with them physically, you know that they absolutely love it. They will rough-and-tumble play with you until you are completely exhausted and they’re not even vaguely ready to quit. They have an inexhaustible hunger for it, and they like to be pushed to the edge. So I knew this when I was a new father, partly because I read work by a man named Jak Panksepp, who was a genius, an affective neuroscientist, one of the world’s great neuroscientists, perhaps the world’s greatest neuroscientist, although there’s four or five people that might compete with him. He wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, Emotional Neuroscience, which is a work of real genius. He discovered the play circuit in mammals, because there’s a separate play circuit in mammals, a specialized circuit. He did a lot of work on rats, showing that in order for a rat to become socialized, because rats are highly social, they had to engage in iterative bouts of rough-and-tumble play. Here’s a cool thing, it’s a ridiculously cool thing. This has to do, in some sense, with the postmodern critique of the patriarchal tyranny. So, if you take two juvenile rats, males, and you imagine you give them an opportunity to play, so you throw two of them into a little play arena and you let them wrestle, okay, the next time that you bring them to the same place, you can measure how much work they’ll do to open the door to the arena. How many times they’ll push a button, say, to open the door, or how hard they’ll pull if you tie a string to their tail. And so you can get an estimate of their motivation, because the more motivated they are to play, the harder they’ll work. And rats will work really hard to play, so you know that they want to play, assuming that you’re willing to accept the fact that if you work for something, you want it. It’s like an operational definition. So rats will work to play. Now, if you let the rats out in the play arena, and one rat is 10% bigger than the other, then that rat will win. You might say, well, what does winning mean? And rats wrestle like people wrestle. They even pin each other. And they manifest play behaviour to begin with, like dogs playing in a park. You know how a dog looks when it wants to play? It sort of hunkers down a little bit, looks up at you, like expectantly, kind of move back and forth, which is like, okay, human, I’m ready to play. And if you have any sense and you know how to play, then you look at the dog and you sort of go like this, and the dog goes like this, and you cuff the dog, not too hard, and the dog bites you, not too hard, and then you can play, and you’re both happy with that. And kids can do that with dogs, because kids understand dogs, and dogs and kids know how to play. If your dog can’t play, then you should not own a dog, because you’re not smart enough to own a dog. So, it’s true. And if you have a dog that can’t play, then don’t have a kid. Right. It’s true. The stupidest dog I ever saw was owned by a psychologist. That was really embarrassing. So, okay, so you put the two rats together, and there’s the 10% bigger rat, and there’s the 10% smaller rat, and the 10% bigger rat stomps the small rat and pins him. So he wins. And so now you’re a postmodernist doing the experiment, and you say, powerful tyrannical rat dominates hierarchy. Really, really, that’s what you conclude. End of experiment. And it looks correct, because powerful, dominant rat, dominated, and won. It’s like, okay, except for one thing. Rats live with rats. They don’t wander. They’re not psychopathic individuals wandering from isolated community to isolated community. They know all the other rats, and that means they have to keep playing with them. And the rules for playing with someone 30 times are not the same as the rules for playing with someone once. So Panksepp had the rats play repeatedly. And what he observed was, okay, now the next time you put those rats together, the situation’s a little different. The little rat comes bouncing out and does the playful dog thing to the big rat. So now the rule is, you’re the little rat, you lost, you have to be the creature that invites to play. That’s now your status. So you bounce around, and you know, the big rat’s all cool, and he’s smoking a cigarette and doesn’t want to play. But he’ll flick it away at some point and think, all right, what the hell, you know? And so then he gets in it. And he can stomp the little rat again, because he’s a bigger rat. If the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win 30% of the time across repeated play bouts, then the little rat won’t ask him to play anymore. You think. Well, if you think about it, you don’t think so what? You don’t think, why did Yaak Panksepp waste his time studying play in rats? You think, oh my God, that’s an absolute miracle. Because it shows you that there’s an ethic of fair play that emerges as a consequence of repeated bouts of play, even among rats. It’s so basic. It isn’t even human, that ethic. The ethic of fair play is deeper than human. It’s real. And it’s the ethic that governs iterated interactions. And it’s not just in rats that we’ve seen this. So, you know, chimpanzees are pretty damn brutal. They’re way more brutal than you think. And they’re really, really strong. Maybe six times as strong as an adult male. Now, there’s the estimates vary, but they’re plenty strong enough to tear you to bits. And that happens now. And then people have chimps for pets. And they become adults. And it’s like, don’t mess with the chimp, because it’ll tear you to pieces. And so, chimps are brutal. And this is interesting, because they’re our closest relatives. And so, Jane Goodall discovered in the 1970s that rats are tribe, or chimps are tribal. They live in tribal groups, like we do. And they have a territory. That’s the known territory. And there’s a perimeter. That’s the unknown. That’s chaos. And other chimpanzees inhabit the chaos. Foreign chimpanzees. And the juvenile chimps patrol the perimeters in groups of four or five. And if they spy a foreign chimp, or two of them, if they outnumber them, because they can’t count, but they have a sense of quantity. If five chimps come across two foreign chimps, they will tear them to bits. And I actually mean that literally. That’s what they do. And chimps also hunt. They hunt colobus monkeys. And they weigh about 40 pounds. And they’re quite carnivorous. And they will eat them alive while they’re screaming. So there isn’t a lot of empathy regulating chimp aggression. Which is something to think about when you think about human beings. Because it’s not obvious what regulates our aggression. And you might think, well, it’s your conscience. And like, yeah, maybe it’s your conscience. And maybe it’s something else. You read the book of… you read The Rape of Nanking, for example. And you’ll start wondering very, very rapidly about whether people have any conscience at all. So that’s a story of absolutely atrocious Japanese behavior in China at the beginning of World War II. And it’s a horrifying book. So read it with caution. But it’s very instructive. So, anyways, the chimps are very brutal creatures. And so you might think, well, let’s look at a chimp hierarchy. Because chimps have dominance hierarchies. And they’re basically male-dominated. Although there are lots of powerful female chimps. Say, okay, who becomes the dominant chimp? And the answer might be, and this would be the postmodern answer, the most powerful, tyrannical, brutal chimp. Rules. Because it’s power that moves you up the hierarchy. It’s like, that happens sometimes among chimps. But you know what happens to tyrant chimps? They have an off day. And two subordinate chimps, each three-quarters the size, gang up to make a one-and-a-half superchimp. And then they tear him to pieces. Right. So here’s the rule if you’re a chimp. Tyrants meet bloody ends. So how do you conduct yourself as a chimp if you want to be at the top of the hierarchy and have preferential access to the things that being at the top of the hierarchy would give you? And the answer is, engage in mutually reciprocal interactions with your peers. The chimps that rise to the top, that stay there stably, and also have the most stably functioning troops, by the way, are the ones that have friends that are long-term and permanent, and engage in reciprocal interactions not only with their friends, but also with the females and the infants. And so even among chimps, patriarchal tyranny, A, is not the norm, and B, is not the proper mode of approaching the situation. And so that speaks to a broader ethic, the same kind of ethic that is spoken to with regards to the rat studies of play behaviour. And you can see this sort of thing throughout the animal kingdom. There’s a pattern of reciprocal interaction that seems to stabilise social animals that isn’t predicated on brute force. Now maybe the simpler the animal, the more it’s predicated on brute force, but we are by no means simple animals. And the idea that our hierarchies are fundamentally tyrannical, the patriarchy, which is a word that nobody who thinks carefully should ever use casually, that term is predicated on the idea that A, that our hierarchies are tyrannical, which they aren’t, although they can become that way, and B, that the most reliable means to attaining status within a hierarchy is through the expression of power. And both of those things are wrong. They’re wrong. And nonetheless, that’s the primary theory of the social sciences and the humanities. Enough of that. We have enough data to indicate that none of that’s sufficiently sophisticated to constitute a reasonable explanation of the world. So we should dispense with it as fast as possible. All it’s doing is dividing us into tribes, and it’s not solving the problems that it’s hypothetically intended to solve. So… Okay, so now back to the question. So there isn’t a hierarchy. There’s a set of hierarchies. And it’s like the set of games. So here’s what you’re telling your child when you say, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. What you’re telling them is, life is not a game. It’s not even a sequence of the same games. It’s multiple sequences of different games. And if you want to be a successful player in the set of multiple sequence of different games, then you have to adopt a higher order ethic. And you don’t subordinate that ethic to victory in any one game. Ever. So you put the manner in which you play above your victory in each instance. And the reason that that produces the best possible outcome for you is that you get invited to play the largest number of games. And so let’s go back to rule five. Don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Okay, so let’s say you like your children. Let’s say you love your children and you want the best for them. You detach yourself a little bit. You think, well, I’m not going to be around forever. And they’re going to deal with a lot of different people. Single people like individuals, groups of people, children and adults. And what they have to be prepared for is to interact with that set of people in the best possible manner. Because and so what do you want? Well, let’s say your child’s two and is still pretty egocentric because children, two year olds are quite egocentric. They can’t share yet. They don’t really learn how to share in any technical sense till they’re about three. It’s hard for them to learn to share. Between two and four, they learn to share and to play. And the way they learn is by at least in part by engaging in reciprocal interactions with their parents. Now, what is it that it what is it that’s your job when you’re socializing a child who’s two to four? You have to do it between the ages of two and four, by the way, because if you don’t manage it by the time they’re four, then you might as well give up because it isn’t going to happen. And the literature on antisocial behavior in children is crystal clear on this point. If your child’s antisocial at four, you failed. And there isn’t anything that can be done about it. It’s a dismal literature. And believe me, psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists and criminologists have tried for like six decades to figure out how to remediate antisocial behavior in older children and adolescents. And they haven’t managed it. So so to between two and four is crucial. You want to help your child become the sort of person that other children want to play with. And the reason you want to do that is because from four onward, other children are the primary agents of socialization. And so if your children are accepted by other children, then they’re on their way because other children will socialize them. Doesn’t mean you’re not important as a parent, but it means they find their peers who are at the same developmental level as them and they start to reciprocally socialize one another. And they do that through play. And so if you’ve prepared your child to be a great play companion, then you can just stand back and let it happen. And you have to be around when something breaks down, when the system doesn’t work properly. You have to be there as a resource. But basically, you can sort of push them out onto the playground and say, you know, you know what to do. Go play and plays of absolutely crucial importance as documented by people like Jean Piaget. So you’re trying to make your child maximally attractive as a play partner. And the ethic there is, well, the world is made out of a sequence of hierarchies that transform. And so you want your child to be the sort of person who’s invited to participate in whatever hierarchy organizes itself. And how and what should a child be like to do that? Well, they have to be reciprocal. Take turns, right? You don’t always get to pick the game. You have to find out what other people want to do. They have to want to play, too. Like there’s all these sophisticated ethical rules that go around play. And you know, if you’re playing with some of you have played with kids that aren’t fun to play with. Well, what are they like? If something doesn’t go their way, what happens? They have an emotional outburst. So they revert to the behavior of a ill prepared two year old. They have a temper tantrum. They burst into tears. They thrash around on the floor. It’s not fun because when you play, if you don’t lose sometimes, then no one else ever wins. So who the hell is going to play with someone like that? A downtrodden victim. That’s all. It’s not no kid with any sense is going to put up with that. All they did. And this is exactly what kids are like. If they find out that their potential play partner is a whiny two year old, even though they’re four, they just stop playing and they’re just playing. They just stop playing and they go find another kid. That’s exactly what happens. And so if you want that for your kid, then make sure that they’re whiny and bitter every time they lose. A good way to do that is to never let them lose at anything. So they don’t get any practice. Well, I don’t want my kid to lose. It’s like wrong. You don’t want to. You don’t want your kid to lose in an unsophisticated manner. That’s not the same thing at all. I think the way you accomplish that is by never having your kid lose. Then well then. Well, then we’re back to the you shouldn’t even own a dog problem. All right. So then you might take apart. What does it mean to be a desirable play partner? Assuming you’re going to play reciprocal repeated games across all sorts of different contexts. Well, there’s a whole ethic that emerges from that. See, Nietzsche back in the late 1800s, he was the first person to kind of caught on to this sort of thing because until then people tended to think of morality as something that was invented rationally and then imposed from the top down. But Nietzsche being a very intelligent observer noted that that wasn’t really the case. There was a ethic already built into human interactions that we all acted out, but that we didn’t really understand very well. So here’s a way to think about that. So imagine you’re watching a wolf pack and wolves compete for dominance. And so the way they do that is they basically have a play fight about it. Now, it’s a fairly serious play fight. And so two wolves that are engaged in a dominance dispute will sort of stand sideways to each other. You know how cats do that? You ever watch two cats fight? Cats stand sideways. I think, well, why does a cat stand sideways when it’s fighting? It’s because a sideways cat is a bigger cat than a head on cat. So the cat’s trying to intimidate the other cat. So it stands sideways and it puffs itself up, including its tail. And the reason it does that is so that it looks bigger. Because one cat isn’t, the cats don’t want to fight. They want to threaten until one cat backs down. And so they puff themselves up and they make horrible noises and they face off against each other. But they don’t want to fight because the two cats that are fighting might damage each other. Then a third cat comes in and like wins. It’s a stupid strategy. So it is. So most animals don’t like to fight because they might damage themselves and then another interloper will just win. It’s a stupid strategy. And human beings are quite a bit like that. We do a lot of posturing and defensive display and aggressive display and all that. But we don’t fight very often for the same reasons. It’s only when those other mechanisms break down that we actually fight. So what happens in a wolf dispute is this. The wolves square off and they amp up the threats in the hope that one of the wolves will back the hell down. Because what will happen is the wolf will chicken out one of them. And then when it does, it rolls over and shows its neck. Why? Well, because when wolves hunt, they go for the neck generally. Like wolves are quite cruel creatures in some sense and they’ll actually eat moose standing up. But generally speaking, if they can manage it, they go through for the throat and they’ll bring the animal down. And so what the wolf is basically saying is, well, you scared me half to death. I’m a useful moose. I’m a useless moose. You might as well tear out my neck. And the other wolf says, yeah, you’re pretty detestable and you’re kind of like a moose, but I might need you to hunt tomorrow. So I know I could tear out your neck, but I won’t. And then the defeated wolf stands up and he’s not very happy and he’s kind of a low status wolf. But at least he’s still got his neck. And the victor wolf gets to be high status wolf and he gets to go hunting with his partner the next day. And so you might think, well, wolves have a complex procedural morality. And the morality is don’t tear the neck out of the creature you defeat. That’s wrong. And then you might say, well, that’s the rule that wolves follow. But that’s wrong because wolves don’t follow rules, because wolves don’t have rules, because they don’t have language and they don’t think, not like us. They act like they have rules. They act so that if you watch them act, you could label what they’re doing with the rule. That’s how we got our rules. That’s how we got our rules. We acted out an ethic. And then we watched. And then we coded it in stories. That’s what our religious stories are. They’re the consequence of us watching what it is that we do when we act ethically. And then transforming that into a story. And everyone’s intent on that story. Absolutely intent on the story of good versus evil, let’s say, because that’s the fundamental story. And why do you want to watch that story? Because you want to know how to be the victor in the set of all possible games. And that’s what that story’s about. And that’s what movies are about, and that’s what books are about, and that’s what religious narratives are about. That’s what everything that grips us at a literary level is about. And the reason that it grips us is because that’s what the world is made of, and that’s what we need to know. So then you might think, so here’s something to think about. I’ll give you a symbolic representation of this, okay? So there’s this idea in Christianity. And I’m not talking about this from a religious perspective. Okay, I’m talking about this from an anthropological perspective, or a biological perspective, or a… That’ll do. An anthropological or a biological, or a psychological perspective. So there’s this idea in Christianity that Christ is, whatever Christ is, is the King of Kings. Okay, so I’m going to take that apart. So imagine that you have a hierarchy, whatever it is, and there’s someone at the top of it. And so that person has the attributes necessary to be at the top of that hierarchy. Maybe it’s a hockey team, and you go home and you tell a story about how the best hockey player on your team played while they were being the best hockey player. It’s a little hero narrative. It’s a little fragment of a hero narrative. And maybe it’s hockey, soccer, plumbing, law, business, art. There’s all these hierarchies. And then there’s the thing that’s at the top of all of them. And the thing that’s at the top of all of them has something in common. That’s whatever it is that’s in common across all the things that are at the top. So imagine this. Okay, so you could think about this. Imagine that you’re a novelist, and you want to distill some characters. And you want a good evil character, because what the hell good is your book without a good evil character? And you want a good good character, because the same problem applies. You don’t want to just tell a story about some guy’s day. You don’t want to say, well, John woke up at six, and then he smacked his lips four times and blinked 20 times. And then he swung his feet over across the bed and walked into the bathroom. Because who cares about any of that? You don’t need to know that because you know how to move your mouth and cough and walk to the bathroom. It’s not helpful. You want a distillation. You want the novelist to have watched a bunch of people and abstracted out someone who’s good in a way that’s good across a bunch of people. And you want him to have abstracted out someone who’s evil that’s abstracted across a bunch of evil characters. So you see that in Hamlet, for example. You see that in Dostoevsky, where the characters are bigger than life. You want them bigger than life because you want it distilled so that you can learn from it. And what you’re learning is that ethic. OK, so then imagine that you have 100 hierarchies, just mundane hierarchies. Then you take the people at the top of all those hierarchies and say that you group them into groups of 10. OK, so you take 10 admirable people and then you say, well, we’re going to average across them and we’re going to come out with the most ad with a composite admirable person made out of those 10. You have 100 to begin with. So let’s say you have a thousand to begin with. You distill them to 100 admirable people. And then you take that 100 admirable people and you distill them into 10. Then you take those 10 admirable people and you distill them into one. And what that one is, is what’s admirable across the entire set of admirable people. That’s a divine figure in a mythological story. That’s what it is. And so the Christian idea is Christ is the King of Kings. And that’s what it means. You go into a cathedral and the cathedral is a cross, by the way. And the cross is the place where suffering is accepted. And the cross is a dome over it and that’s the sky. OK, so there’s an idea in the cathedral and the idea is that the place of the cross, which is where suffering occurs, is the center of the universe, which is the dome. And then you look up at the dome and you see this figure staring down at you. That’s the King of Kings. And that’s how to behave in the world. That’s what that image represents. And you think, well, what does it mean? Well, here’s a way of unpacking it. And this is associated with the idea of how to behave across the set of all possible hierarchies. Well, what should you do? Well, according to rule one, you should stand up straight with your shoulders back. OK, now, some of the people who’ve been criticizing me say, well, because I point out that hierarchies exist, I’m justifying them. It’s like pointing out that something exists is not the same as justifying it. It’s just pointing out that it exists. And pointing out that it exists without justifying it is certainly not saying that the way to attain dominance in a hierarchy is through power, which is the other thing that I’ve been criticized for, which is not what I’m saying. In fact, I’m not saying that. I’m not even saying that a little bit. It’s exactly the opposite of what I’m saying. You say, well, if you stand up straight with your shoulders back, isn’t that a powerful stance? And the answer is, well, actually, no. A powerful stance is this, right? Well, not really, because I’m not very good at it. But if I knew what I was doing, this would be it. And I put myself sideways so I’m not much of a target, and I’m ready for attack. OK, that’s not this stance. This stance is different, right? That isn’t this stance either. This is a defensive crouch. This is what happens if you’re depressed and anxious. This stance is, I’m willing to take what the world throws at me. And that might be the trials and tribulations that are associated with the hierarchy, because that’s a tough battle in and of itself. But it also might be all the terrible, unknown things that are going to come your way. And what’s the right attitude? Stand the hell up with some courage and take it, right? Voluntarily, with courage. So it’s actually a stance of maximal vulnerability. Vulnerability adopted voluntarily. That’s what the crucifix represents, just so you know. It represents the willingness to take on the suffering of the world voluntarily. The whole thing. And that’s associated with what’s ever at the top of the hierarchy. So the idea is, the best possible strategy that you have to be successful across the set of all possible hierarchies is to maximally accept the fact that you’re vulnerable. To accept that as the price of being. And that’s the essential message. It’s not only the message of Christianity, by the way. You see this sort of idea expressed in all sorts of religious structures. I mean, the Taoists, to return to them, say, well, where should you be in the world? The world is made out of the catastrophe of chaos and the tyranny of order. Where do you stand in that place? And the answer is, with one foot in chaos and one foot in order. That’s the line down the middle. That’s the Tao. That’s the way. That’s the point of meaning. It’s the same place that’s at the center of a cathedral. It’s the same idea. You stand there because you’re secure, because you have tradition and the power of your civilization behind you. And you have one foot in chaos because that’s not enough and never will be. And the instinct that puts you there is the instinct of meaning. And you can use that as a guide. And it’s a deep neurological instinct. It’s not some epiphenomena. It’s the most real thing there is, as far as I can tell. And associated with that is a certain attitude towards life, which is to venture courageously out into the unknown is to put yourself on the line, right? To heed the call of adventure. To risk yourself voluntarily. You have no choice anyways. Right? Because you’re in this all the way. There’s no out that isn’t death. The full catastrophe is at your feet. You can’t evade or escape that. But what you can do is choose how it is that you’re going to confront it. And so rule one is to stand up straight with your shoulders back and to manifest. And this is the thing that’s so amazing about this, I think. And that what lends a kind of ultimate reality to the idea of positioning yourself properly. You might say, well, let’s presume that you’re a very pessimistic person or a very realistic person. And you say, well, what’s the fundamental reality of life? You say, well, it’s suffering and malevolence. It’s like, OK, it’s a hard argument to forestall. But I don’t think it’s true. It’s true, but it’s not it’s not the final truth. The final truth is, despite the fact that that’s true, the ability of the human spirit to prevail is more powerful than death and evil. That’s the truth. And you know that. You know that. First of all, you know that because you’re ashamed that you’re not everything you could be. You know that because the people that you admire are people who manifest courage in the direst of straits. And you know that as well, because when you meet people like that and you’re not like that, they shame you. That speaks to your deepest possible instinct. You know what you could be. And you know, too, that you see people contend with situations that are so difficult that it’s truly a miracle that they can contend with them. You know, and I think of people. Well, I think of people who work in funeral homes. That’s a good example. That’s hard. Right. That’s death and grief every day. And it’s not something that you can avoid. It’s like it’s right there. It’s as real as it can possibly be. I’ll tell you a story about that. I had a client who was very afraid of being alive, and she wanted to sleep all the time. And she took sleeping pills and all sorts of other things so that she could evade the burden of being conscious. And she was a very good dreamer. And she wasn’t doing well in university. And she had a dream one night that a gypsy told her that she was actually lucid during her dreams, by the way. And she could ask her dream characters what they meant, and they would tell her, which was something I’d never seen anyone else manage. In any case, she jumped off this gypsy that she met in the forest, and the gypsy told her that unless she could learn to work in a slaughterhouse, she’d never finish her degree. And so she told me that story. I don’t know if you know this, but the classic treatment for people who are afraid of things is to expose them to what they’re afraid of, which is a good lesson if you have children. Because you want to expose your children to challenges because that makes them stronger. It has to be done voluntarily. But if you have post-traumatic stress disorder, let’s say you’re the victim of a vicious sexual assault by a stranger, and two years later you have post-traumatic stress disorder, the most effective treatment is to get you to relive the experience in as much vivid detail as you possibly can and experience all the emotions that occurred while it was happening. And if you do that, the more upset you get when you do that, if you do it voluntarily, the faster you get better and the longer you stay better. And so it’s a general rule of thumb in psychotherapy is if someone’s avoiding something, find out what they’re avoiding, break it into manageable pieces, and have them voluntarily expose themselves to it, and they will be cured. And that’s the dragon fight in clinical practice. Find what you most want to, what you most need will be found where you least want to look. Right, that’s a hell of a statement. So she told me this dream, and I thought, well, I don’t know how to arrange for you to work in a slaughterhouse. That doesn’t seem like very, she wouldn’t eat meat, by the way, she wouldn’t go into a butcher store. I took her into a butcher store once and she had a very catastrophic reaction. She couldn’t handle it. Anyways, I said, well, we can’t arrange the slaughterhouse thing. Why don’t you go away for a while and come back in a week and see if you can come up with an alternative? So she came back and she said, I want to see an embalming. And I thought, oh, God, okay, how the hell am I going to arrange that? So I phoned a couple of funeral homes and I said, look, I’ve got this person who’s really afraid of death. And she had this dream and I told them the story and they said, no problem, bring her in. And so I wasn’t looking forward to this, by the way. So we went and she was very, very nervous because she certainly didn’t think she could handle that. And, you know, as I said already, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about it either. But in for a pound, in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. So anyways, we went to the funeral parlor and they showed us around and we asked a bunch of questions. Like how the hell did they cope with their jobs? Because that’s just a mystery to me. And they said, well, it was actually really useful for them to guide people through the process of grief. And that their experience was that that had given them a renewed appreciation for life, which is well. That would account for why they were able to do it, because it seems like a very hard job. And so we went into this room and watched this embalming. And I was about eight feet away from this small room. It’s a pretty gruesome operation, as you might imagine. And my client was sitting beside me and I was watching her and watching the embalming as well. And for the first while, she was just looking to the side, which was I’m not here and I certainly can’t handle that. And no bloody wonder, literally. And so but then she would take the odd glance. She’d go like this and then look away. And then as the minutes ticked by, but fairly rapidly, she was spending more time watching and less time looking away until she was finally doing nothing but watching. And then at some point she asked if she could come in and put her hand on the body. And so they gave her a glove and she did that. And then she went and sat down and she was quite quiet about all this and quite quiet afterwards. And well, so what did she discover? Well, she didn’t discover that death was wasn’t horrible. She didn’t discover that. And she didn’t discover that death wasn’t terrifying because it certainly was. But what she did discover was that she was a hell of a lot tougher than she thought and much quicker than she would have believed. And she went away thinking, huh, look at that. I did the thing I was most afraid of doing. And here I am. And not only am I not more damaged than I was, I’m actually better than I was. And so from then on, she had a reference point, right, which is an interesting thing. I think this is why primordial people initiate their especially their young men, because it sort of happens automatically with young women. They expose their young men to something absolutely terrifying, genuinely terrifying so that for the rest of their lives, they know the difference between what’s actually terrifying and what’s just sort of normal. Because you really need to know that, right, because you need to know that you can prevail. And one of the things she learned as a consequence of that exposure was that she could prevail despite the realities of life. Of course, that’s what you want to teach your children. Mostly by example is that they can prevail despite the realities of life. Of course, that also means that you have to have admitted to what the realities of life are. But the thing that’s so interesting about that, here’s another story. So you know the story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail is the ultimate value. It’s a symbol of whatever the ultimate value is. And King Arthur assembles his knights around the round table. And it’s a round table because they’re all equal, despite the fact that they have a king. They sit as equals at the round table, and they all decide to go off to seek for the Holy Grail. It’s either the cup that Christ drank out of the Last Supper, or the cup that held his blood on the cross. It’s one of those two things. It doesn’t really matter. It’s a symbol of what’s redemptive. That’s what the Holy Grail is. So it’s a representation of the ultimate value. The question is, where do you go to seek out what’s of ultimate value? An answer in the tale of King Arthur and the Holy Grail is that each night entered the forest when they began their search. At the place that looked darkest to them. So that’s the thing, is that it’s necessary if you’re going to stand up straight with your shoulders back to confront the darkness of the world head on. To take responsibility for the tragedy of existence and for malevolence. That’s what it means. That’s what the Christian injunction, to take the sins of the world onto yourself. It means it’s your bloody problem. And to confront Satan in the desert is the same idea. Not only do you have to take on the tragedy of the world as if it’s your responsibility, but you have to contend with the spirit of malevolence while you’re doing so. And it’s in doing that that you find your destiny. That’s where you find the highest of possible values. And that’s the call to the nobility of being. Because you might think, well, what could possibly justify your life more thoroughly? What could make you the best player of all possible games? Than to take the tragedy of the world onto your shoulders and to fight with all your ability against the malevolence in your own heart. Thank you. The first one I’ll choose here. Thank you for coming to speak with us. What do you think of Iceland? Well, first of all, thank you all for coming. It’s quite remarkable to see so many people come out for such a serious conversation. It isn’t exactly what you’d expect. So everyone has been ridiculously hospitable to me and my family. We’ve seen some beautiful things. We were at the Blue Lagoon, which was very impressive. We went to the house today where Gorbachev and Reagan met in 1986. And that was very interesting. I went and saw some rare manuscripts at the university this morning. Gunnleger and his crew of people have been very organized. And you have a beautiful little capital city that’s extraordinarily impressive. And you’ve produced this amazing venue. And your country is cruising along on all cylinders. And it’s a hell of an achievement. So that’s what I think. And I think that almost all the time when I come to a European country, it’s amazing how well it works. I mean, it’s a harsh place, you know. You made a lot of what you have. And it looks to me like it’s just getting better. And so it’s peaceful and productive and civilized and beautiful and hospitable. And good for you. And thank you for inviting me. This one, the next one, is regards to the hit pieces on you. When such an article is written, what is your interpretation of the cause? Or further, what potential explanations are there for this phenomenon? Well, I think there’s, you know, we could start with what I might be contributing to it. You know, one thing I’ve had to learn, I’ve had some interactions with public exposure for probably 15 years. Because I worked a little bit with a public television station in Ontario before all this blew up. My producer, who was someone who was very much on my side, so I worked for a public affairs show, first of all as a regular panelist and then as a columnist for a couple of years. My producer, who’s a level-headed guy, well versed in what worked well in panel discussions, told me to be very careful about controlling my proclivity towards anger, because it doesn’t play very well publicly. And so, you know, I kept trying to learn the doctrine of minimal necessary force. I mean, I think that aggression is a good thing if it’s controlled. I think it’s a good antidote to fear. I think it’s one of the things that can help you maintain your ground in the face of resistance. But it has to be applied very, very judiciously. And it isn’t obvious that I always do that as well as I might. And if you’re going to deal with difficult and dangerous and contentious issues, then you’re going to get punished for your failures. And so, I’m trying to learn to detach myself and to, not in an I don’t care way, but in a watchful way, and to keep all of that under control as much as possible, and to use minimal necessary force. And it’s hard to learn to do that well. And so, to the degree that I don’t do that, then I instigate more opposition than I might. Now, I have a hard time with that to some degree, because I do find some of what I have been, let’s say, opposing… What would you say? It makes me deeply, it disturbs me deeply, and makes me unhappy and ashamed. That’s particularly the case when I see what’s happening at the universities. I’m not impressed by what’s happening in the social sciences and the humanities. I’m not impressed with the postmodernists. I’m not impressed with the Marxists, and I’m certainly not impressed with the people, or the theories that juxtapose the two in this particularly ideological brew that’s been fermenting, say, since the 1960s. And so, it’s not easy to maintain equanimity in the face of that, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s still necessary. Do you think their ideology has permeated all of media? Not all of it. That’s the other thing, and this is why… Now, we can turn to what the media might bring to this. Well, ideological pre-commitments, that’s certainly the case, and inability to see anything other than in politicized terms. I don’t view what I’m doing as fundamentally political. In fact, I don’t view the battle that’s raging in the ideational substructure of a society as fundamentally political. I think it’s deeper than political. It’s at least philosophical, and it’s probably theological. But the people who’ve been pilloring me, let’s say, who tend to be the postmodern neo-Marxist types, or at least lean in that direction, cannot conceptualize anything that isn’t political. In their world, there isn’t anything that isn’t political. One of the things that you might consider, for example, is… You know, I’ve been perhaps represented as an advocate of free speech, and of course there’s a lot of debate about what free speech really is from the radical leftist types. And here’s something that you have to understand. From the collectivist perspective that dominates the radical left, there is no such thing as free speech. It’s not that they oppose it. It’s that it isn’t a move in their game. It doesn’t exist. So if you stand up and say, I’m manifesting my opinion as an individual, then that’s not an acceptable move, because you aren’t an individual. You’re an avatar of your dominant group. And whatever you utter, regardless of why you think you’re uttering it, or regardless of whether you think it’s your individual opinion, is nothing but a power move in your dominance hierarchy. And so it’s not like they oppose free speech. It’s that it doesn’t exist in their conceptual framework. And so that’s one of the things that drives the hit pieces, because I do believe in the individual, and I do believe in free speech, and I do believe in a world outside the conceptual realm, all sorts of propositions that aren’t part and parcel of the postmodernist-slash-neo-Marxist game. And they’re not very happy with that. I’m not playing by the rules. And so they don’t know what to do about that. The simplest thing to do is to call me far right or alt-right, because then they can… first of all, that’s an evil category, and that dispenses with that, but it also means they don’t have to contend with any of my arguments, and that’s convenient. So it’s easier to demonize than it is to contend. It doesn’t seem to help them, because the more they scream, the more people that actually listen to you hear that you’re not far right, you’re not alt-right, and they stop believing them. Well, that’s the other thing. I’ve talked with my wife about this, because it’s produced a lot of tension in our family, because it’s very stressful, I mean, for all sorts of reasons, but that’s certainly one of them. You know, I mean, it’s certainly not the case that when I read a hit piece that I’m very pleased about it, and I’m often quite worried about it, like the New York Times piece, for example, is a good example. And it’s idiot… what would you call it? …insistence that I was promoting, you know, monogamy with the weapons of the state, of all the insane ideas. I mean, who the hell believes that? It’s like some ISIS guys. That’s about it. So it’s a completely absurd accusation, and it’s certainly bore no resemblance to anything that I meant. But, you know, it’s a powerful media organization, and lots of people warned me in the immediate aftermath of that that it would be my downfall, including people who were less… they weren’t fearful people, and so it’s very stressful. So one question is, well, should I be doing interviews like that at all? Because one of the things I’ve thought is no written interviews, only live interviews, only the whole thing. So the one today you had is the last one. Well, see, I don’t know, because there’s another side of it, which is the side you laid out. It’s like… this happened with the… some of you have seen the Channel 4 interview that I did with Kathy Newman. And… … You know, and that was… I would say that was a stressful interview. And I would say that the two weeks after the interview were also very stressful, because… … You know, first of all, there was the interview, and I thought they’d just cut it to seven minutes and pillory me and leave it at that. But they cut it to seven minutes and pillory me, and then they posted the whole interview, which just shocked me. But here’s the shocking thing. The people who posted that interview thought it went well. That’s why they posted it. They didn’t think, oh my god, this is contentious, we better put it out. Believe me, they didn’t think that. That is not what they thought. They thought it went fine. And so then there was this overwhelming response to it, and that was completely unexpected. And then the counter-response was, Peterson’s army of alt-right trolls is victimizing Kathy Newman. And that was the response of her employers, the technical response, because that’s what they published. They said, we had to call in police to evaluate the threat. It’s like, well, so what? Anybody can call in police to evaluate a threat. It doesn’t mean that the threat justified police intervention, or that there was a threat. It just meant that that’s how you responded to it. And then they spun a victim narrative for Kathy, which was, I think, reprehensible, given that I don’t know what Kathy Newman is exactly, but she’s not a bloody victim. She’s not powerless. She’s one of the most powerful women in the United Kingdom, and she has a salary that’s commensurate with that. And good for her. That’s absolutely fine. But you don’t get to have that and also be a victim. It’s not the right way to play the game. And so then a whole bunch of newspapers laid out the story that poor Kathy was being trolled by my legion of alt-right angry people. But then the numbers started to mount, you know, and after it was like four million people, the whole troll argument got hard to sustain unless you think there are like, well, now it’s perhaps 30 million people have watched either the whole thing or major clips from it. Maybe it’s more than that. It’s hard to sustain the old troll argument when it’s 30 million people. But it was very, I thought that narrative was going to prevail for a while, that, you know, oh, she got victimized, and it was all these terrible people that went after her, but that collapsed. But it’s very stressful. But, and this is something that I’ve learned, so I’ve been obsessing about another statement in the New Testament for about two years. I’ve been trying to figure it out, and it’s the statement that you should turn the other cheek. And that’s a tough one, man, because, well, because first of all, who wants to do that? Because you want to explode in righteous anger. At least you want to defend yourself. You want to do one of those things. So what the hell does that mean? And partly what it means is, if you’re attacked and you’re innocent, and look, I’m not saying I’m like globally innocent or anything like that, but I’m not guilty of the accusations that are levied at me, or at least I’m not guilty in the manner that the accusations would indicate. If you’re being attacked and you’re not guilty of the accusations, then the attacks say more about the attacker than their intended target. And so, so far, I’ve been able to withstand the attacks, and the consequence of that is that it said more about the attackers than about me. And then the question is, can I tolerate that? Because it’s still very stressful. And I vary, I waver on that back and forth. And then, of course, the other issue is that some people in the media have pilloried me, but many haven’t. You know, there have been very many thoughtful people that have written thoughtful pieces about me. There’s a Canadian consortium of 200 newspapers, the Post Media Group, and they came out, the entire group came out in favour of my stance in relationship to Bill C-16 in Canada, which was a piece of legislation that compelled speech. And so, well, so, so far, same with the protests. When people come out to protest against me, the first video that really went viral was a protest at the University of Toronto. And after the protest was over, the anti-free speech people at the protests took the microphone away and blasted white noise and made it impossible for anyone to speak, even though it was an open mic event. So that got broadcast. And then about two hours after the event, I went down to talk to the cops to see if anybody had been hurt or anything like that. And then on the way back into the university, I got accosted by half a dozen, like, radical types and about 30 of their hangers on. And then there’s a crowd of people that I would say were probably supporting me that gathered around me. And they went after me and videotaped all of it on their cell phones. And then they posted that. And the idea was that that was going to do me in. But what happened was the comments were 100 to 1 in favour of what I was saying. So that was another example where the protests were more damaging to the protesters than they were to me. And that’s been luckily, fortunately, miraculously, all of that, a recurrent pattern. And so the question is whether or not I can tolerate it and whether my family can tolerate it. And so far, look, if you’re trying to do something difficult, let’s say the right amount of controversy isn’t zero. The question is how much controversy can you handle and how much of the mud that’s thrown will stick? And then how much of it deserves to stick? All of those things. You’ve got to scour your conscience under those circumstances. But so far, I’ve been fortunate. It seems like you’ve taken on this dragon voluntarily. It seems like from the beginning you’ve known that this, for example, when you spoke up against Bill C-16 in Canada, you knew that this might become tough. Well, I’d taught people to negotiate in my clinical practice for a long time. I’ve had lots of clients. Many of those clients were female. And the goal in my consulting with them was to double or triple their salary within five years. And so that wasn’t necessarily the only goal. We discussed all sorts of goals, but that was often one. And so I was very accustomed to organizing people to negotiate. If you want to negotiate, there’s a couple of rules. The first rule is you have to be able to say no. And what no means is there isn’t anything you can do to me to get me to do that. That’s what no means. Now, like, you can have different degrees of seriousness about no, but if you’re going to negotiate with your boss, say, for a substantial raise, no means if I don’t get it, then I will leave. That’s fundamentally what, and that leaving will cost you more than, it’s not a threat, right? It has to be the observation that me leaving will cost you substantially more than giving me the raise. You have to be in a position to make that case or you don’t win the negotiation. And so I always put my clients in a position where if they went and asked for something, they were in a position to win because we didn’t go and ask before that. So when I made the video criticizing Bill C-16, I thought, I’m not abiding by this damn piece of legislation. And then I thought, well, what does it mean that I’m not? And I thought, well, I had multiple sources of income, so I was reasonably positioned to tolerate a fair bit of pushback. I mean, I could have got wiped out, had things gone sideways, it would have been difficult to take me out completely. And I thought, there’s no way I’m abiding by this piece of legislation. I was willing, I thought through the negative consequences. Now, I didn’t, of course, think that any of this would happen because this is just completely preposterous and no one could have possibly foreseen it. But so I would say there were certain things I faced in doing that, but I couldn’t have foreseen the absolutely explosive consequences. I’m not unhappy that I did it. I would do it again. I am still doing it, I suppose. Which of your twelve rules do you break most often? I could probably still be better at listening to people. I have these, I do interviews with people, I call them discussions because they’re not really interviews. Probably they’re not interviews because I talk too much. So I had to call them discussions. But I would say the most common criticism of those discussions is that they’re not really interviews. So I had to call them discussions. But I would say the most common criticism of those discussions is that I interrupt the people that I’m discussing things with and tilt the conversation probably a little bit more towards me, my thinking than theirs. Now, part of that, I think, is my natural tendency towards, like I’ve always talked a lot ever since I was like three, like continually. So I’m verbally fluent, you know, it’s part of my nature and extroverted. But you can always get better at listening, you know. And so I can listen and I practice that because I’m a therapist, but I would say that’s probably the rule I break. That’s rule nine. Like assume that the person you’re listening to knows something you don’t. It’s like I’m not as good at that yet as I could be because I wouldn’t get that criticism if I was. Like it’s not every comment or anything. It’s probably like every 20th comment or every 30th comment. But it’s still it’s consistent. And so every time I have an interview, I think, OK, I’m going to try to shut up a little bit more. But then I get excited about what’s happening and, you know, and talk too much. One thing related to that. Sometimes you seem to go off on a tangent when you’re discussing something. You go into, you know, something related to it. Then you come back to a greater structure of things. Do you have you laid all this out before you say it? Or do you just go from one topic to another and they somehow relate together and become whole? Both. Both. Yeah. But so before I do a talk, like I have to I think about the talk all day before I do it, like not 100 percent of the time. But it’s it’s in my mind all the time. And what I’m trying to get is the basic narrative. And it’s something like you can only use a metaphor to really describe it. So imagine you wanted to cross a swamp and there were stones under the surface. You need to know where the stones are to get from one side of the swamp to the other. And so then that’s what I do in my imagination. I think, OK, well, there’s this area I have to traverse and there’s stepping stones along the way. I need to know where they’re located. And so that might be like 12 points or something like that. That’s the rough path. And then I have a whole corpus of stories that fit each of those points. And then I can choose how I’m going to weave those together. But I have to remember where I’m going. And if I’m well, like if I’m healthy and functioning properly, then I can go way out on a tangent and I can still remember. Oh, yes, I have to tie that back to this point and move to the next step. So it’s I like I think it’s like jazz improvisation, essentially. You know, you have the melody and it has to organize the melody has to organize all the improvisation. And then I have all these stories that I know. But I every time I tell the story, I try to vary it so that it brings in something I haven’t brought in before. Integrate something, you know, like one of the things I was trying to do tonight. I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time is how to integrate the idea of the good player of games with the idea of voluntarily. Shouldering your the catastrophe of life. I know those are the same thing, but it’s not obvious why. And I’m still not completely obvious to me, but I know that the connection exists and I got a fair bit a fair ways tonight. Farther than I had it, stacking those concepts on top of each other. So the other thing I’m always trying to do is to take each of these sets of ideas and to weave them together more tightly. But also to push them further in their development. So you’ve been doing that on this tour. Have you been developing your ideas? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There’s you can’t give an effective lecture without so. You don’t deliver a talk to an audience. First of all, it’s not at talk. Second, you don’t deliver it. Third, it isn’t an audience like all of that’s wrong. You talk to individuals in the audience one at a time and they’re representative of the whole. But you’re not talking to the audience. If you’re afraid of public speaking, it’s because you’re talking to the audience. It’s like forget about that. You just talk to people. You know how to do that. And then you’re not delivering a talk because then it’s a canned product. You must have just hand people pieces of paper that they could read. It’s more efficient. Why not do that? What you’re doing if you address people properly is that you involve them in the process of furthering exploration of important concepts. And you think, well, how can you do that? Because they’re sitting there passively. It’s like, well, you’re not passive. You’re not verbal, but you’re not passive. Like I listen. I listen to whether or not everyone’s rustling around. If you’re rustling around, then I’m not balancing chaos and order properly. You’re not gripped. If I can hear noise in the audience, it’s not right. I watch people one by one and I see sometimes they’re shaking their head like this. Sometimes they’re nodding. Sometimes they look confused. If people look confused, I think, well, I haven’t got that right. I have to be watching people and seeing that they’re understanding. They’re following along. And that indication that they’re following along helps me figure out if I’m in the right place. And so there’s a dynamic that goes along with it. And so all of that. And that’s what you’re doing if you engage the audience properly is you shouldn’t be talking about things you don’t know enough about to talk about. So if you have to read your notes, it’s like, sorry, you don’t know enough to talk about that because you need notes. Now, maybe when you’re first starting to talk about something, you need notes. But if you need notes, you haven’t prepared enough. You should know like ten times as much about the topic than you’re going to talk about in the talk. Otherwise, who the hell are you? And so, well, right. I mean, you’re supposed to be the authority. So you need to know these things. And so and then knowing these things, you want to stretch them further. Because when you’re this is a theater, a lecture theater, theater is drama. So why is it a lecture theater? Because lecture is drama. What’s the drama? Drama. Delivering a talk. No, there’s no drama in that. A tape recorder can do that. The drama is to engage with ideas actively in real time and to discover with the audience what the consequences. And that’s what makes a novel great, for example. The reason the Dostoevsky novel is great is because Dostoevsky did not know where he was going when he started. He had problems, you know, like crime and punishment is a great example. He wanted to explore the relationship between crime and punishment. He didn’t think, well, I’m a postmodern neo-Marxist and I have a solution to the problem of crime and punishment. And I’m going to write a novel describing what the right solution is. He thought, here’s a problem, man. This is a major problem. I’m going to divide myself into ten characters and I’m going to have a war and I’m going to see what prevails. And he takes you along on that voyage. And that’s what makes Dostoevsky different than Ayn Rand, for example. Because Ayn Rand already knew who the good guys and the bad guys were. And maybe she was right and maybe she wasn’t. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that what she did wasn’t literature. It was just sophisticated propaganda. You know, like it taps into literature upon occasion. But she knew where she was going, whereas Dostoevsky, he discovered it along the way. And so he takes you along on the journey. And that’s any great artist does that, takes you along on the journey. That’s why it’s so revivifying to encounter anything that’s genuinely artistic. It’s because you’re along for the conflict between chaos and order. And that’s way more interesting than having a talk delivered to you. Is it possible that that journey might lead to a bad place in some cases? You’ve spoken of Hitler when he was speaking to audiences and he was listening to the audiences. And he started to find what really engaged them and made them excited about what he was saying. Is it possible that you might get it wrong because of that dynamic? Oh, definitely. And it’s a terrible threat to get it wrong because, you know, in rule three, make friends with the people who want the best for you. There are other rules that were associated with that that I didn’t write about, like make friends with people with own, no, let’s see, be very careful with who, be very careful about who you share good news with. That was one rule. And another rule was be very careful about whom you share bad news with. And those are sort of hallmarks of friendship. If you have friends you can tell good news to. You know what it’s like to tell good news to someone that you shouldn’t tell good news to. It’s like they’re not happy about your good news. They’re bitter about it and they’ll show it in some way. Maybe they’ll trump your good news or they won’t listen or they’ll bring up another topic or they’re secretly angry or whatever. You walk away from sharing the good news thinking you should have kept your damn mouth shut. And that’s not a good sign. But some people you can tell good news to and they’ll be happy because they have enough sense to know that life’s a catastrophe and if something good happens to you then hooray, you know, because… And then bad news is the same thing. It’s like if you tell bad news to someone, they need to let you suffer, right? They shouldn’t make you feel better quick because they’re upset because you’re upset. None of that. They just have to take it and that’s hard. So the… Uh-oh. I think I forgot what the hell the question was here. I’m getting tired so I’m losing my ability to go back. You may get it wrong when you’re interacting with the audience. Yes. Look. What Hitler did was this, as far as I can tell. And I’ve talked to politicians who’ve built grassroots political parties about how they did it too. So the audience talks to you when you deliver, when you speak publicly. And they talk to you with their emotional reactions. And then you can learn how to say what produces a given emotional reaction. Especially if that’s what you want. If you want, say, control over the crowd. Or maybe you want to harness the anger of the crowd, let’s say. Because your own motivations… What were Hitler’s motivations? Here’s a psychoanalytic answer. If you cannot understand the motivations, look at the consequences and infer the motivation. What’s the consequence? Hitler blows his brains out in a bunker under Berlin when Europe is on fire. What was the motivation? A suicidal apocalypse. That’s the motivation. How do you generate a suicidal apocalypse? You aim at it. How do you get the crowd to go along? You speak in that manner and you watch for the emotional response. And when you get the anger that you’re after, you facilitate it. And you let your imagination dwell on that. And you become a master of that. And that’s what Hitler did. And it wasn’t like the Germans weren’t angry. And they had their reasons. World War I was brutal. They lost. The Versailles Treaty was a catastrophe. In the 1920s, every decent, hardworking German lost all of their savings in hyperinflation. And the entire country was threatened by a radical leftist revolution. It was rough. And people were not happy. And many of them had been terribly brutalized by World War I. So there was no shortage of anger to capitalize on. And Hitler was just the guy. Annoyed as he was, for example, that he was rejected from art school three times, despite having a fair bit of artistic talent. He had his reasons for resentment and hatred. And that’s just a tiny part of it. Yes, these things can go terribly wrong. It depends, at least in part, on what you’re aiming at. People ask me what I’m aiming at. And I would say, I mean, who knows, right? Because you don’t know yourself. I don’t know myself, not to the final depths. But I think what I’m aiming at, I’m hoping, is exactly what I say I’m aiming at. I hope that what I’m aiming at is to tell people stories and provide them with clinical information that’s derived from the best literature and science that I know, so that they can be fortified in their ability to contend with tragedy and malevolence. And the reason that I’m doing that, as far as I’m concerned, is because when I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning, the audio version of which is out next week, by the way, I think it’ll be easier to understand because it’s read and the intonation is all there, I concluded after studying the psychological dynamics of the Cold War that the only proper medication to tyrannical collectivism was the sovereignty of the individual, and that as a consequence, the sovereign individual needed to be strengthened. That that was the path forward with least harm and most potential good. And I think that’s what I’m doing. My evidence for that is that I’ve been doing it for 30 years. I taught courses based on that at Harvard and at the University of Toronto. Consistently, the lectures were made into a television program in Toronto that was popular. The lectures became explosively popular online. Everybody can see what I’m saying, as far as I can tell. And apart from the hit pieces, which are perhaps valid criticisms, although I don’t believe so, the overwhelming evidence, as far as I can tell, is that it’s having a positive consequence. So, and I’m hoping, and I have people watching me and criticizing me, like friends of mine and my family, trying to make sure that this all works. And so hopefully, I’m not doing something that isn’t good. We’ll see. So, the last question. What did you think of the last Star Wars movie? I’ve gone, I don’t know if I saw the last Star Wars movie, but I saw one of the last, I’ve probably seen three of the last five Star Wars movies, I would say. And I thought they were all the same movie as the first Star Wars movie. So, they haven’t been my cup of tea, let’s say. Having said that, it’s obvious that, you know, the superhero movies, the Star Wars movies, the Star Trek movies, the fantastic success that Marvel, in particular, has had with their superhero pantheon. Like, those are the most expensive artifacts that people make, those movies. That’s something to really think about, you know. People put $200 million into a movie like that. It’s not the most expensive thing we make, but it’s bloody well up there, I can tell you. And it’s pretty interesting to realize as well that making the special effects for those movies, which is a form of artificial reality, let’s say, is part of what’s driving computational sophistication forward, because the big processors are being used most intensively to render reality. And so, whatever’s happening in those movies is something far more significant than you might think. I think it all speaks to the unquenchable power of mythology and its proclivity to manifest itself in a multitude of forms and to be eternally compelling to people. And so, generally, that seems to be a really good thing to me. So, I mean, their Harry Potter series, I think, is a better example than the Star Wars series, because I think that the Star Wars series is a bit too consciously contrived, whereas the Harry Potter series is genuinely, to my way of thinking anyways, is a genuine intuitive production. And Rowling got her mythology. She’s so good at that, I just can’t believe it. It’s just absolutely unbelievable. And you think of the consequences of that. She wrote seven books about wizards, like teenage wizards and child wizards in magical castle, threatened by giant snakes, and portrayed the battle between good and evil on a landscape of chaos and order, and sold, I don’t know, what’s her empire worth in terms of total financial consequences? It would be, it’s in the tens of billions of dollars, certainly. She got all these kids to read 600-page books. They produced all these movies that were fantastically expensive. Everybody read them and went and watched them. It’s like, and what do you see there? It’s a dying and resurrecting hero fights a satanic figure and attains final victory through death and resurrection. It’s like, you know, and it wasn’t contrived that came out of the story. And so the mythology seeps in no matter what. And it’s, I think, and this is something I learned from Jung, is that it’s time for us to understand it. We can’t just live by it unconsciously anymore. We have to understand it as well as living by it. And that’s the task of the 21st century. That’s what it looks like to me. So if we understand it, then maybe we can fortify ourselves against collectivist ideology, for example. I’m hoping, because that’s a bad pathway. So you were able to turn that question into very good final words somehow. Good. Thank you. Thank you very much.