Iceland： 12 Rules for Life Tour： Lecture 2 (Bf9Wen-j5Zw)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Bf9Wen-j5Zw

Give him a warm welcome, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s very nice to be here and to see you all come out to spend a couple of hours thinking about difficult things. There seems to be an appetite for that, which is really something. So let’s exploit it. So I started working on the ideas that I outlined in 12 Rules for Life, well, a long time ago. And really started when I was about 13. I was a junior high school student and I met this librarian who’s kind of an eccentric person, very well educated person. And she, I used to hang around with my delinquent friends in the library, which tells you how eccentric the librarian was, because that’s not normally the place where the delinquent kids hang out, you know. But she talked to us like we were adults. And that was a, what would you call it, a refreshing, that was a refreshing experience. And she knew that I liked to read and she started giving me real books. She gave me One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was the first book published by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union. It’s a story about the day of a political prisoner in a work camp and Brave New World and 1984 and Animal Farm and Ayn Rand’s books, which was quite interesting because she was the wife of our member of parliament, who was the only member of the opposition in our province. And he was a socialist, an NDP, New Democratic Party leader, as a matter of fact. But despite that, she gave me Ayn Rand’s books because she thought that I should be exposed to the other side of the argument. So I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. And, well, she was the first person who helped me discover literature, let’s say. And while at the same time, I got interested in what had happened in Nazi Germany. And I wrote an essay about that when I was about 13 or 14 about Auschwitz and what had happened there. And I never read that really never left my mind, I would say. I think I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at that point, which is a book I would highly recommend. I have a reading list on my website, by the way, at Jordan B. Peterson dot com. And so there’s a variety of books there that have really influenced me. And I put them up for other people’s use. Anyways, what I learned about Auschwitz and about Nazi Germany never really left my mind. And because I couldn’t understand how people could act that way, how they could not only be possessed by an ideology to the degree that the Germans were, in a very civilized country, Germany, you know, so it was, I suppose, even a more spectacular shock that something so catastrophic happened there. There wasn’t just the ideological possession, it was the cruelty and the gratuitous cruelty in the service of that ideological possession that I couldn’t understand. It didn’t, I couldn’t establish a relationship between my own being and those patterns of action. And as I got older, that concern transformed itself into an obsession, I would say, not so much with what had happened in Nazi Germany, but with, I think, what happened, what was happening as a consequence of the collectivist philosophy per se, which you might think of something that manifested itself both on the right in Nazi Germany and then on the left in all the multitudinous and catastrophic communist regimes that characterized the bulk of the 20th century. And their insane murderousness. And that probably culminated for me in the 1970s when I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which is another book that everyone should read, because in some sense it might be the defining document of the 20th century. And the fact that everyone in the West isn’t familiar with that book is actually a signal of our catastrophic moral failing, I would say. I started writing this book called Maps of Meaning in about 1985, although I had been working on variants of it before that. And what I was trying to understand was maybe the psychological motivations for the Cold War, something like that. Many of you are old enough to remember what it was like in the 1980s. We just went and visited the house in Reykjavik where Gorbachev and Reagan met, which was quite something to see when they decided they were going to bring at least some of the insanity to a relative halt, thank God. The 80s were a very contentious time. You know, the Cold War sort of peaked in two, at two times it peaked in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I don’t know if you know this, but I visited a nuclear missile site in Arizona about 10 years ago. It was a decommissioned missile site, intercontinental ballistic missile. Intercontinental ballistic missile is a very large rocket, so it can go halfway around the world. And it’s ballistic, which means it has the same function as a bullet. And the bullet is ballistic because once you fire it, it’s gone. You don’t control it after it leaves. So once you launch a ballistic missile, it’s launched. There’s no calling it back. And they told us they did a simulation launch, which was a very eerie thing. And so to launch a nuclear missile, there’s a big console that sort of looks like the Star Trek control module, let’s say. And one person stands here, and one person stands about 20 feet away. Each have a key around their neck, and they put the key in the lock simultaneously, and then turn it for 10 seconds. And at the end of 10 seconds, the missile is gone. And that’s that. And they both had their keys in the lock in 1962. And we came close again in 1984 when, I don’t know if you know this, but the Soviet missile detection system signaled the launch of four or five missiles from North America. And a single Russian soldier decided that it was a false alarm and refused to push the button. It would have resulted in major retaliation. He just died about a year ago. You can read about him on Wikipedia. Anyways, I read Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s, and that made me, even I would say, more obsessed with what was happening here. With what was happening on the world stage. I was trying to understand why it was that the systems of belief that we inhabited, let’s say, one typifying the Soviet Union and similar states, Maoist China, North Korea, wonderful places like that, versus the West, we each had our own way of construing the world. The ways of construing the world were set at odds with one another. And the fact that they were set at odds with one another appeared to be so significant that we’d armed ourselves with 50,000 hydrogen bombs on each side, something like that. And I don’t know how much you know about a hydrogen bomb. You know, you know about atomic bombs. You know that a hydrogen bomb has an atomic bomb for the trigger. Right. So, like, the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, that was something. That was a fission bomb, not a standard atomic bomb, the first generation. But a hydrogen bomb is incontestably more powerful than that. And we were producing them in the tens of thousands. It’s not like we don’t have any now, but it was really some insanity in the 1980s. And people seemed to have a very itchy trigger finger. So I was very confused about this in two ways. One, from a psychological perspective, because by that time I decided to study psychology instead of political science, which was my original major. I got disenchanted with political science because I didn’t believe that people were fundamentally motivated by economic issues. I still don’t believe that that’s true. They’re motivated by whatever they’re motivated by. It can’t be captured by economics, not precisely. I was very curious about what it was that was so important about a belief system that people would risk putting the entire planet to the torch to ensure that their particular mode of construing the world prevailed. It was an interesting psychological problem. What was so important about a belief system that would justify destroying everything, let’s say, risking destroying everything, because that was certainly the situation we put ourselves in. And more to the point, I guess, or equally to the point, I was interested in two other things. One was, were these differences in belief systems just arbitrary? And that’s actually a postmodern question. I didn’t know that at the time. Because you might say, the postmodernists do say, there’s a very large number of ways of interpreting the world. And it isn’t obvious how you determine which of those ways are correct. And so perhaps you can’t determine that any of them are correct. And then as a consequence of your inability to determine if any of them are correct, then you have to turn to something like power dispute to establish which interpretation is going to take precedence. I would say, in a nutshell, that’s a postmodernist theory. Now that’s tainted to some degree with Marxist preconceptions, but we won’t get into that. But that’s basically the idea. And it’s an idea with a certain amount of justification. There is a very large number of ways of interpreting the world. And it isn’t obvious which way or ways are right or why they’re right. So it’s a complicated problem. And so I was curious, was this merely a difference of opinion? The West had a certain set of axioms that it was acting out in the world. And the Soviet bloc and the rest of the communist countries had another set of axioms. And they were both arbitrary, and it was a matter of power. Or was there something deeper at stake? So that was question number two. Question number three was, was there an alternative to brutal combat? Was there an alternative way of solving the dispute to brutal group combat? Something like that. Because I always believed that if you understood a problem, that you could solve it. In fact, if when you analyzed the problem, a solution didn’t emerge from the analysis, then you actually didn’t understand the problem. And so I thought if I delved into the problem deeply enough, then maybe I could figure out what might constitute a solution, assuming there was such a thing. Because I knew after writing a fair bit of it that there was a real problem. Because you can get belief systems that are locked in combat. And then obviously the terrible consequence of that is the combat. But then I also knew, and this was probably more from reading Nietzsche than anything else, that if your belief system collapses, you might say, well I don’t want to fight with you about whose belief system is correct, I’ll just let my mind go. But the problem is if you let your belief system go, then you’re swamped by nihilism and hopelessness. And that’s not helpful. First of all, it’s not helpful psychologically, because it produces emotional pain and anxiety, and maybe at unbearable levels. You can’t have a pointless life. It’s a suffering. A pointless life is pointless suffering. And people can’t sustain that without becoming demoralized. That’s only where they start. Demoralized, bitter, cruel, resentful, angry, hostile, murderous, genocidal, like all those things. Follow one from another if things are sufficiently hopeless. So you can’t just let your belief system go. But if you’re locked into it, and there’s another one that you’re competing with, then the consequence is war. So what is it? Nihilism on the one hand and war on the other. That didn’t seem like, especially given the outcome of, say, the Third World War. Neither of those seemed like acceptable alternatives, but I couldn’t see any other… I couldn’t see that there was anything else other than those two alternatives. And so that’s what I tried to lay out in this book, Maps of Meaning. Most of the thoughts that I expressed in 12 Rules for Life, not all of them, and in the lectures that I’ve done that have become popular on YouTube, were all developed during the 15-year period that I worked on that book, and I worked on it, I would say, obsessively, really. I wrote about three hours a day, and I thought about it for pretty much 12 other hours. And so I was thinking constantly. It’s not an obvious why, but well, I told you why. For some reason, all that manifested itself to me as a cardinal problem. But I concluded, and tried to lay out the rationale for this, that the fight between these two belief systems, but let’s look at the belief systems. It’s not communism versus the West. It’s not communism versus the free market. It’s different than that. It’s collectivism in its far-right form, let’s say the far-right form of the Nazis, and the far-left form of the radical leftists, the communists. That’s collectivism versus individualism. That’s the fundamental conflict. And there are variants of the collectivist viewpoint, but it doesn’t matter. They can be grouped under the rubric of collectivism. There’s important differences, but we don’t have to get into that. But the Western take wasn’t collectivist. It was individualist. And the central idea of the West was that although people are obviously, obviously aggregate into groups, and many different groups, because all of you are members of many different groups, ethnicities, genders, sexes, races, family groups, community groups, you can be grouped a very large number of ways. And you tend towards the adoption of something approximating a group identity, because you know, you take care of your family, and you’re a member of your community, and you have a certain amount of justifiable patriotism in relationship to your state. The group identity is definitely part of who you are. The question is, what’s the fundamental defining characteristic of who you are? And the collectivist definition is that you are the avatar of a collective, and that’s fundamentally who you are. But the Western perspective is not that. The Western perspective is that despite the fact that people have an individual level and a collective level, the individual level is to be regarded as paramount. You’re to be treated above all as an individual. Now, and I looked into that very deeply, and I thought that isn’t arbitrary, it’s actually correct. That’s the right way of looking at the world. And then you might say, well, what do you mean the right way? And of course, that’s the right question, because that is the question. If something’s the right way of looking at something, well, why is it the right way of looking at it? But I want to put a little spin on that, too, because usually when we talk about individualism in the West, at least in the modern world, maybe let’s say for the last 50 years or something like that, maybe it’s after World War II, I don’t know exactly the parameters, it doesn’t matter, certainly since the 1960s, when we think about the tradition of individuality in the West, we think about the tradition of individual rights. And there’s a problem with that, because the fundamental individual tradition of the West is not individual rights. And rights have a problem. Rights are sort of like your privilege compared to other people. I have these rights, and don’t tread on them. That walls me off and makes me privileged in some sense. It means that I have the right to do things, I have the right to pursue my own interests, I have the right to pursue happiness, for example, that’s explicitly laid out in the American system. The rights are what is special about me. And so when you look at individuality or individualism from that perspective, you can think about it as a selfish idea. And it’s often criticized by collectivists precisely for that selfishness. But the fundamental idea of the individual in the West isn’t predicated on rights, even though that’s important. It’s predicated on responsibility. Right, so your role as an individual in the West isn’t to be the bearer of rights, of intrinsic rights, even though those are important. Your responsibility as an individual in the West is to bear the responsibility of an individual. And it’s in bearing that responsibility that you set yourself right and your family right, and you keep the state on track. It’s not from expressing your rights, it’s from shouldering your responsibility. And I would say that the reason that you have rights in the West is so that you can shoulder your responsibility. It’s not the other way around. It’s so that you can do what’s best on your behalf and in that manner do what’s best on your family’s behalf, and in that manner contribute to the degree that you can to the community. And that if you do all those things simultaneously, which means to accept the responsibility for that, then things move ahead as well as they can move ahead, which doesn’t necessarily mean well, because life is very difficult and there’s no sure way through it. There’s only less bad approaches. That might be a way of thinking about it. And the least bad approach you can manage is to shoulder your responsibility as an individual. And I would say that one of the things that drives the collectivist ethos, which is often formulated in terms of compassion for the oppressed, which is something we’ll talk about a little bit later, is actually a deep desire to at all costs avoid that responsibility. And it’s no wonder, because the responsibility is overwhelming. You say the world fundamentally is a tragic place, right? It’s a place in which each of us is broken and it’s contaminated by the ever-present reality of betrayal and malevolence. And to shoulder the responsibility, first, for even admitting to that, and second, for assuming that you are duty-bound, let’s say, to do something about that. Well, that’s a task that anyone who has his or her eyes open should be leery of accepting. And I would say, well, perhaps there’s no credible reason for accepting it, except that every other alternative is worse. And so that’s a brutal fact. So, the antidote to collectivism is individualism, but it’s not the individualism of the privileged person with rights. It’s the terrible burden of the individual who determines that he or she will shoulder their responsibility to that most. So I developed that idea in Maps of Meaning. And I made a lot of lectures about that book, many of which are on YouTube, some of which have become widely viewed, I would say, by hundreds of thousands of people now. And that course always had a dramatic effect on my students and their most typical comment. There’s two classes of typical comments that I got from students about my Maps of Meaning courses, and it’s the same comments that I get from people now when they come and talk to me about my lectures. The first comment is, and this is about maybe a quarter of the people, is that watching the lectures or taking the course enabled them to put words to things they knew they knew, but didn’t know how to say. And that’s fine, because that was actually an explicit purpose of the writing and the course. And the second is that it helped people straighten out their lives. And that’s also not that surprising to me, because a lot of what I integrated into that book and the lectures, and then the lectures that were also associated with my personality course, were ideas from the great clinical psychologists and psychiatrists of the 20th century. There was a dozen of them or so, or maybe 20, who were all outstanding geniuses of slightly different types, who learned all sorts of things about how people could put themselves together properly as individuals. And if you learn about those things, they’re actually really helpful. That’s not surprising, because they sit at the core of an entire domain of science and art, let’s say, devoted to improving people’s individual lives. I wove the responsibility idea into 12 rules, because that’s really what it is in some sense. It’s a call to the voluntary adoption of maximal individual responsibility. And it’s a psychological work, not a political work. Now, I think the reason that it’s attracted so much political attention, let’s say, some of which Gunnlager referred to in the introduction, is, well, there’s two reasons. One is because I took what might be regarded as a political stance about some compelled speech legislation in Canada. I never regarded that as a political move, because I regarded the legislation itself as something that wasn’t a political move. I regarded it as an attempt by the politicians to jump outside their domain of acceptable conduct into the philosophical or even the theological realm, because you don’t mess with the idea of free speech in a Western country. And there’s very sophisticated reasons for that. And it doesn’t matter what your reasons for doing it are. You don’t go there. But it happened to be the more radical leftists that were pushing this forward. And because I objected to it, then it was in their interest to assume that I must be the worst sort of right-wing die-hard, I suppose, because otherwise they’d have to contend with my actual arguments. And so it’s simpler just to shoot the messenger than to contend with the arguments. And, you know, if you stand up and say there’s something wrong in a place like Canada where most things aren’t wrong, then it’s reasonable also for people to assume there must be something wrong with you, because most of the time there isn’t anything wrong with the country. And so a certain amount of testing is a reasonable thing for people to do. I guess the other element of this that’s political in some sense, though, is that within the collectivist viewpoint, this is something that’s very interesting with regard to free speech. I didn’t really figure this out until a couple of weeks ago. The radical leftists, and you see this particularly in the United States now, although the Americans have a very strong tradition of free speech, the radical leftists are opposed to freedom of speech, but that’s not really right. It’s not the way to think about it. In the radical leftist collectivist view of the world, there’s actually no such thing as free speech. It’s a worse criticism than opposing it, because the collectivists believe that you’re nothing but an avatar of your group. First of all, there is no you. You’re defined by your group membership. And then the world is a landscape of groups, each vying for predominance. And that’s what there is. And so when you say that you’re speaking your mind, that isn’t something that you can do from the collectivist viewpoint. What you’re doing is acting as an unconscious avatar of the power demands of your group. There’s no you. There’s no free speech. There’s no your opinion. There’s no facts for that matter. Everything is to be viewed in relationship to the power struggle between groups that even in principle cannot communicate. And so the other reason that I detest, let’s say, the collectivist viewpoint, is because I see that it leads nowhere but to conflict. Because if people cannot speak as individuals between groups, then all they can do is submit or fight. Those are the options, right? Negotiation, capitulation, or warfare. Those are the options. And the only process that allows for negotiation in the absence of capitulation or conflict is speech. Because we can talk over our differences. And that discussion is going to be contentious. Because we actually have differences. But compared to the contentiousness of not talking over the differences, it’s a walk in the park. You know, I saw something quite remarkable. When I was in London a month and a half ago, I was on this political show. And one of the things they did in this section that didn’t have anything to do with me was to show a bunch of clips from the political show. From the…there’s a question period that the British have evolved where the opposition can go after the Prime Minister. And the woman that was appearing with me on the show had written a book about that called Punch and Judy, if I remember correctly. And they showed a bunch of clips of English MPs attacking the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister’s response, all the way from Thatcher forward. It was absolutely vicious in the way that well-educated British people can be vicious, which is a very impressive form of viciousness. It was no holds barred verbal combat. And you might think, well, isn’t that horrible? Because it’s certainly rife, let’s say, with microaggressions. But it’s not horrible because none of them had their hands around each other’s necks. Right? It was all civilized. It was everyone was standing where they were supposed to stand. And they were hurling invective and making criticisms and making accusations and defending themselves and all of that. But it was all contained within the peaceful confines of this…of the House of Parliament. And that’s a miracle, really. It’s a miracle. And the British are particularly good at that. And so you leave free speech alone because the alternative to free speech is capitulation or conflict. And unless you want one of those or both, and you might, then you don’t interfere with the mechanism that enables people to state the nature of their reality and to clarify that and to negotiate with others, even though that negotiation is painful and emotionally demanding and threatening and anxiety provoking and aggression instigating. And all of those things because the alternative is far worse. I wove the idea of individual responsibility through…through 12 rules. Well, we might say we might begin by thinking about how that’s related to the idea of free speech. It’s like you have to find your way in the world, let’s say, with all of your peculiarities, your idiosyncrasies and your differences. And the way you do that is by acting in the world. But the way you prepare to act is by thinking. And really what you’re doing when you’re thinking…there’s a philosopher named Alfred North Whitehead who said something very intelligent about thinking. He said that the reason we think is so that our thoughts can die instead of us. Right. And it’s a Darwinian idea. So the way animals adapt to the world across time is that animals produce variants, variant offspring, many of them. And most of them are unsuccessful and die. But a few of them are successful enough in that time and place to reproduce. And so the animal keeps living across the millennia, varying slightly as it does so to adapt to the transformations of the environment. Human beings do the same thing, but we also have figured out how to abstract that. And so what we do when we think is that we produce a fictional world that’s a simulation of the real world. And we populate that simulated world with simulations of us. And then we let those simulations play out in the simulated world. And the ones that are successful, we embody and act out. And the ones that are unsuccessful, we abandon and let die. And we do that when we’re thinking in dreams. And we do that when we think in stories. And we even do that when we think in words. Although it’s not as obvious when you argue internally, which is what you do when you think. You have an avatar that manifests itself as one point of view and an avatar that manifests itself as another. And you let them engage in conflict. And the one that loses, you let go of. That’s a sacrifice. And if you’re discussing something with someone and it’s important, then you both put your viewpoints forward and you analyze the consequences of the dispute. And then you walk away with any luck, wiser than you were, so that you can embody a mode of being that’s more likely to be successful. And you do that in part, in large part, by exercising your freedom of speech. And you might think, well, why freedom of speech and not freedom of thought? And the answer to that is, don’t be thinking that you think. Because thinking is very hard. And most people can’t think at all. And even if you can think, you’re not very good at it. I mean, think about what you have to do, technically, to think. First of all, you have to formulate the problem. That’s hard enough. And you have to formulate it precisely. Then you have to generate multiple potential solutions to the problem. And then you have to let those solutions argue themselves into a hierarchy internally. And so you have to be able to tolerate that stress, right? You can’t just be one thing if you’re going to think. Because thinking isn’t just saying that what I think is right. That’s not thinking at all. Thinking is questioning whether or not what you think is right is right. And that’s really hard. It’s very demanding. And so, and you can do that to some degree, but you’re not as good at it as you think, even if you’re a pretty good thinker. Mostly the way you think is by talking. And you talk, and mostly when you talk and think, it’s contentious, as you know, if you’ve ever had an intimate relationship with someone. Because an intimate relationship, if it has any worth at all, is a place where there’s tremendous contention. But it’s bounded within something approximating mutual respect and the willingness to continue to play the game across time. And the reason that an intimate relationship is contentious is because life is very, very difficult. And people are different. And we face extraordinarily complex problems together, like how to make a living and how to operate properly in our careers. And how to rank order the importance of our careers. And how to manage our domestic economies. And how to discipline our kids. And whether or not to have kids. And how to enter middle age. And how to grow old gracefully. And how to live productively. And where to vacation. And all of these things, which are extraordinarily difficult problems, the only way that we can solve them is by butting heads to some degree. And communicating freely about what the possibilities are. And negotiating a solution. And that’s thinking. And in order to do that thinking, you have to be able to speak freely. And you certainly have to be willing to offend someone. I mean of all the stupid questions I’ve ever been asked by journalists, the question, what makes you think you have the right to offend someone by what you say, is by far the most miraculously ignorant. And I say that because, well, you know, it just sets me back on my heels to some degree. Because I think, well, what’s your claim here? Your claim is, your first claim is, we could hypothetically discuss something important without one of us getting upset. It’s like, that’s not going to happen. If you ever discuss anything important with anyone, including just discussing it with yourself, not only are you going to get upset, you’re going to get so upset that you probably won’t even do it. You know, you think, well, I have a difficult problem. What’s your first reaction? Well, I’m going to sit right here and think about that. It’s like, no, that isn’t your reaction. Your reaction is to go, like, play a video game or watch a YouTube video or vacuum your bedroom or do the dishes or whatever you can do not to think about that. That’s what you’re going to do. So, you know, and then if you’re going to have a discussion with your wife or your husband or your kids and it’s about something important, it’s like if you’re a normal person, your heart rate goes up. And it’s like it’s demanding. And then you have to think it through. And then you’re probably wrong. And you’re going to stumble over your words. And God only knows if you’re going to reach a solution and you can’t tell if it’s going to mean the end of your damn relationship. And like the catastrophe lurks everywhere when you’re discussing difficult issues. And the rule is something like, but you can’t offend anyone. It’s like, well, then, OK, fine. And you never get to talk about anything that’s important with anyone ever, including yourself. It’s like that’s supposed to be the rule. Then you think, well, even if it’s not quite that bad, it’s like, let’s say, so here I’m addressing about 850 people, something like that. It’s like, what’s the probability that I could talk about anything that any of you would ever want to listen to for more than about 15 seconds? You know, that would grip your interest without me offending at least one person in this room with each sentence. There’s a thousand people in here, you know, and some people are unbelievably easy to offend. There’s that. They’re just looking for a reason to be offended. So there’s that problem. But if we’re going to deal with things that are solid and contentious, and why talk about things that we already all agree on, we’ve already solved those problems. We can only really talk about things we don’t agree on. It’s the only thing worth talking about. Well, of course, everyone’s going to be offended. And so for a journalist to ask that, it’s like, what the hell’s with you? What planet do you inhabit? Don’t you understand that your entire discipline is predicated on not only your right to offend someone, but the responsibility that you have to offend people? It’s like, that’s, it’s… Thinking is an offensive act, which is why tyrants hate it. Right? Because one of the rules in tyranny is, don’t think. Why? Because I already know all the answers. And you’re supposed to accept my answers as the tyrant. And so there’s no need for your thinking. And you might be saying, well, my life isn’t going as well as it could. And the tyrant says, well, you don’t get to think that because in my utopian tyranny, everything’s perfect. And if you’re suffering, that means you’re politically suspect. Because you’re suffering your inability to recognize that the utopia has already manifested itself. Your unhappiness is actually a political crime. But if you just keep it to yourself, well, we’ll let you keep your head. But if you have the… If you’re driven to the extreme, where you have to express the fact that you’re unhappy, perhaps, that your child doesn’t have enough to eat, then it’s off to the gulag with you and all your family as well. Because there’ll be no thinking here. And even if there is, there’ll certainly be no talking. Here’s something that happened recently in Venezuela. This is worth thinking about for all the people who harbor collectivist utopian dreams. Venezuela, the Venezuelan government, about two months ago, this was reported in the New York Times, which is not a newspaper, I would say, that would be intrinsically biased against Venezuela, said that it was now illegal to diagnose the cause of a child’s death in a Venezuelan hospital as starvation. Because the Venezuelan government’s answer to the problem of children starving was to make it illegal to notice it in hospitals. And that’s a tyranny, right? That’s a place where thought is not allowed. That’s a place where free speech is not allowed. So it seems to me that that’s not a good place to go, to say the least. And we’ve gone there many times in the last 150 years. And we should perhaps think very hard about whether or not we ever want to go there again. The first rule in 12 Rules for Life is stand up straight with your shoulders back. And I want to tell you a little bit about the world in which that rule applies. And it’s our world, but it isn’t necessarily the world that you think of when you think of our world. Although it’s the world you know. It’s funny, because it’s a world you know, but you don’t know you know it. It’s a world that presents itself to you in literary form and in mythological form and in symbolic form. And you all understand it, but you can’t articulate it. But I can articulate some of it. How many of you have seen the Lion King? Okay. How many of you haven’t? Okay, so that’s a better question. You guys should see the Lion King, because obviously there’s something wrong with you. So, and in anyways, I want to tell you about the world of the Lion King. Now, one of the things I want you to notice is that when you go see that movie or when you show it to your kids, when you watch it at home, I don’t care what, you fall into it. And that’s very strange, because first of all, it’s not a world, it’s drawings, right? It’s animated drawings of a world. It’s very low resolution. And the creatures aren’t human, they’re animals. You’ve all noticed that, no doubt. And the world is magical, because things happen in it that aren’t the sorts of things that obviously happen in the real world. But you don’t care about any of that. You don’t care that the animals talk. You don’t care that the lions are kings. All of that makes perfect sense to you. And that means that, which is a very strange thing, which it means that the manner in which the characters are represented and the world that they inhabit is somehow familiar to you. Because otherwise you wouldn’t fall into it, and you wouldn’t even, and you’d notice that what you’re doing is so strange, because it really is so strange. So imagine the opening of the Lion King. So what happens is that the camera pans over the great African plain, and you see all the animals gathering, right? They’re all coming together, and there’s this kind of thrilling black gospel music going on in the background with an African beat. And so, and it’s really well done, the opening of that movie. And then the camera pans up, like it’s revealing something, and you see this structure that’s known in the movie as Pride Rock. And so it’s this structure that rises up above the plain, and it’s shaped like it’s a mountain, essentially, although it’s not. It’s just a rock. But it’s a high place. It’s a place that you can view everything from, right? So it’s a place from which you can get an overview. It’s a place from which you can see. And you’re introduced to the king’s little bird, whose name I don’t remember at the moment. And he’s the eyes of the king. And so the king is obviously something that has eyes, because he has a bird, and the bird can fly around from up above and see everything and report to him. So whatever the king is, is associated with the bird, just like Horus, the ancient Egyptian god, was associated with a falcon. In fact, for exactly that reason, falcons can see better than any other creature, by the way, better even than human beings, and we have very good eyesight. So the king is the creature who can see, and the king is a lion. And the reason the lion’s a king is because the lion’s at the top of the food chain. That’s part of it. But the lion is a solar beast. He has a mane. He’s associated with the sun. He’s associated with the daytime. He’s associated with power and majesty and strength. And it’s not a mouse that’s king, right? It’s not a rat. It’s a lion. And you think, well, obviously the lion is king. You know, everyone knows that, even though animals don’t have kings, in case you didn’t notice. So it’s not self-evident that it should be the lion. And then the lion is on the rock in the sun. Right? So the rock sticks up above everything else, and the lion is there, and the lion is a paternal lion, and he has a mate. And the scene opens with them giving birth. And so it’s a nativity scene. And so, and that’s painfully obvious if you watch it with a little bit of detachment. It’s a nativity scene. And Rafiki, who’s the shaman, priest, lifts up the new messiah to the sun. And when that happens, the music swells, and all of the animals go down on their knees. And it’s a very, and then there’s a drumbeat, and the words, the lion king, come up on stage. It’s beautifully done. It’s beautifully done. It’s beautifully done. They pan up to the revelation of the lion cub to the sun two or three times. And it’s really, it’s a really emotional moment. And it’s because all these levels of symbolism lock in at the same time. You have the environment, the field, where all the animals gather. So all the animals are gathering to review the revelation of something transcendent. And the revelation of what’s transcendent is the birth of the new hero to the king and queen on the rock above the plain. And there’s a universal truth in that, which is why the animators worked as hard as they did to make that scene. And why it opens what was one of the most spectacularly successful movies of all time. And the way the filmmakers do it is when Rafiki holds up the infant Simba, the clouds break and the sun shines on him. And that’s the culminating moment. And that’s the revelation of the identity of the newborn hero with the consciousness of the sun. And so we’re light creatures. We’re daytime creatures. We’re visual creatures, right? We’re not nocturnal. The night is when we’re unconscious. The day is when we’re conscious. And the terminology that we use that’s associated with the furtherance of our consciousness is illumination and enlightenment. And so there’s a tight relationship between waking up and letting the light shine in and developing in consciousness. And the association between the rays of the sun and the lifting up of the infant is the association, the ancient association between the hero who defeats the forces of darkness and the sun itself. And you all know all of that, which is why that opening works and why it sets the scene for the rest of the movie. And what’s the rest of the movie? Well, we could think about the landscape. First of all, there’s a scene where Simba’s father takes him up on top of Pride Rock and tells him that his kingdom, that he’s the king, and that his kingdom extends as far as the light touches. So the landscape is a place with a pyramid in it, there at the top of the pyramid, on a plane that’s circumscribed by the light, and outside the light is darkness. And so the mythological landscape in which this story reveals itself is light versus darkness or order versus chaos. And the reason for that is because that is our landscape. We inhabit pyramidal structures. Those are hierarchies of other hierarchies. I think in our society, those are mostly hierarchies of competence. We inhabit hierarchical structures on a plane that’s defined by our understanding, surrounded by what we do not comprehend, and that’s the universal human world. And that hierarchy itself is a cooperative structure that enables us to live with a certain amount of peace and productivity together, and also to establish a value system with whatever is at the pinnacle of the hierarchy, regarded as whatever’s most valuable. Now, think about what happens in The Lion King. It’s a voyage into what’s most valuable. It’s an examination of what’s most valuable. Now, the Old Kingdom is threatened by Scar. Scar is the evil brother of the king. The king is the entity that inhabits the pinnacle of the pyramid. The king always has an evil brother, and you know that as well. And the reason for that is that there’s no hierarchy that’s so pristine that it isn’t threatened by corruption. And Scar is presented as a resentful intellect, and that’s a very common trope as well. That’s the evil scientist idea. It’s not the only, only the evil scientist idea. It’s the mad scientist. It’s the evil genius. God, how many movies with a mythological substrate have come out in the last 20 years that prominently feature an evil genius? It’s like there’s dozens of them. There’s an inexhaustible hunger for that representation. I mean, in the last Avenger movie, you had Thanatos, right? He’s basically the spirit of death, who’s an evil genius who thinks that mass extinction is the answer to the population problem of, let’s say, the world. Something to think about very seriously. Well, the reason for that is that the state is always threatened by malevolence. Always. The hierarchy can always become corrupt and tyrannical. And that those, the forces of malevolence, let’s say, that are conspiring behind the scenes, tend to tilt every hierarchy towards tyranny. And the proper attitude to take towards that universal truth is to stay in the light and keep your damn eyes open. And so, well, what happens in The Lion King is that the evil brother overthrows the rightful king. And that, again, is an unbelievably common idea. You see that idea echo throughout the mythological landscape for centuries. And the reason for that is it happens all the time. That’s what happened in Nazi Germany. That’s what’s happened in most of the tyrannical societies of the world. And most societies in the world are tyrannical. There’s always the possibility that the hierarchies that we live in will become corrupt and counterproductive. And there’s multiple reasons for that. But they’re summed up in the malevolence of the arrogant intellect. It’s something like that. That’s a very common idea. That’s the character of Milton Satan, by the way, because he’s the ultimate arrogant intellect. Milton Satan is the figure who believes that his knowledge is sufficient to do without the transcendent. To do without the idea that there’s something beyond or that there’s still something to learn. All I know is all that I need to know. Which is exactly the belief of the fundamental tyrant. The evil brother of the king kills the king. Simba loses his father. Well, that’s another common idea. Because everyone loses their father in some sense. People grow up and become cynical as teenagers. And the reason they become cynical as teenagers is because they see that the corruption of the state is sufficient to undermine their confidence in the benevolence of the state. And they get cynical prematurely because what the hell do you know when you’re a teenager? But you’re encouraged in your cynicism frequently in our culture, which is a very bad idea. I mean, even though it is the case that the structure is always threatened by malevolence, let’s say, and human weakness. Simba ends up fatherless and lost and alienated from his kingdom, just like King Arthur. It’s the same story. The king is often, the rightful king is often dissociated from his kingdom and forced to occupy a domain that’s outside the kingdom. And that’s what happens to Simba. He loses his father. And what happens? He adopts the lifestyle of an impulsive adolescent. That’s what happens. And so he’s out there in no man’s land with his useless teenage friends doing nothing of any good except living for the moment. And that’s the nihilistic retreat from the corrupt state. And no wonder. And you might say, well, if the state is corrupt, why should I participate in its maintenance? Why should I do anything that’s useful if all I’m doing is furthering the development of a corrupt state? And I would say the message in the most pathological university disciplines, the activist disciplines, that’s exactly the message that they’re particularly putting out to young men, which is you live in a corrupt patriarchy. And that means any attempts that you make to further yourself in this life as an individual with regards to your family, another corrupt patriarchal institution, with regards to marriage or career, that all that is is furthering the corrupt patriarchy. Everything you do that you think is good in the productive sense is actually doing nothing but contributing to this catastrophic tyrannical patriarchy. Very demoralizing, but also opens the door for you to be as useless as you possibly can because there’s always a temptation in that direction because it’s easier. And you can justify it by saying, well, if I did anything productive, all I would be doing is furthering the dominance of the corrupt system anyways. And if you haven’t met people who think that way, then you haven’t met very many people because that’s an unbelievably common way of thinking. And it’s an excuse, but it’s also a logical reaction to the confusion of competence with power that’s part and parcel of the collectivist landscape. So Simba grows up, so to speak, gets older at least, playing this impulsive day-to-day game. Rule seven in my book is, do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. And of course, Simba’s lifestyle outside the rightful kingdom is nothing but expedience, it’s impulsive pleasure. And that lasts until, until what? Until his old girlfriend shows up, Nella. And she’s been dealing with the catastrophe of the state, and maybe that’s because women… The demands of family fall heavier on women, at least initially. And so they’re more sensitive to the catastrophe of the state. Nella shows up and says to Simba, What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re useless. I liked you when you were a kid. Here you are, you’re completely useless, and everything’s falling apart, and the state has become corrupt, and there isn’t enough to eat, and there’s things that need to be done. And he falls in love with her, of course, probably because she criticizes him. And then he’s deeply ashamed of himself, because she rejects him, because he’s useless. And so she should reject him, because he’s useless. And if she didn’t, then he’d never figure out why he was useless and do something about it. And that’s when he meets his father. Remember, there’s an initiation scene there. And Simba, the wise old baboon, who is supposed to be a fool in the early drafts of the movie, guides him down underground so that he can reflect upon himself, which is what he does in a pool, down in the underworld. And what he sees reflected in his own face is the spirit of his dead father. And he sees his father in the water, and then he sees his father in the sky, and his father says, You’ve forgotten who you are. And sort of rotten old adolescent innocence, you know, that’s outlived its utility. But his father has a very set face, which means he’s integrated his aggression. And he sees his father in the water, and then he sees his father in the sky, and his father says, You’ve forgotten who you are. Wake the hell up. Grow the hell up. There are things to fix. There are things to fix. There are responsibilities to take on. And so Simba is rather shocked by this encounter and decides to leave his false adolescent paradise and to go back to the catastrophically demolished state. And he takes his friends and he sees this place where there’s nothing but starvation and cruelty and malevolence and tyranny. And he fights a battle against evil and he reclaims his kingdom. And as soon as that happens, the rain falls and the plants grow and harmony is restored. And that’s fascist mysticism, by the way. So it seems to appeal to a very large number of people, given the popularity of that movie. And what is that? What’s it called? A responsibility. It’s a fundamental call to responsibility. Right? It is the case that we live in a field that’s defined by the extent of our vision. It is the case that we live in a hierarchical structure on that plane. It is the case that there’s a kingship at the top. It is the case that that’s always threatened by malevolence and sin. It is the case that that can make you corrupt and cynical and irresponsible. It is the case that that’s the inappropriate response and that it’s your responsibility to repair the damaged structure of tradition, despite the fact that it veers towards corruption. It is the case that if you take that responsibility on yourself, that the rain falls again and everything flourishes. It’s correct. It’s the right way of looking at the world. And if we didn’t know that deeply, everyone in this room wouldn’t have watched that movie. And you think, well, it’s so strange that we can watch that movie without understanding it. Right? You can fall into it, because you do. When you go to, you might wonder, well, do people have religious experiences? Because people wonder about the truth of religion, let’s say. And I’m not going to go very deeply into that issue. But I can tell you that what you’re doing when you go to a movie like that, that has that mythological structure, and you fall into it, which is what you do, that what you’re having is absolutely indistinguishable from a religious experience. It’s the revelation of knowledge that you know, but you don’t know you know. And there’s something about it that’s so deeply engaging and meaningful that you will line up and pay for the privilege of being exposed to it. And this is not an easy thing to understand. Like, if you bring your child, we’ll be very excited about the possibility of going to the Lion King. Right? And maybe want to watch it 20 times. My son watched the whale scene in Pinocchio. I bet he watched that 115 times when he was four or five years old. He just watched it over and over and over and over. I thought, what the hell are you doing, kid? You know, I mean, it was so interesting to watch that he was so obsessed by it. But there’s a tremendous amount of information in that movie, like an almost unlimited amount of information. And he was gripped by it and was trying, however it is that a child’s imagination tries, to come to terms with what the movie was representing. And it wasn’t like he enjoyed it. Not at all. Not in the least, you know. And if you, well, if you, if you watch the scene, how many of you have seen the movie Pinocchio? Okay, so it’s the same thing. It’s one of the 10 most highest-grossing movies of all time, by the way. There’s a scene where Pinocchio, who’s turned in, he’s a wooden puppet who’s been turned into a jackass. And for some, which is supposed to make sense to you, and apparently does. And he goes to the bottom of the ocean to rescue his father, who is somehow swallowed by a whale. So think about what you’re watching. You’re watching a drawing of a puppet turned into a jackass go to the bottom of the ocean and rescue his father from a fire-breathing whale. And you’re all perfectly okay with that. Right? So it’s very peculiar. And so, and it’s very frightening. Like, the whale is a, well, it does breathe fire because it’s actually a dragon, not a whale. And the animators used locomotive noises to add the audio background. And the whale is hell-bent on destroying the hero of the story, Pinocchio, and also Geppetto. And it’s a very tense scene. And so my son was just like this, like the whole time watching it. You wouldn’t think that he would, you know, he’s terrified like a rabbit who’s being watched by a wolf. And then it makes his heart beat and he’s all exhausted, and it goes, and then the first thing he wants to do is to do it again. It’s like, what the hell’s going on there? It’s not like it’s a cakewalk. It’s not that at all. It’s like he can hardly even stand to watch it. It’s so tense, especially when you’re four. It’s like, it’s bad enough when you’re an adult. You know, and you’ve seen a thousand things like that. And at least in principle, you’re a little tougher and a little wiser. But when you’re four, that just blows you away like everything in the world does. And yet all he would do is expose himself to it over and over and over and over and over. And in The Lion King, like if you watch children, when they go see that, they’re just demolished when Simba’s father dies. It just tears them apart. They can’t believe that, you know, the king has disappeared. And yet they’ll watch it. And it’s because, well, the whole story, we used to tell our son when we took him to movies, because he’d get all shorted out by what was happening. And unsurprisingly, watch the hero. Keep your eye on the hero, because that’s the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. And that’s exactly right, because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero, because that is the pathway through. It’s more true than true. Deep fiction is more true than truth. That’s a way of thinking about it. It’s more real than reality itself. It’s more real than reality itself. In the same way that an abstraction can be more real than the thing that it’s abstracted from. In the same way that an abstraction can be more real than the thing that it’s abstracted from. In the same way that an abstraction can be more real than the thing that it’s abstracted from. All of the landscape in a mythological tale, like the Lion King, is an abstract landscape. All of the landscape in a mythological tale, like the Lion King, is an abstract landscape. All of the landscape in a mythological tale, like the Lion King, is an abstract landscape. All of the landscape in a mythological tale, like the Lion King, is an abstract landscape. What’s common across all landscapes? Well, wherever you go, there are things that you know. Well, wherever you go, there are things that you know. And there are things that you don’t know. And there are things that you don’t know. And that’s the human world. And it doesn’t matter who the human being is. And it doesn’t matter who the human being is. You might know more than you do. But it doesn’t matter because your knowledge is still bounded by your limitless ignorance. But it doesn’t matter because your knowledge is still bounded by your limitless ignorance. And the possibility that that domain of limitless ignorance will make mockery of what you know at any moment. And the possibility that that domain of limitless ignorance will make mockery of what you know at any moment. And the possibility that that domain of limitless ignorance will make mockery of what you know at any moment. It’s a reality. And it’s a universal reality. And you have to orient yourself in that landscape. And so does everyone else. And so does everyone else. And so does everyone else. You have to deal with what you know and what you don’t know everywhere. And the way you do that is by straddling the divide between what you know and what you don’t know. And the way you do that is by straddling the divide between what you know and what you don’t know. And the way you do that is by straddling the divide between what you know and what you don’t know. You do that by staying firmly grounded to some degree in what you understand. You do that by staying firmly grounded to some degree in what you understand. You do that by staying firmly grounded to some degree in what you understand. But by putting a tentative foot outward into what you don’t understand. But by putting a tentative foot outward into what you don’t understand. So that you can remain stable. But you can stretch yourself and challenge yourself simultaneously. But you can stretch yourself and challenge yourself simultaneously. And that’s the proper place to stand. And that’s actually a real place. That’s the line between chaos and order. And that’s the place of meaning. Rule 6 again. Rule 7 is. Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. And when you do what is meaningful, you stay in the kingdom that you’ve established. You stay in the kingdom that you’ve established. But you don’t stay completely in it. But, you don’t stay completely in it. Because you need to challenge yourself and grow. And so you put 1 foot. Tentatively. Out into the domain that super cedes your competence. Out into the domain that supersedes your competence. Out into the domain that supersedes your competence. And you maintain stability and grow at the same time. And when you’re doing that properly. Then, the… Then, the psychological… Then, the psychological consequence of that… Is the immersement in a meaningful experience. Is the immersement in a meaningful experience. It’s a deep instinct. So when you know, if you watch yourself, you say, well, I had a particularly good day at work. And what does that mean? Well, it means that you lost your sense of time. Because when you’re having not a good day at work, it’s like, first it’s one minute to three, and then it’s 45 seconds to three, and then it’s 30 seconds. That’s what school was like for me. It was like, click. So funny, you know, I went to my daughter’s school. I used to get in trouble for talking all the time, surprise, surprise, when I was a kid. And I was bored stiff in school. And so I would misbehave upon occasion out of pure boredom. And about 21 years ago, I went to my daughter’s school to sit for a class. It was about an hour long. And I was sitting there, and the teacher had all the kids on the floor and was having some of the kids read to the others. And some of the kids who were reading couldn’t read at all. And I had exactly the same experience. I was sitting there. It was like being seven years old. I could see the clock going tick, tick. And I thought, you know, if I was in this classroom for three days, I would misbehave. 40 years old, I would misbehave exactly like I did when I was six. Well, that’s no place to be, right? Because you don’t want to be in a place that’s stultifying. You don’t want to be in a place where there’s no challenge. You might even quit your job if there’s no challenge. Say, well, that’s a good job. It gives you security. And you think, god, I can’t stand this. It’s eating away at my soul. It’s all security and no challenge. So why do you want to challenge? Because that’s what you’re built for. That’s what you’re built for. You’re built to take on a maximal load, right? Because that’s what strengthens you. And you need to be strong, because life is extraordinarily difficult. And because the evil king is always whittling away at the structure of the state. And you have to be awake and sharp to stop that from happening so that you don’t become corrupt, and so that your family doesn’t become corrupt, and so that your state doesn’t have to become corrupt. You have to have your eyes open and your wits sharp and your words at the ready. And you have to be educated. And you have to know about your history. And you have to know how to think. And you have to know how to read. And you have to know how to speak. And you have to know how to aim. And you have to be willing to hoist the troubles of the world up on your shoulders. And what’s so interesting about that, so remarkable. And this is something that’s really manifested itself to me as I’ve been doing these public lectures. I’ve been talking about responsibility to people, which doesn’t seem to happen very often anymore. And the audiences are dead quiet. And I lay out this idea that life is tragedy, tainted by malevolence. And everyone says, yeah, well, we already always suspected that. No one has ever said it quite so bluntly. And it’s quite a relief to hear that I’m not the only person who has those suspicions. And then the second part of that is the better part. And it’s the optimistic part, which is despite the fact that life is a tragedy tainted by malevolence, at every level of existence, there’s something about the human spirit that can thrive under precisely those conditions if we allow that to occur. Because as difficult as life is and as horrible as we are, our capacity to deal with that catastrophe and to transcend that malevolent spirit is more powerful than that reality itself. And that’s the fundamental issue. And I think that’s the fundamental issue of the Judeo-Christian ethic with its emphasis on the divinity of the individual, as catastrophic as life is and as malevolent as people can be. And that’s malevolent beyond belief fundamentally. A person has in spirit the nobility to set that right and to defeat evil. And that more than that, and that the antidote to the catastrophe of life and the suffering of life and the tragedy of life that can drive you down and destroy you is to take on exactly that responsibility and to say, well, there’s plenty of work to be done and isn’t that terrible. And there isn’t anything so bad that we can’t make it worse and certainly try very hard to do so. But I have it within me to decide that I’m going to stand up against that. I’m going to strive to make the world a better place. I’m going to strive to constrain the malevolence that’s in my own heart and to set my family straight and to work despite my tragic lot for the betterment of anything, of everything that’s in front of me. And the consequence of that, the immediate consequence of that is that when you make the decision to take on all of that voluntarily, which is to stand up straight, by the way, with your shoulders back, to take on all that on voluntarily, as soon as you make that decision, then all the catastrophe justifies itself in the nobility of your striving. And that’s what it means to be an individual. Thank you. This one is good, the first one here. What’s your take on universal income? Is it a fast track to new communism, capitalism killer, or a possible way out of starvation for humanity? Thank you. Well, I don’t think it addresses the fundamental problem. And I think it’s a mirror of the rights responsibility problem. You might say, well, everyone has a right to the basics of life. First of all, that’s a debatable proposition, because the question is, who’s going to provide those necessities? And the answer shouldn’t be someone else under compulsion, because each right comes at the expense of someone else’s responsibility. And so you don’t want to multiply rights beyond minimum necessity, because you also multiply diverse responsibilities beyond tolerance. But more importantly than that, I would say, is that let’s make it more concrete. So let’s imagine that as the technological revolution progresses, more and more people will be in danger of being replaced by intelligent machines. Now, we don’t know if that’s true, because it hasn’t happened yet. And everyone has been predicting that that was going to happen since 1960, and it hasn’t happened. And so there may be an infinite amount of work, and we’re never going to run out of work. I suspect that’s probably the case. But let’s assume that people do get dispossessed as technologies transform, and then we have the problem of the development of people who have no viable means of making a living. And the question might be, well, what’s the fundamental problem there? And one answer is, well, they don’t have any money. But I actually don’t think that that is the fundamental problem. I’ve had many people in my clinical practice who were unemployed and had money. Now, they didn’t have a lot of money, but they had enough money, and enough money to keep privation at bay, let’s say, and enough money to, well, that was the rub, enough money to get themselves into plenty of trouble. And so one of my clients, for example, was a, I liked him quite a lot, and he had worked in a hospital, and he’d been hurt. And then he got onto painkillers, because he’d been hurt, and then he got addicted to painkillers, and then he got addicted to cocaine, and his life took a bad nosedive. And he was actually pretty good, unless he had money. But as soon as he had a check, he was gone. He was in a ditch. He was in a bar. He spent all his money, and he was facedown in a ditch, and that’s where he woke up the next day. And the reason I’m telling you that story is because it wasn’t that he didn’t have money. That wasn’t the problem, really. The problem was that he didn’t have a purpose. He didn’t have a place anymore. He got thrown out of the structure that would have enabled him to find productive meaning. And you might have said, well, he should have been able to conjure that up on his own. And perhaps that’s the case, although he wasn’t the world’s most sophisticated person, and people vary substantially in their sophistication. And he didn’t have a good family. He didn’t have a support network around him. He was kind of a lost character in many, many ways. So it was easy for him to fall out of the world, which is what he did. And providing him with money was not going to fix that. What is? What is going to fix that? Well, that’s a good question. I mean, we have a program. Some of you people might be interested in it. It’s part of a suite of online writing programs called the Self-Authoring Suite. It’s at selfauthoring.com. And one of the programs is called Future Authoring. And we’ve experimented with this program in an attempt to address this problem. OK, so I mentioned to you tonight the idea that we live out a story, and we need a purpose to live out that story properly. And what that implies is that you need a purpose. You need a point. You need a name. You need a precise aim. You need an aim that’s of sufficient nobility. I can’t think of any other word. Sufficient nobility to justify your miserable existence even to yourself. And you need to develop that aim. And so we built this program. I started working on it about 15 years ago, when I was giving my students exercises to do at university. And one of the exercises I had them do was that they had to pick a small problem, maybe in their family with their room, and fix it. Not try to fix it, but actually pick a problem that was small that they could fix. Clean up the cigarette butts in the yard outside the residence. Clean the room. We had one kid whose mother had died, and the family got kind of fragmented. And he decided that he was going to take over the maternal duties in the household. And kids were supposed to write about what happened when they tried to put this into practice. Because doing things like that is way more difficult than anybody ever realizes. And so he tried to become mother, and the family needed a mother. And he encountered all sorts of terrible resistance, which is completely unsurprising. I mean, first of all, people in his family were annoyed that he would dare to try to take their dead mother’s place, even though he was trying to do it for the best of reasons. And I played with that for a couple of years, and that was very interesting. And then I realized that I was teaching students all these stories about purpose, but nobody had ever had them write a story about their purpose, essentially. So I thought, well, isn’t that interesting? Here are these kids. They’ve been in university. They’ve been in school for 15 years. And no one has ever sat them down and said, well, what sort of character do you want to develop? Who should you be? Why don’t you write that out and justify it? Six pages, something like that, with the same amount of care and attention that you might spend, or even more, on an essay about the War of 1812, or something like that. I think, well, the more I thought about that, the more flabbergasted, I would say, I became, because I thought, well, how is it possible that we could set up a education system and run people through it for 15 years and never have them forced, so to speak, to figure out who they wanted to be and to justify it in an articulate manner? And so I built this program with my colleagues to help people do that. And I used my classes first. And so I thought, OK, well, here’s the game. And this is like rule two. Treat yourself like you’re someone responsible for helping. And that doesn’t mean be good to yourself. It doesn’t mean be nice to yourself. It doesn’t mean give yourself an easy life. That isn’t actually what you do to people if you care for them. You actually present them with something like an optimal challenge. That’s what you do with kids if you love them, is you present them with an optimal challenge so they can develop and grow. So that’s what you should do for yourself if you’re taking care of yourself. So I thought, OK, well, here’s the game. First of all, assume that you’re worth taking care of and that it’s your responsibility to do so, even if you don’t like yourself very much. And lots of people don’t. And they have their reasons. Because everybody is very aware of their own flaws, right? Unless you’re narcissistic, you’re more aware of your own flaws than of anyone else’s flaws. And maybe you’re not very happy with yourself and you don’t think that you deserve to have an OK life. And so you punish yourself and you set yourself up for failure and all of that. And that happens all the time. Or you just don’t aim or you don’t have any goals or you’re guilty and resentful and feel that you should be punished. So you have to abandon all that. Treat yourself like you’re someone you’re responsible for helping. Responsible for helping. Imagine yourself three to five years into the future. You get to have what you need. If you’re taking care of yourself, you can have it. But you have to figure out what it is. Because you are not going to get it unless you aim at it. And that’s rule 10 is be precise in your speech. And the reason I wrote that rule is because you can be bloody sure that you’re not going to hit a target unless you aim at it. And the more precise you make the target, the higher the probability that you’ll hit it when you aim at it. So what do you want? You think, well, I don’t want to even think about what I want. Because as soon as I figure out what I want, then I’ve made clear my conditions for failure. And it’s the last thing I’m going to do. And so people envelop themselves in vagueness so they don’t have to confront their own failure. But then they fail and just don’t notice, except for maybe two decades later when it’s too bloody late. And then they’re all catastrophically hurt because they wasted their life. It’s a very bad plan. It’s better just to figure out what you want and to tell yourself and then to tell your partner and to tell the people around you that maybe you can get it. Or maybe at least while you’re struggling towards it, you’ll come up with a better plan, which is more likely the case. What do you want from your family? If you could have what was good for you, what do you want from your intimate relationship? How are you going to educate yourself? Because you don’t know enough. What do you want for a career or a job? Because not everyone has a career. How are you going to spend your time outside of work in a productive and meaningful manner? How are you going to resist the temptations of drugs and alcohol and sexual misconduct, let’s say, because those are the big three. How are you going to maintain yourself physically and mentally? Well, those are seven good questions. You can have what you want. What do you want? It’s an operational realization of the New Testament principle. Ask and you will receive. Knock and the door will open. And you think, well, no, there’s no possibility that that’s the case. It’s like, actually, it is the case. If you don’t specify what you want, you won’t get it. If you specify what you want and you want it, which means you’re willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get it, then the probability that you’ll get it expands immensely and miraculously in some sense. Now, of course, it assumes that what you want is within the bounds of appropriate reason, let’s say. But you could also dream big, and there’s always the possibility that’ll work out, too. So people answer those questions. Then they write for 15 minutes. Your life is the way you want it to be in four years. What does it look like? Write as much as you can. Don’t worry about being too accurate. Don’t worry about grammar or spelling. Don’t worry about getting it right, because you’re not going to get it right anyways. Just sketch the damn thing out. If you could have what you wanted, what would it be? And then we have them do the opposite, which is all right. Take stock of yourself for a minute with all your weaknesses and inadequacies and bitterness and resentments and sinful tendencies, let’s say. Now imagine that you let all of that go and occupy you. Just which little corner of hell would you occupy in three to five years? Why don’t you write about that? And everyone knows where they’d go if they let themselves. And so then you have something to avoid, and you have something to strive for. And that makes you optimally motivated. Because maybe you’re afraid, you know, maybe you find out you don’t like your job and you’re afraid to change your job. Then you think, oh, well, if I don’t change my job, then I’m heading for this little corner of hell that I outlined. Think, well, that’s not a very good plan. It’s very threatening and stressful to change my job, but it beats the hell out of ending up there. And so then you have your anxieties behind you, pushing you forward instead of in front of you, stopping you cold. And then we ask people to write a plan to implement their positive vision, to justify it, to come up with a strategy for making it into a real world realization. And we tested that on thousands of university students now. And the upshot was that it decreased the probability that they would drop out of university by 30%. In fact, in Canada, we did it for 90 minutes before kids went to college in the fall. They came to their summer orientation. Neither wrote for 90 minutes about something that required writing, but that wasn’t so relevant, or they wrote out of plan. And it dropped the dropout rate among young men 50% in the first semester. And it had the biggest effect on young men who didn’t do that well in high school and who weren’t oriented towards a professional career. The consequence of that was that the university used it for one year and then stopped doing it, so which was not surprising in the least. But the reason that I’m laying out this long story for you is because that’s what people need. They need a differentiated and delineated purpose. It’s way more important than the money. It isn’t money that you need. I know you need money, for God’s sake, I’m not ignorant. Everybody needs money, that’s not the point here. It’s the provision of money without purpose is not helpful. And what people need is a purpose. And they need that to develop that for themselves, obviously, because it’s something you have to participate in, but it’s something that society has to foster. And the reason they need that purpose is because that’s what gives their life meaning. Think, well, think about this. Do you really think that you would be satisfied if you had money without responsibility? So what, okay, got no responsibility. Because that’s what everyone wants. It’s like, I had a client, he wanted to retire when he was kind of young, and I said, well, what’s your retirement dream? He said, well, I envisioned myself on a beach in a tropical island with a margarita in my hand. And I thought, what the hell is that? It’s like, okay, let’s play that out. Let’s be adult about this. Okay, so you go down to, you’re this like, redheaded white guy, you go down to the Caribbean, and you sit on a beach, and you’re sitting on the beach, and you have like six margaritas, and you’re there for like three hours. What happens the next day? Okay, you’re sunburned to a crisp, right? So you can’t even go out of your hotel room, and you’re hungover. Okay, and let’s say now you hide in your hotel room for three or four days, and you recover, and then you repeat that every day for three months. It’s like, you go outside and all the locals get away from you, because you’re the new drunk lecher who’s come down from the north, and that’s your vision for retirement. It’s like, okay, so you have all the money you want, no responsibility. You don’t have to take care of yourself. You don’t have a partner, so you don’t have to take care of them. You don’t have any kids. You don’t have to take care of them. You don’t have a job. It’s like, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do, exactly? Sit in the sun and drink margaritas. It’s like, there’s no. No, that’s not a good vision. You don’t want no responsibility. It’s wrong. People find the meaning in their life by adopting responsibility. And so, provision of money, you know, they say, man does not live by bread alone. And there’s wisdom in that. It’s like, you don’t want no responsibility. You might dream about that if you’re crushed by your job, but then you have the wrong job, or you have the wrong attitude, or you have the wrong job and the wrong attitude. I don’t know what it is. You want lots of responsibility, and society needs to foster that, and we need to help people find their purpose and their place. And that’s more to the point than universal income. It’s the wrong solution. Okay. So, that is the solution for the individual. But for example, an individual that takes your program and authors his or her future already has taken the first steps of personal responsibility by doing something about it. So, let’s assume that we here, we have a solution for the individual. We assume responsibility for our lives. We get our acts together. And we start with our rooms, and we broaden the circle. And we want to start helping people out in the world that don’t have this first seed of responsibility. And of course, some of them also have diseases that they can’t do anything about. We can leave that aside for now. What do we do to inspire others? Well, you just laid it out, I would say. It’s like, you know, one of the things that you pull out of the clinical literature, imagine that you have children who have a certain low level amount of neurological trouble when they’re infants. So, something’s gone wrong, maybe a little oxygen deprivation at birth, something like that. Something’s gone a little bit wrong with their neurological development. Assuming that the damage isn’t too severe, those children will stabilize and normalize if they have at least one well put together role model in their life. And so, one of the things that you do, if you want to inspire others, is get your act together. Because you inspire most through example. It’s much more powerful than words. Words are very powerful if they’re also accompanied by example. But the best thing you can do is start putting things together around you. There’s plenty of things to put together. It’s a good meditative exercise, you know. If you’re, and I think this is the proper form of prayer, let’s say, assuming that there is such a thing. A proper form of prayer would be if you’re not happy with your life, if you’re miserable, you sit on the edge of your bed and you think, is there anything I can change in what I’m doing that is going to make this less awful than it has to be? Less awful than it might be? You have to ask that, you know, with intent. And generally speaking, you’ll get an answer almost immediately. There’s something that you could put right that day that would make things slightly better than they are. And that’s rule four, which is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today. I don’t believe that there’s a person who exists who wouldn’t receive an answer to that question if they genuinely asked it. And it’s no different really than thinking. Like if you think, you have a problem, you think, you get an answer. Might not be the right answer, but obviously you get an answer. And you might think, well, I thought up that answer. It’s like, well, that’s really not much of an explanation because you don’t know how you think. It’s like, I’m sitting there and thoughts appear in my head and that’s how I think. It’s like, that’s a pretty shallow explanation. It’s not much different than revelation. It’s like you ask yourself the proper questions, you’ll get the proper answers. If you ask the right question and you want the answers. Right, and those are not easy preconditions to set up because who knows, you know, if you’re sitting on the edge of your bed thinking, okay, what am I doing wrong? That’s a hell of a question to ask. You know, because if you really wanna know, you’ll find out. And then you’ll find out that you really didn’t wanna know because generally speaking, finding out what you’re doing wrong is not a pleasant experience. And it means that you have to sacrifice part of yourself. Usually a burned out, stupid, bitter, corrupt, arrogant, nasty, vengeful part of yourself, but nonetheless part that you like. And so, so you can, I think that room for those incremental improvements exists within everyone’s grasp. And I think that it’s a humble thing to do, to ask how you could improve incrementally without interfering with anyone else. Like it’s your problem, not theirs. But I think that the consequences of maintained incremental improvement are anything but incremental. You get compound interest on incremental improvement. You know, there’s another rule in the New Testament called the Matthew Principle. It’s economists use it. And the rule is to those who have everything more will be given. And from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. It’s an actually a description of the way the world works. Interestingly enough, you know that if you’ve ever played monopoly, because that’s what happens if you play monopoly. And there’s a reason for that. That’s a deep reason. But what, and it’s a very harsh rule because it means as you start to wander off the path, let’s say, the probability that you will wander further off the path increases non-linearly. And that’s a terrible thing to know. As you wander towards the edge, the probability that you’ll fall off the cliff increases. And that’s a statistical justification for the concept of hell. But as you improve, the probability that each improvement will produce a further improvement increases. And so perhaps the downside is the cataclysmic catastrophe that you can engage upon if you reproduce your moral failings. But the upside is that each improvement produces an increment in the probability of the next improvement. And I’ve seen that. It’s a truism among behavioral psychologists. I mean, although they don’t generally phrase it that way. If you’re a behavioral psychologist, and I am a behavioral psychologist, what you do is you find out what, essentially you help a person establish their aim, then you break down what they’re trying to do into attainable units, and you negotiate with them. You say, well look, you know, well I’m not, they say I’m not making use of my time very well, spending three hours a day playing video games. You say, well, okay. Hypothetically, how much time would you like to spend playing video games? And they say, well, I could probably spend an hour a day without it interfering with the rest of my life. Which is kind of the issue, right? Because if you play video games, fine. But maybe three hours means that you’re not doing your homework or something, and that’s not a good game. So you say, okay, well I wanna play for an hour a day. It’s like, okay, well can you shift to an hour a day right now? And this is supposed to be an honest conversation. And the person says, no, I’ve tried that lots of times. Every time I try, I just fail. And so you don’t say, well, quit failing, go play one hour a day, and the problem will be solved. That’s a stupid strategy. You say, okay, well, look, you think about this, and don’t agree to do this unless you think you will do it. Because otherwise it’s just a waste of both of our times. It’s like, do you think that you could track how much time you’ve spent playing video games for one week? Don’t change anything. Just track it. And they think, yeah, I could probably do that, but I might miss a couple of days. And you think, okay, fine, so here’s the deal. Five out of the next seven days, you just track how much time you spent playing video games. And the person says, I think I can do that. Because that’s what you want them to say. You want them to succeed at the improvement. It’s not much of an improvement, but it’s something, right? Then they come back and they say, well, yeah, I was playing about four hours a day. And so you say, okay, well, fine, good work, man. You’ve got it tracked. Now we know the parameters of your problem. It’s actually a little worse than you thought, but at least you had enough sense to measure it. We know where you’re at. Okay, do you think you could cut that down to three and a half hours every day? And the person thinks, no, I’m pretty weak-willed. I don’t think I can manage that. You say, well, how about this? Do you think that two of the next seven days you can only play for three hours? You think you can manage that? And you’re not cynical about this. You’re not insulting the person. Any of that, it’s like because, because you don’t care. All you care is that they make some incremental movement towards their goal. And the person thinks about that if they have any sense, and they take their weakness into account. And they think, I think I could probably do that. And then they come back the next week and they say, I managed to spend three hours a day playing video games for three days and the rest for four hours. And you say, good work, man. You’ve just got rid of 25%. 12.5% of your problem, you’re one-eighth of the way to fixing it in one week. And you know, the person isn’t going to be all that thrilled with themselves because they don’t do the arithmetic, and they don’t do the projection, they think, well I’m still pretty damn useless, I’m playing 25 hours worth of video games a week, it’s nothing to pat myself on the back for. It’s like, yes it is. It’s definitely, it’s a marked, measurable improvement, and it’s a move in the right direction. You know, and then you say, okay well, on the days you succeeded, how did you manage to succeed, and is there a way that you could do it for four days next week, how about that? Or maybe you could even try five days, you think you could do that? And then you also tell the person, look, the other thing you’ve got to understand is you’re not going to improve like this. You’re going to improve like this. So some weeks you’re going to come back and say, geez, I back slid completely and I like played for four hours a day for seven days. But it doesn’t matter because that doesn’t mean you failed, it just means that you slid back. You want to calculate it over a month or something like that. And you know, generally speaking, a month later the person’s down to something like two hours a day, and you’ve figured out ways of filling their time in with something productive otherwise, and they’re on their way. And the general consequence of that is that every time they manage an accomplishment, they get a little stronger in character, they get a little bit more confident in their ability, they get a little bit less racked with self-disgust, they get a little bit more hopeful about the future, and they get more confident that they can make another change. And if you’re patient, and you have to be patient with yourself that way, it’s like you reward those incremental improvements and you don’t get all cynical about them, and you think, okay, just imagine what would happen if you kept doing that every week for ten years. And the answer to that is things would be so much better for you that you can’t even imagine it with that much improvement, or maybe even with half that much improvement. And so that’s a very good way of progressing. Very good. So, yeah, there’s a question here on the article written by your friend Bernard Schiff, that’s one of the many hit pieces. So, yeah, from Vyðar Helki. I want to ask you what your thoughts are of the article written by Bernard Schiff. Kind of a wide question, but I’d like to hear your side of the matter. Okay, so Bernie Schiff is a friend of mine, although he doesn’t see it that way. Well, I’m not saying that to be funny, like that’s how I look at it. And it’s a loss to me because he was a good friend of mine. I’ve lost a couple of friends in the last two years, and it’s two or three years, and it’s not pleasant. But he had his reasons for doing what he did, which I won’t go into. But there is one thing I will say about it. He set forward a set of propositions about the way that I was interacting with my students and am interacting with all the people like you to whom I’m lecturing. And he questions my motivations, and fair enough. But he said, for example, I’m paraphrasing, but this is the gist of it, that my style was autocratic, say, in the classroom. And he cited a couple of students who felt that way. And I would say, I’ll say two things about that. The evaluations of my classes at Harvard and at the University of Toronto were almost invariably better than the evaluations of any classes they’d ever had. That’s the first thing. In my Maps of Meaning class, the most common comment, and that would have been from about 80% of students, was that the class completely changed the way they conducted their lives. So that’s issue number one. And issue number two is, all those lectures are online. Like, not every lecture I’ve given in the last 30 years is online, but every lecture I’ve given in the last four years is online, plus one lecture series that I gave 30 years ago, and a whole bunch of other talks. And so, if you want to see whether the accusations leveled at me in that argument, in that article, are true, all you have to do is go watch the lectures. And if you think they’re true, well then, he’s right. And if you don’t think they’re true, then he isn’t right. The evidence is, it’s not like it’s hidden. I’ve been recording my lectures since, like, well I recorded one in 1993 at Harvard, and so it’s online, and then there’s like 200 hours of them. So, whatever my crimes, they’re there for everyone to see and to determine for themselves. And so, that’s mostly what people are doing, and that’s fine with me. And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that article. There’s a question from Magnus Carl, relating to what you discussed earlier, nuclear weapons. What are your thoughts on mutually assured destruction? Will we be safer in a world without nuclear weapons? I think it depends on how we decide to conduct ourselves. You know, it isn’t obvious to me that we’re in a position where we can trust ourselves without nuclear weapons. You know, nuclear weapons are like, they’re like a judgmental god, in some sense. If you misbehave too badly, there’s going to be hell to pay. And so, the consequence of that, since the end of the Second World War, thank God, is that no one has misbehaved too badly yet. And so, I don’t know if that’s… We’ve had comparative peace since the end of the Second World War. Now, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been chronic low-level conflict. And some of it, I’m not saying that the conflicts have been trivial, but compared to World War II, they are trivial, and certainly compared to World War III, they’re trivial. And so, I would say that the hydrogen bomb has put the fear of God into us, and that there’s some utility in that. Obviously, it would be better if we didn’t need that, because they’re dangerous, and the probability that there’ll be an accident at some point seems to me to be 100%, because there’s always an accident, right? And so, we’re playing with fire, but… But it isn’t self-evident to me that so far it’s been a bad thing. Even the Soviets, even Stalin, although he was probably… There’s some evidence that Stalin was gearing up for the Third World War, and that he would have been willing to put Europe to the thermonuclear torch. And he was just the kind of guy to do it. He’d been practicing doing that for a long time. After you kill your 10 millionth person, the next 10 million come pretty easy. And so, there is evidence that he was gearing up for that in Western Europe, and that he was probably killed. And so… But apart from Stalin, no one has come along who’s been corrupt and malevolent enough to make that a priority. And so, that’s so far a testament to the fundamental goodness of the human heart. But… What do you think Hitler would have done with nuclear weapons? I think he probably would have cleared out most of Eastern Europe. I mean, part of his plan… I mean, you perhaps know this, but Hitler believed the Germans deserved an empire, like many other European countries had an empire. And he felt that it was no different for the Germans to pursue their empire than it was for the British, and that his empire was going to be in Eastern Europe. Because what the hell good are they anyways? That was his attitude. And I think he would have used whatever means necessary to clear out as much territory as possible, so that it could have been inhabited by his vogue. That’s what it looks like. Now, you know, you might ask, well, could that have been done by nuclear means? And the answer to that’s probably. So, I think he would have put them to use. I mean, my sense of Hitler, you say, well, what motivated Hitler? You say, well, he wanted to rule the world. It’s like, I don’t think that’s what he wanted. I think he got exactly what he wanted. He wanted to put a bullet through his head when Berlin was in ruins and Europe was in flames. And that’s exactly what he did. And you think, well, no one could aim for that. It’s like, think again. Someone aimed for it. And they got it, too. So, I don’t think he would have stopped. So. There’s a question here regarding the controversial statement regarding enforced monogamy. So, from Gisli Trikvason, stating the obvious often suggests an agenda. I agree with your observation that lack of sex for young men can make societies more violent. What should be done? That’s actually not my observation. So, that isn’t my observation. I mean, words matter. My observation is that social norms favoring monogamy are essentially a human universal. And the reason for that is that we’ve learned through painful experience that social conventions favoring monogamy are the best way to reduce male violence, provide a secure environment for children, and help women find partners to help them with the difficult process of reproduction and child rearing. And that’s… The woman who wrote that article knew perfectly well that when I used the term enforced monogamy, and we only discussed this for probably two minutes out of an interview that lasted two days, she knew perfectly well that I meant social convention. But it was in her interest to find a phrase that could be misinterpreted so that what I was speaking about could be misinterpreted. So, here’s what enforced monogamy means. So, let’s say my son is planning to get married in the fall, and I am happy about his fiancee. We seem to get along quite well. We seem to do quite well together. And so, I’m pleased that they’ve made the decision to start their life together. So now, imagine that he comes to me in a year and he says, I’ve got some news for you, Dad. I’ve been married for a whole year and I’ve managed to have three affairs during that time and not get caught. And what am I supposed to do about that? Put my arm around him and say, good work, kid. Way to be. It’s like, no. First of all, if he did that, he wouldn’t tell me. And second, if he did tell me, which I can’t imagine, I would ask him, just what the hell did he think he was doing? That that was no way to conduct himself. And it would be something I would regard as contemptible. Not only the affairs, but the deceit that goes along with it and the violation of his vows and the breaking of the harmonious relationship that he decided voluntarily to establish and the weakening of the family structure and the trouble that he put everyone through to attend the marriage ceremony in good faith and all of that. Well, that’s enforced monogamy for God’s sake. It’s the assumption of the responsibility on the part of people who enter a relationship with some expectation of permanence to uphold the promise that they make when they do that. And she knew that bloody perfectly well. And so it’s just a… It’s so idiotic, it’s almost impossible to believe. You know, first of all, if you’re going to accuse someone of something, you should at least accuse them of something that’s plausible. It’s like, well, there isn’t anybody who goes around thinking that monogamy should be enforced at the point of a gun. You know, maybe the odd ISIS wingnut does that, thinks that. But no, there isn’t anyone who thinks that, including me. And she knew that perfectly well. And so if that’s the best that my… those who regard themselves as my enemies on the left can manage as a character slur, then, well, you know, have at her, boys and girls. It’s pretty bloody pathetic as far as I’m concerned. So… I’ll tell you one more thing about that. Here’s something interesting. I detailed this out in 12 Rules for Life. I don’t have the figures exactly right because I haven’t got to memorize. But, you know, over the last 20 years, the desire for marriage has increased among young women. And by a substantial margin, I think it’s 35%, something like that. At the same time, it’s decreased among men by about 17%. It’s like, so why am I telling you that? It’s like, well, are we so blind that we don’t realize what most people want? Like, most people who aren’t cynical dream that they’ll find a monogamous partner. And you think, well, what’s the evidence for that? First of all, there’s evidence for that because all you have to do is ask people, and the majority of them tell you that. But there’s way more evidence than that. It’s like, what do you do? You take your date to a romantic comedy. And what’s the structure of the romantic comedy? Man lies to partner and has multiple affairs. And you go away from that romantic comedy and you think, that was fun. Let’s do that. It’s like, that isn’t what happens. You go to a romantic comedy together and you see a couple who are attracted and repulsed across the dynamics of the movie, and they overcome a bunch of obstacles, and they decide to live happily ever after. And that’s the romantic comedy. And it’s like a surefire success, if it’s reasonably handled, because it reflects what people want. And the reason it reflects that is because basically, although not without exception, human beings are monogamous. We tilt towards monogamy. That doesn’t mean we can’t be serially monogamous, and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who tend towards multiple partners. But it’s not the dream, that’s for sure. It’s not what we enforce as social norms. It’s not the universal human standard. It’s not what makes for good people individuals, or good intimate relationships, or solid families, or stable communities. And I don’t know how that can be contentious. How did that become contentious? What’s the alternative? Like, responsibilityless, impulsive sex. It’s like, do it, man. Do it for 15 years. See how much fun it is. See where you end up. You’ll certainly end up cynical. You’ll definitely end up alone. And then what the hell are you going to do? What are you going to do when you’re 45 and you don’t have anyone? No, what are you going to do for the next 35 years? You don’t have kids. You’re not going to have grandchildren. You don’t have someone to tangle your story together with. You don’t have anything that lends solidity to your life. You’ve got no responsibility and so no self-respect. Well, if that’s what you want, if that’s what you’re promoting as an alternative to enforced monogamy, it’s like, have at her. It’s your life. You’ll see. That’s my sense of it. So. Now, here’s a good one. What can Marxism contribute to our modern day world by our? It can contribute Venezuela and it has. So I’ll be a little bit less cynical in my answer, but we’ve seen what it can contribute. I don’t know how many bloody times we have to run the experiment. No, that wasn’t real Marxism. I know what that means. I know what that sentence means. What that means is, well, if I was the dictator with my profound understanding of Marx’s real intent and my universal belief in the world, and my universal benevolent compassion, uncontaminated by any proclivity towards darkness or sin, I would bring on the socialist utopia. That’s what it means fundamentally. And if someone says that and claims it, then you should get the hell away from them as fast as you possibly can. Okay, so Marx was concerned about inequality, and there are reasons to be concerned about inequality. But the problem with Marxism is that it lays the cause of equality at the feet of the fundamental institutions of the West. Free market, democracy, capitalism, patriarchy, the hated word. Inequality is not caused by the institutions of the West. That’s wrong. Inequality is the fundamental rule of existence. And it’s produced… The thing about the Western systems, every system we know produces inequality when it’s run as an operative process. All of the systems produce inequality. What we’ve developed in the West is the only system that produces wealth along with the inequality. And you might say, well, the wealth isn’t equally distributed. It’s like, that’s true, hence the inequality. But at least there’s some wealth. You know, the number of people in absolute poverty in the world has halved between 2000 and 2012. Three years faster than the UN was hoping for in its most wildly optimistic projections. People are getting comparatively richer at an absolute level with unbelievable speed. It’s never been seen in the entire history of the planet. You know, first it happened in the West, obviously, including to Iceland. And even in the last, what, 75 years here, there’s been an unbelievable increase in the standard of living. And now it’s starting to happen everywhere else. The fastest growing economies in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s a hell of a good deal. There’s no starvation in China. There’s no starvation in India. And in the places in the world where there still is starvation, it’s because of political reasons. It’s not because there isn’t enough food. It’s because one group of people sets out to starve another group of people to death. It’s not a matter of absolute privation. Or because of Marxism. Well, yes, or because of Marxism. Right. I think the average Venezuelan has lost something like 17 pounds. You know, it’s very, it’s awful. It’s absolutely awful. So I don’t think that Marxism has a damn thing. I think Marxism has already contributed enough millions of corpses to have finished with its contributions, personally. But isn’t Marxism dangerous because it has its appeal, and its appeal comes from grains of truth that it uses and tries to stretch across and explain all of reality? Well, it points, the Marxists point to the pernicious problem of inequality. And inequality is a problem. Inequality is a problem. I mean, I outlined that in part in 12 Rules for Life. The reason there’s a left wing, and the reason there should be a left wing, is because inequality is a problem. It has to be addressed. And when you set up a hierarchical structure, which you need to, if you’re going to pursue things of value, then the hierarchy tends to ossify and become rigid, and it becomes hard for people at the bottom to climb to the top. And so they get dispossessed, and that can become permanent. That’s a bad thing. It’s everyone’s problem. Left wing, centrist, right wing, doesn’t matter. Inequality is a problem. But that doesn’t mean that you can lay it at the feet of the institutions of the West. And that’s where Marxism goes wrong. And it also doesn’t mean that we know how to fix inequality. It’s really a hard problem. And so it’s a much harder problem than people think. Now, we don’t know what to do about it. We’ve done some things, and, you know, our cultures vary. The Scandinavian countries tend to be a little bit more on the income redistribution side. And that seems to have worked reasonably well. I mean, the Scandinavian countries are pretty damn livable. They’ve got their problems, particularly Sweden, as far as I can tell. But it’s easier for homogenous small countries to do redistribution by all appearances. It’s not so easy for a place like the United States, which is much bigger and much more diverse and has a much broader range of problems. And so the Western countries are stumbling through. Some of them have steeper hierarchies and less of a social safety net like the U.S., although it’s incredibly productive and tends to have very low levels of unemployment. And then there’s places like the Scandinavian countries and Canada where the social safety net is more well developed, but that struggle with improving productivity and with higher rates of unemployment, most of the countries. So we don’t know how to get that right, but we’re kind of muddling through it. And at the same time, we’re muddling through it. Almost all of us are getting absolutely richer. And so that’s a pretty good default position to be in when you’re trying to sort out the inequality problem. And, you know, I’ve been thinking over the last weeks that there are, you know, you can express these problems in quasi-mathematical form. It’s like there’s probably a rule that something like in order to produce one increment of absolute wealth, you have to allow three increments of inequality or something like that. Inequality is the price you pay for the generation of wealth. And I suspect because the right amount of inequality, the right amount of inequality is not zero. It’s some number. And you could debate about what that number is, but it’s not zero. You flatten everyone out, you get nothing. If you have a meritocracy of some sort, then if you’re producing something to get to the top, you’re producing something for others. Well, the thing is that the radical types don’t believe that there’s anything but power. Another thing that really annoys me about the universities and this doctrine that I’ve been combating, let’s say, is that your argument is predicated on the idea that there’s such a thing as merit, that there’s such a thing as things worth doing. And the real radical types would debate that. They’d just say, well, you’re just using the idea of meritocracy to justify your position in the patriarchal tyranny. And you might say, well, no, I’m not. And they would say, you’re just a mouthpiece for your group privilege. There isn’t any you. Don’t make that mistake. There’s no you. You’re just an avatar for your privilege. So, well, thank you. Well, me too. So before I ask the last question, I’d like to remind you that we’re going to meet outside this room and more people may come. Since the people from yesterday, they may come as well. And Dr. Petersen is going to sign books. And if you’re going to have books signed, you’ll have a few seconds with him. So, yeah, the last question. We had a similar question yesterday, a very original one from Svaner. Thank you, Svaner. How do you like Iceland? Well, my wife and I, well, I’m here actually with my wife and my mother, who I don’t normally travel with, and my aunt. And they came along for the adventure because I had invited them. And I’m traveling with my wife to many, many places. And I asked members of my extended family if they wanted to have a bit of an adventure that they could pick a place to come. And my mother and my aunt picked Iceland. And everyone here has been ridiculously hospitable. And so that’s lovely. And I’ve met lots of people in the street and outside these venues. And everyone has been unfailingly polite and welcoming. And you have a beautiful little country. And what you’ve done with it is nothing short of miraculous, as far as I’m concerned. It’s beautiful. It’s peaceful. It’s thriving. It’s stable. It’s free. It’s like, great. I love coming to countries like this. And I do think they’re absolute miracles. Life is a real catastrophe. And yet, look at how wonderful it is here. And it’s not like it’s easy. This isn’t an easy place to live. It’s a hard place. And yet, you’ve done a tremendous amount with what you have in front of you. And so more power to you, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve had a wonderful time here. Thanks very much. It’s been a real honour to be here and to talk to all of you. So, good night.