Tackling the ＂Meaning Crisis＂： Mental Chaos in University Students (dvmUTeZvl6I)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dvmUTeZvl6I

Welcome. My name is Farah Aswan-Avra. I’m the president of Blue Matter Project U of T chapter. On behalf of my team, we thank you for deciding to spend your night with us. Our mission at Blue Matter Project has been to provide the resources that we believe would be beneficial to the mental health of our fellow students at U of T. Because a healthy mind is crucial for success at this university. And I think we all know that maintaining such a state is no easy task. I’m going to be asking you a few questions, and I hope that you participate by simply raising your hand if the question applies to you. How many of you are currently undergraduate students? How many of you have had a radical change in your core beliefs after entering university? How many of you have been reasonably stressed out throughout your university life? How many of you have wondered, at least once in your life, what the point of it all is? And we’re confused about how you should deal with the situation. If most of these questions apply to you, then you have, at least I hope, come to the right place. If they don’t apply to you, then I’d like to personally get some coffee with you, on me, to see how the hell you do what you do. Just kidding, I’m broke, so I probably have to split the coffee. The person who I have the honor of introducing tonight has had a considerably significant influence on me, and most likely on any of you who are also familiar with his work. If you don’t believe me, you can check the Rape My Profs website or the YouTube comments on his lectures. You will see the words such as mind-boggling and life-changing very frequently. I was first introduced to him in the first TEDx U of T event back in 2013, when I was in my first year of study at U of T. He was the first speaker at the TEDx, and the title of his talk was Potential. As a life sciences student who had just finished a series of courses in biology, chemistry, and mathematics, I could immediately see that his perspective on life was radically different compared to the perspectives of other lecturers I had listened to before. As a result, I found it difficult to connect to the content of his talk at first, but I was nevertheless interested in his perspective. Fast forward to two years later, the day in which I didn’t hear any talk even remotely similar to that of his in the TEDx talk, and I took a psychology course called Personality and its Transformations without initially knowing that I was taught by him, and how fortunate I consider myself that I decided to take that course. This course, along with his other course called Maps of Meaning, have thus far been among the select few courses that I genuinely have enjoyed, to an extent that I have watched some lectures over and over solely out of interest. I presume by now you have reconsidered what the word obsessed really means. Our speaker tonight has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Alberta. He received his PhD in Clinical Psychology from McGill University. He taught at Harvard University as an assistant and an associate professor from 1993 to 1998. He then returned to Canada and took a ten-year position at the University of Toronto and has been teaching here ever since. He is the author of Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, and has more than 96 published articles. His talks are sincere and eloquent and present content of unfathomable depth. He has attempted to present the forms of untruth that we should both pay attention and not fall prey to in order to find truth and ultimately leading a meaningful life. I’m sure you are as excited as I am to listen to his talk tonight and without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Peterson. Thanks, that was good. So one of the things that struck me right away when Tom put the question in, is how many of you have been really stressed out by your university experience? How many of you are second year students? How many are third year? First year? They’re too busy being anxious. So anyways, I don’t really think that was the case when I was an undergraduate. I enjoyed my undergraduate degree quite a lot. I went to a small place to begin with, which was just a community college in northern Alberta. That was actually a huge advantage because I had small classes, you know, and the big classes had 30 people in them and the small classes had like eight. The people who were teaching there really liked to teach and although they might not have known as much as might conceivably be imagined, they were excellent teachers and they knew a hell of a lot more than me and that was, you know, sufficient. And so I really liked that. I learned a lot. I think I learned more there in the first year than I did in my entire school career, you know, prior to that, which is partly to do with me and partly to do with the schools. And then when I went to the University of Alberta, it was less enjoyable because it got more formulaic. But I still had a good time and I wouldn’t say that I was stressed particularly, you know, I wouldn’t say that. I would say I was probably less stressed in university than I was in high school. Things were just better. And I think that was, I think that was probably the case for most of my peers. At least the people I knew were certainly the case for. So, you know, things have changed since then and I think some of those changes would undo stress in you guys. I mean, the first is that your ability to access careers of certainty has declined. Like for those of you who want to become clinical psychologists, for example, or who want to go to medical school, it’s insanely difficult. It’s no wonder you’re stressed. My nephew tried to get into medical school three years ago and I mean that gets bright, man. I was watching him do those, is that online set of exercises that are supposed to make you more intelligent? But no, it’s the velocity. And he was doing a maze exercise where he had to maneuver his way through a maze while it was rotating and free of energy. That guy could do that just like it was standing still. It was really amazing. He had a 4.0 average from Queens and he was like a really high level soccer player. And he’s a good guy. He’s the sort of person you just hate because not only are they good at everything, they’re actually great people. It’s very annoying. And he didn’t get into medical school and I thought, what the hell? And he had 99th percentile NCAS and he didn’t get into medical school. I thought, what the hell? How stupid is that? Because obviously that’s a wasted talent, right? It’s obviously a wasted talent. And it’s a betrayal as well of young people because he hit the ball out of the park on multiple dimensions and still had to walk through three extra, two extra years of hoops. He finally got into medical school, but man, he should have been a shoe in. And by getting into clinical psychology, which is another one that I’m very familiar with, I can tell you how to do it. You have to have a high grade point average because otherwise you can’t. And you have to have good GREs. In fact, you probably have to have great GREs. But then what you have to do is you have to apply everywhere because it’s a lottery. So you have to apply to 30 places. And so remember that because it’s a lottery. And a lot of these things are lotteries. And so what you do when the base rate of rejection is extremely high is, first of all, don’t beat yourself up about it because the base rate of rejection is really high and you get rejected. It has nothing to do with you. The base rate’s high. And you really have to learn that in life. The base rate of rejection for most worthwhile things is like 95% enough. And it’s getting, I think in many situations, it’s getting, the odds against you are actually increasing. Now there’s some other positive things about the way things are going. I mean, you had access to hundreds of opportunities that would have been unimaginable to me. But a lot of those are also hard to monetize. So that’s an increasing problem, especially if you’re a creative person. So there’s been this ramp up in competition. And it’s partly because the certain jobs, as I said, are difficult to obtain. Law is the same way. And increasingly even having a career as a lawyer is more risky than it was, say, 20 years ago because a lot of law is being nibbled to death by technological transformation. And of course journalism is out. Most creative enterprises are out because you can’t monetize them. And you guys can also look forward to a job career trajectory where you’re going to be changing jobs fairly often. And so one of the things that I would recommend is get used to that. Get good at it. Have a good CV. Get used to doing interviews. Be ready to move at the drop of a hat. And keep your damn options open. Because a lot of you, in order to ratchet yourself up the career ladder, are going to have to be tough partners. And you’re going to have to have options at hand. So whenever you’re employed, you might want to be looking for other opportunities that you can use as bargaining chips so that you can transfer across and up. Or you can use that as a hammer to lap your employers on the heads with. Because you’re going to have to be canny and tough. And the upper end rewards insanely high. But it’s a lot harder to climb into that category. So I think that’s part of the reason that you’re stressed is that your future is more variable and more uncertain than people’s future was when I was in university. So that would have been in the early 80s. And certainly much more uncertain than people in the 60s. The people in the 60s, their concern was that they were going to graduate and they’d have a job that would last the rest of their life. That would pay well. And then their concern was how oppressive that was going to be. It looks pretty damn pathetic in retrospect. But you guys don’t have that worry. So you’re not worried about that. So the reason I’m telling you partly is because if you’re stressed, the first thing you’ve got to do is figure out how much of that’s you and how much of it is situation. Because it isn’t necessarily going to make it less stressful to know that it’s situation. But at least you can dispense with some of the guilt and self-criticism. So for example in publishing, just for scientific articles, if you want to publish in a new journal, there’s a 1% accept that’s right. So you have to assume that you’re going to get walloped. A lot. And the best news you ever get if you’re trying to publish a paper is that that paper really sucks. But if you do a lot of work on it and you rewrite it completely and you do a few more studies of the same sort and they work, we’ll tentatively send it out for re-review. And that’s time for a party. And a lot of the things that you’re going to do in your life are going to be like that. They’re very old probability events and they’ll begin to gradually back. And so you need to know that because otherwise you’ll take responsibility for that onto yourself. And normally taking responsibility is a good thing. But you want to take responsibility for the things that you’re responsible for and parcel out external circumstances to the external world. And so the problem with conscientious people, and you know a fairly large number of you are going to be above average in conscientiousness or you wouldn’t have got to where you are because you’re above average in intelligence and above average in conscientiousness, is that conscientious people often feel guilty. And also if they’re not doing as well as they expect you, they automatically assume that there’s something wrong with them. Now you know that can be a useful adaptive style because primarily if things aren’t going your way, the way to change them is to change things that you can control. So if you’re thinking it’s situational, there’s not much you can do about that. And so sometimes there’s utility in focusing in on your micro pathologies. I’m all for that. You go to take responsibility. But it’s easy for conscientious people to take excess responsibility. And so for example, they do very badly if they’re unemployed. And if they feel like losers, you know, and then they attribute that to themselves. And that can easily go too far. So the first thing is, you know, do you have a reason to be stressed? Now another thing that’s happened is, you know, one of the things you might ask yourself is is it better to be a big fish in a little pond or a little fish in a big pond? And I would say generally speaking, it’s better to be a big fish in a little pond. And you guys made a mistake by coming to the University of Toronto on that dimension. And I saw this when I worked in the Ivy League school down in the United States. It was quite interesting watching the students there. So those were the Harvard students because, you know, the Ivy League students have a reputation for being arrogant. And I think that’s more or less something that’s carried over from the time you know, schools were really aristocratic. You know, and entry was mostly based on economic factors and familial connections. It’s really not like that anymore. Oh, it is to some degree. The thing that was interesting about the Harvard students is that they were the top of their class wherever they were. And maybe they were the smartest people they knew. But when they came to Harvard, they weren’t. They were in the middle for almost everything and in the bottom for some things. And days of being the smartest person in the room were seriously over. And so it was really hard on them. You know, but it was it was illusionary to some degree because they were now with the non-representative sample of people. And so you’re also with the non-representative sample of people. And so average in a high pool is that’s that’s it’s nothing. If you’re thinking about it from an actuarial perspective and a probabilistic perspective, then it’s not there’s nothing to be surprised about. And that’s something else to keep in mind. Now, the downside, of course, is that wherever you go in your life, what will happen is you keep climbing until the people you’re competing with are approximately as good at things as you are. And so that performance tension that you feel is something that probably will never go away. Hopefully, you’ll end up playing games that are fair, where if you work hard, you know, and you do a good job, that will actually translate into success. But I suspect that that’s going to be the case for the majority of you, you know, because intelligence is a good predictor of long term outcome. And so is conscientiousness and people who can do things are rare. They’re really rare. And one of the things you’ll find in the workplace is that if you can do things, and you’re reliable and honest in all those things, and someone finally notices, they’ll open doors for you like man. And that’s something about especially, I would say, especially entrepreneurial enterprises that are functioning well at something that’s underplayed when they’re described. People who do a good job of things almost always want to create opportunities for other people who do a good job of things. It’s actually a part of the, if you’re successful, one of the perks of being successful is that you get to mentor young people who have opportunity and possibility and help them. And that’s rewarding in and of itself. And all the people I know who are high performing people who are powerful, they all love doing that. So there’s places you’re going to find that are going to be relatively inviting. But having said all that, there’s a lot of uncertainty in the future. There’s a lot of technological transformation and it isn’t obvious what’s going to be of utility in the future. So a lot of it’s situational. And then, you know, the other thing that’s happened to some degree is that there’s an undue amount of emphasis placed on, let’s say, grades as the criteria that will select you for the next level of attainment. Because I think it starts to become a mistake. So I think people purely on the basis of grades, once you’re above about say a B plus or A minus, something like that, because people start to gerrymander their education so that they increase the probability that they’ll get straight As. So they don’t take the courses they’re interested in. They take courses, they’ll get As in the, you know, they, and logically so, they twist and tangle up their interaction with the educational system so that they get the output that the system demands. I think that’s really not good. You know, I think an optimal academic record is actually one where there’s a fair bit of high attainment with some outliers. You know, because it kind of indicates, well, that you’re not obsessively focused on your grades because you shouldn’t be obsessively focused on them. You should be focused on them. And also maybe that you’re willing to take a chance or two, you know, step outside of your domain of comfort in the hope of getting educated. But of course that isn’t how it is. So you’re also stuck with that. So, from a practical perspective, I mean, one of the things that I’ve done that you guys could probably take advantage of if you wanted to is, I’ve been interested for a long time on what interventions might help people obtain the optimum in motivation to move forward and the minimum of uncertainty and stress. And I can tell you some things that you can engage in that are going to help. They’re going to help optimize your life. And there’s some exercises you can do. I have this exercise called the Future Authoring Program, which is online at selfauthoring.com. And we’ve used that now with thousands of university students, mostly in Europe. But we also just ran Mohawk College, the intro students at Mohawk College through it. And it raises their grade point average 25% and drops the dropout rate by about the same. And so what the Future Authoring Program does is help you… It fills a niche in your education that is pathologically underfilled for reasons that I can’t really quite comprehend, but I’ve looked into to some degree. Which is… And it’s really the purpose of the humanities, which is, I think, in many ways, to be forgotten. The issue is, who the hell are you and where are you going? And then the subsidiary issues are why. Why are you doing that? And those are not optional questions. They’re philosophical questions. But true philosophical questions, they’re not decoration on the business of life. They’re the most fundamental possible issues that you can grapple with. And if you don’t grapple with them properly, you’ll get flattened because you’ll be weak. And weak means you won’t be able to tolerate stress without falling apart. And life is full of stress. And so if you can’t tolerate it, you’ll fall apart. And that’s just not good. And so part of what you need to figure out is what makes you conditioned, oftenly. In some sense, for battle. It’s not just battle, because it’s also cooperation. But you need both of those metaphors in order to consider the situation properly. The Future Offering Program asks people to formulate a vision of themselves, to formulate an ideal for themselves. And it’s not a Nietzschean kind of formulation. One of the things that Nietzsche discussed when he was describing the collapse of values, first in Western civilization, and then maybe around the world, the collapse of traditional values, was that people would have to create their own values as a replacement. But it’s an erroneous demand in some sense, because first of all, you can’t create your own values. You’re not smart enough, and you don’t live long enough. You have to rely on your culture to guide you. And second, you just can’t create your own values because you can’t cross yourself around. You are a certain way. You have certain interests, you have certain vulnerabilities, you have certain inadequacies and weaknesses that may be very tightly aligned with your strengths. It’s complicated. And so basically what you have to do is discover in some sense what your values are and align yourself with the property. And so the Future Offering Program does that. It basically asks you to envision… Look, one thing I’ve observed about people is that they don’t…part of the reason people don’t get what they want is because they don’t even have it. And you’re not going to get something without aiming at it, that’s for sure. And the more precisely targeted your vision is and the more clearly laid out what you want is, the higher the probability that you’re going to get it. And it’s partly because you’ll be moving ahead like an organized and crystalline entity, and you’ll be basically moving through mush. Because other people are much less concerned about stalking you than you are concerned about going forward. And so things will move away from you. And they do that quite dramatically. So it’s a non-trivial utility to get your act together and point yourself in the proper direction. The question might be, well, how do you do that? And I’ve tried to think about that from a practical perspective. I mean, the first thing is, what do you want? And that doesn’t mean…it actually doesn’t mean what do you want. Because when people think that, they tend…because we’re materialistic, they tend to think about that in terms of acquisitions. Like, what do you want for Christmas? And that’s…it’s understandable. And it’s not wrong. It’s just second rate. It isn’t as good as it could be, and it’s not good enough. Really what you should be thinking about is what sort of character you want to have. And the reason you want to think about that is because your character is your motive force forward and your armor. And if it’s not well developed, then you’re weak and you’re going to get run over. And so the primary purpose of education is the development of character. And it’s not the sort of, you should be like this if you’re a good person. It’s not proscriptive. Not if it’s deep. It’s…under what conditions would you be willing to be satisfied with your life? And this is a very important question because it’s not that easy to be satisfied with your life. And this is partly where our education system leads people terribly astray. Because, you know, the boneheaded noise is all about being happy. And that is not good because life is suffering. It is. And then having established that, you can say, oh yeah, okay, I get it. I see. That’s why things are like this. Then you can start thinking about what you might do about that. But if you start from the erroneous presupposition that the default condition of human experience is happiness, you’re just done from the start. Because every time you’re unhappy, you’re going to conclude that you’re inadequate. So you’re not inadequate. That’s just how it is. The question is how do you deal with that? And so you say, well, you’re destined to suffer. You’re destined to lose your parents. You’re destined to be unhappy in your career, at least from time to time. You’re destined to fight with your closest intimate friends and perhaps to be divorced and have sick children and develop some sort of horrible disease yourself. There’s a lot of things coming forward at you. And a lot of you have already experienced those things. So given all that, one conclusion is that’s just hopeless. There’s nothing you can do about it. But the problem is that isn’t going to help and it’s also going to make it worse. And that’s just the beginnings of the problem. And if you take that attitude, not only does it not help and make it worse for you, you will then turn and make it way worse for other people. And so that’s just a non-starter. You don’t go there. That’s inappropriate. It’s nihilistic, technically. And nihilism leads directly to hell, as far as I can tell. And I mean that metaphysically and technically. So because nihilism is one of the root causes of terrible social psychopathology. And societies can get so far out of whack that they can do things that are absolutely unimaginable. And you probably don’t want to be part of that. And if you do, well then you should think hard about exactly what you’re doing. Because there’s something about it that’s corrupt. So forget about the nihilistic issue. The other thing that you shouldn’t do, and this is another place where I think our education system fails you, is that you should not learn to parrot ideologies. And almost everything that students are taught, as far as I can tell now in humanities, is basically the parroting of boneheaded ideologies. And there’s ways of identifying ideologies. And one of them is it’s always someone else’s fault. That’s one of the hallmarks, or it’s society’s fault. And the other hallmark is everything that’s complex can be explained by one principle. Because that’s wrong. It’s just no one’s sophisticated. Everything’s that. It’s like you’re looking at the car and it isn’t working. And all you know is that the fan belt might be loose. And so no matter what the car’s doing, the reason is the fan belt’s loose. So you’re not going to fix the damn car. Because sometimes there’s other things that are wrong. So ideologues oversimplify and they’re very, very rigid. And they’re also resentful. And in some sense that’s the easiest alternative to nihilism, right? Because it’s false certainty. And it’s rigid and unbreakable and it also takes you in a terrible direction. Because if you’re rigidly identified with your ideology, anyone who challenges it is instantly your enemy. And what you want to do with your enemies is not pleasant. So that’s also not a very good route to take if you’d rather not end up in an absolutely terrible place. So then you think, well, what are the alternatives to that? That’s where it gets hard because sometimes it doesn’t seem like there is much of an alternative. It’s like things are pointless, obviously, because look at all the suffering and the shortness of life and all of that. And nothing’s really true, so you have to take refuge in some arbitrary set of rules and concepts. And postmodern relativism, basically, that’s basically its conclusions. One system, another system, it doesn’t really matter. They’re all predicated on power. They’re all basically arbitrary. And so there is nothing else there. That’s not right. It’s seriously not right. And it shouldn’t be taught to people. I really think that’s a bad thing. I think it hurts people’s mental health. And actually, I actually think that that’s the point of it. So because malevolence is a motivator and so is resentment. And not everyone is trying to make things better. And lots of people would rather have the misery shared than have it disappear. Okay, so then let’s say potentially there’s a middle road. And what is that? Well, I think some of it’s empirical. Like there’s this idea in behavioral therapy of collaborative empiricism. And basically what happens is a person comes into therapy and they say things aren’t going the way I would like them to be, which basically means I can’t bear the tragedy of my own life. That’s basically what that statement means. And the therapist says, okay, well, fair enough. That’s not so good. You’re willing to change, obviously, because here you are. How should you change? And the answer is, well, we don’t know. So the first thing to do is find out. And so you go and then maybe ask the person to watch their life for a little while and see when things are going well and see when things are not going well. And that’s not the same thing as creating your own values. That’s more a process of observation. And so like I could say, I know some exercises like this that can be ridiculously powerful. One of them is, well, watch when you’re miserable and see if you can figure out why. But more importantly, notice when you’re not miserable and see if you can figure out why. Because at least in part what that indicates is that you’re in the right place at the right time. Right then. That’s where you should be. Now, where you should be is partly in time and partly in space, right? Because things progress. So you’re always trying to locate yourself in time and space. And now and then your nervous system reports that all systems are to go. OK, so that’s a hint. It’s like, OK, I don’t know. I’m doing something right now and that seems to be working. Now, it’s not an omniscient hint, but it’s a start. OK, and so then one thing you can think of is, all right, let’s see if I can figure out what those places where I should be look like. And then let’s see if I can start making those places bigger. And, you know, if you can make them 1% bigger a week, if you do that for three years, it’s like they go from maybe 2% or 5% of your experience to 85% of your experience. That’s really useful. So and that means humility, because, you know, that’s actually a classical virtue. Humility means you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and you better pay attention because you might learn something. And then you’re truly ignorant, even with regards to yourself. But it also means that you treat yourself with a certain respect because it means all of a sudden that, you know, the autonomy of your own experience has a real reality and it’s an observable reality. And so, you know, people talk about this sometimes in terms of flow, which is not a bad concept. But basically, what it means is that you can find yourself engaged in the business in life in a manner that’s sufficiently meaningful. So the fact that life is tragic at that moment does not matter or maybe even better. It’s acceptable. You know, you might see this when you have children, if you’re lucky. And I mean, I think this is one of those experiences where people get close to that. Children expose the tragedy of life like nothing else. But if your relationship with them is what it should be, you think, oh, yeah, that they’re terribly vulnerable. And it’s so worth it. And that’s what you want. That’s what you want. You want to see you’re terribly vulnerable. And so is everyone you love. And so is everything that you have around you. But there’s a way of comporting yourself that makes that worthwhile. And that’s what you’re after. And I would say that’s actually the goal of any genuine religious practice. And the reason I’m using the religious example is because if something is of truly religious significance, what it means is that it deals with the deepest elements of human existence. By definition, that’s what it is. If it isn’t that, it’s not in the category of religious experience or knowledge. So you need a path of being that justifies the suffering of life. Then the next question is, well, can you find such a thing? And the answer to that is, you’ve got your whole life to find out. And I really do mean that that’s the answer. It really is the answer. It’s the prime question. Can you conduct yourself in a way that justifies the tragedy of being? Now, in order to do that, part of it is you can’t be too arrogant, man. You can’t think you know what you’re doing. Now, if you’re all happy and things are going wonderfully and you have a perfect relationship with being, hey, no problem. But you guys don’t put up your hands when you said you’re stressed out and you’re doubtful and you don’t know what’s going on. So you’re teetering between nihilism and ideological possession. So you have a problem. Well, that’s a good thing to notice. I have a problem. Then you can notice, maybe I’m not correct. Because that would be lovely. If the reason that you have a problem is because there are things you don’t know, that’s such a good deal. Because the alternative is things are terrible because they’re terrible and there’s nothing you can do about it. And then it’s like nihilism all the way over there. No bloody wonder. So you can start with the possibility that perhaps the reason that things aren’t as good as they could be or even as good as is necessary is that there are fundamental things that you need to observe and learn and change. And if you’re really careful and sufficiently terrified, because that’s also a necessity, if you’re going to be sufficiently careful, maybe you can figure out how to conduct yourself so that you get to be strong enough so that you can tolerate that. And maybe even more, maybe you could put yourself together so that you’re so strong that you’re only going to get there. You could say, it’s okay that things are this way, or maybe even that it’s good that things are this way. So I learned that in part by having kids, because kids are unbelievably vulnerable. And really, they’re so cute and so perfect in a certain way that their vulnerability is also even more painful. But you think about them and you think, well, let’s eradicate some of that vulnerability. Well, you can’t. You take a little three-year-old and they’re wandering around and they’re subject to any number of potential catastrophes at any moment. And you think, well, you can enclose them in styrofoam and then you could roll them down the stairs and that wouldn’t be a problem. But then they’d be enclosed in styrofoam, which is really what we’re trying to do with kids. Or you could make them 20 feet tall and made out of iron and then cars wouldn’t hurt them. But the thing that’s so strange is that every step you take to eradicate the vulnerability is simultaneously a step that would involve the destruction of the person. So that’s so interesting because what it means is that the vulnerability is a central element of what it is that you love. And that’s pretty interesting because it means that you can love something that’s truly vulnerable, something that’s susceptible to tragedy and it’s mortal and fragile and all of those things. So that’s interesting because if you love someone, you make the judgment that their existence is good. And that’s cool because it shows that, well, if that happens to you spontaneously, you can spontaneously make that judgment. Maybe you can make that judgment about yourself. Now, I don’t think you can just do that. That isn’t what people are like. You can’t really fool yourself. And so you can learn to not judge yourself with unnecessary harshness. That’s really useful. And you can learn to be compassionate with yourself, which basically means to treat yourself as if you’re someone you care about. That’s what true compassion means. And so you can modify your pathological self-criticism. But in order to establish a positive relationship with yourself, you also have to respect yourself. And I think to do that, you have to, there’s a bunch of things that go along with that. You have to be good for something. Good for you, that would be good. Good for other people, that would be even better. Good for other people in a crisis, that would even be better. And so that way you can have some respect for yourself because although you’re full of flaws and vulnerable, if there’s a storm coming, you can still stand up in it. And that’s a good thing. And also, I’ve observed people on surrounding a deathbed, let’s say. It’s an easy thing for people to be terrified of. But it doesn’t help. Like, the person’s dying, you’re in the room, you’re terrified and upset. It’s like, hey, it’s not your turn. It’s their turn. And so hopefully when you’re in that situation, you’ve got yourself together enough so that you’re actually going to be helpful then. And then if you’re not, really terrible things happen. So families often tear themselves apart when a major part of the family dies. A father or mother. Because they’re so mangled up in 15 different ways that while the tragedy is unfolding, they turn on each other like carnivorous wolves. And so they take something that’s just a tragedy and they turn it into hell. And I would say generally, you can tolerate tragedy, but you can’t tolerate hell. So part of your life is, part of what you’re doing in your life is to stop tragedy from deteriorating into hell. And if you can do that, man, you’re worth having around. And that’s actually grounds for some self-respect because that’s hard. It’s really hard. But consider the alternative. You know, it makes everything that’s sad absolutely unbearable in every possible way. You know, and I’ve seen families who were coping with the death, say, of a mother who were courageous people. You know, there were people who had, for example, worked as palliative care nurses. That’s pretty tough work, man. And you know, what they did while their mother was dying was help. And that makes the whole situation different. It transforms the whole situation. And you just don’t know how much a situation can be transformed. You don’t know. And you can take very terrible situations. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I know what terrible situations are like. I’m not trying to offer you some naive response. But you can take situations that could be unimaginably cruel and terrible, and you can transform them at least into bearable tragedy. And that’s the transmutation that someone with real character can manage. And so, and those things are real. You know, a lot of what you hear about is about the fragility of representations of the world. You know, and about their arbitrariness and falseness. That there isn’t a belief system in some sense that isn’t brought into the core and questionable. And I think part of that is just because it’s the wrong questions that are being asked. Like, if the manner in which you address the world makes you stronger, then there’s no… that puts it beyond question. It’s beyond question at that point. And even if you can come up with a rational way of criticizing it, you know, because you could say, well, who cares how heroic you are on your mother’s deathbed when in a trillion years, you know, all the stars have exploded and the galaxies are extinguished. When I hear an objection like that, I know I’m parodying it, but that’s such a stupid question. Like, you’re just missing the point completely. And it’s a pathological objection because you could say, you’re one of the first soldiers that lays eyes on Auschwitz, and the first thing you say is, ah, it doesn’t matter. Who’s going to know in a million years? It’s like, sorry, I get the rush now. You know, I get the impeccable logic. But it’s the logic that only someone who’s corrupt beyond measure would dare to use in a situation like that. And so there’s a simple alternative to that. It’s like, if you’re engaged in something, say that reduces suffering, we’ll just start with that. And something pops into your mind like, who’s really going to care in a million years? The first thing you should conclude is that’s the wrong time for that thought. Because you can criticize either thing, right? You can say that thought is paramount and the conclusion is irrefutable, or you can say, any moron, any chattering devil can come up with that objection. Why in the world would anyone with any sense ever listen to it? And that’s a much more, that’s a deeper response. It’s an embodied response. It’s not a rational response. There are deeper responses than rational responses. There are responses that involve your whole being, and those are the kind of responses you’re after. You know, because rationality, it’s a, what do they say, it’s Milton. It’s the highest spirit in God’s heavenly kingdom. Yes, it is. It’s the most powerful psychological force we have at our disposal. It’s not you, and it shouldn’t be lost. And if it is you and it’s lost, that is not good. So, so there’s no reason to let that happen. You can just, you can just refer to your own experience. I mean, there’s other exercises you can do. This is a really good one. This is terrifying, though, if you do it right. Detach yourself from yourself. So that’s sort of a Buddhist thing in some sense. So you become a watcher of yourself. And so you have to watch yourself like you don’t know who you are, because you don’t, so you might as well detach. And then watch what happens when you talk. You kind of have to watch with your whole body. And notice that sometimes when you say something, you align and you come together. You get stronger. And sometimes when you say something, you get weaker. You fragment and you get weaker. And you know, you could notice sometimes you’ll get weaker if you say something to impress someone. You know, you’ll get weaker if you falsify your own experience, because you’re trying to manipulate the situation in order for something to happen. You’ll get weak if you act on, act as if an intellectual principle is something of your creation when it isn’t. Because lots of great ideas you can’t really use unless you’ve made them your own. You know, you’ve had to take responsibility for them. You have to embody them, because otherwise you’re just a chattering, like a tape recorder. You’re a chattering tape recorder. You know the ideas, but they’re not grounded in you. You don’t have the real right to them. You’ll notice sometimes, this is a good one, you’ll be involved in an argument with someone, and you’ll feel stupid because you’re arguing. It’s like, shut up then. You know, and that’s often, that’s what will happen if you do this. You’ll find that a whole bunch of, on very many occasions, you’ll just have to shut up, because there’s nothing you can say that won’t make you feel weak. And then you can start to sort of feel yourself around your words, and you’ll see that here’s something you can say, there’s solidity there. You know, it’s like you’re standing on a rock in the middle of a swamp. And if you deviate from that, you come apart, you start to feel weak. And so you practice that, you say, alright, I’m going to see what happens if I only say things that make me feel strong. Well, you do that for five years to see what happens. And it’s partly, it’s in reference to a very old idea, an idea that’s at the heart of humanity, which is that the idea that, there’s an idea that conscious human interaction with the ground of being has something to do with that. It reveals, conscious human interaction with the ground of being is what makes potential transform into reality. It’s something like that. It’s an unbelievably powerful idea. And I believe it’s as true as anything can be true. That means to some degree that you speak yourself into being. And so that means that if you want to make yourself strong, you speak truth, so that you could bring yourself into being in truth. And the reason you want to do that isn’t because you should be truthful, like in some sort of external, like an external sense of being in accordance with traditional morality. It’s not rule following, although if you’re really chaotic, rule following is a lot better than just being chaotic. It’s more than that. It’s your attempt to construct yourself into something that can react to the manifestation of being properly. That’s truth. You’re matching yourself to being. And why would you not want to do that? You have to contend with it. Who knows how powerful you can be if you contend properly? People can be so tough, it’s just unbelievable. And you see this even in minor things. I went out for dinner with this guy a while back, and he’d been an athletic guy, he did a lot of biking, a lot of running, Ironman complications, that sort of thing. He got hit by a car, you know, like just wiped him out. So he’s still recovering, and he’s pretty disabled. He went back to work, he’s a linesman. You know, that’s a hard job, right? You’ve got to climb up power lines and splice cables together, and you have to do it under implement conditions, because that’s when the power lines tend to break. It’s demanding and dangerous and all that. And he’s pretty screwed up because he got hit by a car. So he was telling me, it was just a casual story, he was telling me about the last day that he had at work, and he was working with somebody, his partner had Parkinson’s disease, and really couldn’t use one of his arms very well. So, I don’t know, he could use his left arm, and the other guy could use his right arm, and so they were on the ladder trying to fix this. And it’s like, you know, it just made my jaw drop, because how ridiculous is that? Like, he’s got run over by a car, and then this other guy has Parkinson’s disease, which is just as miserable a thing as you could hope to have, and there they are, on their ladder. No freezing rain, they’re fixing the power lines. People can be unbelievably tough. You know, and the other thing that you get in universities now that just drives me crazy is, it’s like, you can’t be racist. You can’t say anything bad about black people or Mexicans or white people or Jews or whoever. You can’t do that. But you can express as much hatred for the entire human race as you want. And so that’s just, to me, that’s just like, it’s really bad if you only hate one sort of person, but if you hate everyone, well, that just means you’re enlightened, you know? You hear about this all the time. We’re screwing up the planet, and the planet would be better off if there weren’t people on it and all this thing, and I think, man, never give the keys to the nuclear arsenal to someone who thinks that way. You know, it’s a despicable way of thinking. And it would be nice if we could develop some respect for people. I mean, you know, we labor along under a burden that exceeds the burden of anything we know, where the only creatures there are who are conscious of their own vulnerability. And it’s ultimate vulnerability, man. You’re going to die. That’s where it talks out. And look, here you are, man. You’re standing up. You’re in here learning. You’re trying to have a life. Maybe some of you are even trying to be good. That’s a hell of a thing to do under those conditions. And so, you know, when you start thinking that way, well, first of all, you can have a little more compassion for people. It’s, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re a little hard on the environment, but in some sense, we’re only returning the favor. You know, I mean, we’re at war with Mother Nature, but she’s going to win. You know, we all die, and we’re doing our best to protect ourselves from that. And obviously, there’s some stupidity and foolishness and, you know, malevolence and ravenousness and greed that goes along with that. But asking someone to solve an impossible problem perfectly, it’s like you’re just the ultimate tyrant when you demand that. So, you know, you could think, well, we could give ourselves a bit of a break. And that’s something to apply to your… I mean, I read to this thing at Queens University. It was a TEDx thing. It was so appalling. A professor came out, and he was supposed to be talking about these computerized surfaces that he was inventing, which were pretty cool, you know. But he came out, and he went into a tirade to the students about how they should not reproduce, you know, because… And, you know, he said him and his wife had only limited themselves to one child, and I thought personally that was one more child than he should have had. But, you know, he didn’t even notice that what he was doing was addressing a whole roomful of people like you, you know, who are just entering into the… into what? The beginnings of their truly adult life, which is when you have children, because that’s what makes you an adult. And he’s telling them, you’re so despicable that your type shouldn’t breed. And then he thought that was moral. It’s like, what the hell? I told him, I had that. It was quite horrible, because I’m really, really nervous, because I really don’t like doing that. But, you know, I told him that I thought that what he did was pathological beyond belief, and that he should be ashamed of himself. And, you know, I freaked my wife out completely. She’s like having a panic attack. And he just huffed off the stage, saying, you know, that’s what happens when you talk about things that are disimportant. It’s like… No, that’s what happens when you have genocide in your soul. That’s not the same thing. So, you know, hatred for humanity, that’s not a good thing, man. We know where that leads. So I would say you could stop having that in relationship to yourself, and have a little bit of respect for people, even though they’re like mangled up and chewed up and spit out and warped and… It’s no wonder. You know, one of the things I’ve noticed about psychology is that we always get things backwards. Why do people manifest abnormal behaviour? Jesus, that’s a stupid question. It’s like, what would you expect? It’s why people are ever normal about anything. That’s the bloody mystery. You know, people come into my office and they’re having… They have anaphobia. I’m afraid that if I go outside I might die and I won’t get to the hospital in time. And they’re having heart palpitations and they’re getting older, I think. Oh yeah, it’s not surprising you have a panic attack. It’s surprising that all the other 50-year-olds don’t have them, because of course what you’re afraid of is definitely going to happen, and you don’t know when. So the idea that it’s a mystery that people engage in abnormal… that they develop personality pathologies is like… That’s no mystery. It’s no mystery why people are afraid. It’s no mystery why people have low self-esteem, which is a word, by the way, I hate, why people are depressed and anxious and in pain and confused and uncertain and all those things. It’s like that doesn’t require any explanation. So if you’re in any of those things, it’s like it’s no bloody wonder. And then the issue is, well, what do you do about it? Well… You need an ideal. You know, and I would say your ideal should be informed by your knowledge of the greatest ideals of the past, because there’s all that knowledge sitting around. What, are you going to waste that? Don’t waste it. Use it. You need an ideal. An ideal is a target, and it’s a judge at the same time, and it’s a motivator, because you can be like that. And as you move towards your ideal, it’ll transform, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do it. So the ideal will recede, but you need an ideal. You need to construct in some sense, or discover an ideal that you believe in. You have to inform that with your knowledge of the past. That’s partly why you need to get educated, and that’s why the humanities are so important. If the humanities go, the universities are done. And they’re going to go, I think, because… Because they’ve committed heritory, fundamentally, and out of resentment, as far as I can tell. And so it’s really not good, but the terror of it is that it deprives you of what you need. You need to be able to extract from the past the ideal. And then you need to put that in front of you as a value. It has to be an ideal that you believe is valuable. You think, look, man, if I could pull that off, if I could do that, if I could be that, all this trouble would be worthwhile. And so we do this practically. We say, okay, look three to five years from the future, because after that it gets kind of blurry. What do you want for friends? Who do you want your friends to be? Because you can pick your friends, you know. You can pick people who like you and want the best for you. That’d be good, if you’re willing to extend that courtesy to yourself. What do you want for your education? Well, let’s talk about education. What does it mean? Here’s what it means. If you’re educated, you get your language straight. You know how to speak and you know how to write. And if you know how to speak and write, you are unstoppable. That’s why you’re supposed to get educated. No one ever tells you that. It’s like, well, why are you writing this essay? Well, it’s a class assignment. Or maybe I’m learning to write. It’s like, well, why bother? Why is that important? Why is that hard? Why bother? You can’t write. The reason you can’t write is because you can’t think. And if you can’t think, then you run into things. And if you run into things, then your life is horrible. So the reason that you get educated is so that you can think and not run into horrible things. And your life expands. And it makes you powerful. You know, part of what I’m doing in my therapy sessions all the time is someone comes in with a problem and they articulate the problem fully. And then we can get rid of most of it because once it’s articulated, you can see what’s the problem and what isn’t. And then we can focus on a few key things. Then we can articulate what a solution would look like. Then we can go to war. It’s like, OK, this is the problem. This is what you want. How can you get it? That’s all articulation. Here’s strategy one. Here’s strategy two. Here’s the rationales for all those strategies. Here’s what you do if they fail. You do that. You do that continually. Things just move away in front of you like they’re not even there. Because the people in systems that are stupid are stupid and weak. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be stupid and weak if they weren’t stupid and weak. And so if you’re a straight arrow, let’s say, then that stuff just disappears in front of you because there’s no commitment to it. And language. You want to be a master of language. That’s why you’re getting educated. That’s why you’re in university. And so I would say, not only should you not say anything that makes you weak, you shouldn’t write anything you don’t believe. I was talking to one of my daughter’s friends. This I drink because I can’t drink coffee. I actually hate it. But if I drink that, then I don’t drink coffee. So that’s my compromise with my own stupidity. So she was complaining about the sociology class that she was taking at Concordia. I thought that was a sign of her mental health. It’s like, yeah. And then she said she had to write her essay so that to feed back to the professor what that particular professor wanted to hear. And so she was all irritated about that and couldn’t get really motivated to do it. And so her failing to notice that the reason she couldn’t get motivated to do it was because she had set herself up to distort her logos, to distort her being in order to please some person she had no respect for. Well, good God. How could you be motivated to do that? And I said to her, look, you can’t do that. You can’t do that. You have to take your months. You write the best essay you can. And you make it something you believe in. And if it doesn’t fly, tough luck for you. But at least you haven’t corrupted your character. And she said, and so did my daughter. Well, dad, you just don’t understand how the university has changed. That’s not relevant. It’s maybe true, but it’s not relevant. The problem is, is once you write something, you believe it. You can’t help it. The data on that’s actually clear. If you come in, let’s say you’re a radical left winger on some viewpoint or a radical right winger. It doesn’t matter. And then I say, OK, you have to write an essay countering that position. Then I bring you in a week later. You shifted way close to your argument. And the reason is that the belief you have to begin with is shallow. You’ve never really articulated it. You just have it. It’s like a heuristic. It’s probably based on your temperament. You articulate a rebuttal? You have a way more well-developed argument for the rebuttal than you do for the original proposition. So you should. So every time you write something to please someone, then you’re damaging your character. And you might say, well, who cares? Be honest. Don’t thrive anyways, which is wrong, by the way. That’s all you’ve got is your character, because nothing else will defend you against suffering. That’s what you’ve got. So you sacrifice that. You sacrifice everything. And it’s worse than that, because once you sacrifice that, you get weak. And when you get weak, the tragedy mounts. And as the tragedy mounts, you get resentful. And then you get cruel. And then you get vicious. And there’s no stopping that. And that’s just the beginning. I mean, there’s no end to the downside of that. And we already saw in the 20th century what happens when people do that. It’s not good. And all of those deaths should have taught us a lesson. And the lesson is, don’t do that. It leads to the worst possible situation that you could imagine, no matter how well you can imagine impossible situations. And maybe you want to partake in that. But maybe you don’t. And in fact, maybe you do not want to partake in it. You want to do exactly whatever is necessary to decrease the probability that that will happen. And we know it can happen. And we know it doesn’t have to. And so obviously, there must be things that you could do to ensure that it doesn’t happen. So those things are hard to discover. It’s easier to see where something is wrong than where it isn’t wrong. It’s just simpler. But, and I think that’s very tightly alive. You’ll find that’s very tightly alive. It’s the same set of phenomena that you will discover if you notice day to day, week to week, month to month, what makes you weak and what makes your life meaningful. So the weakness, if you speak in a way that makes you weak, you’ll deteriorate into that domain. If you don’t and you watch what makes your life meaningful, then you’ll get stronger and stronger and you’ll get farther and farther away from that. And you’ll be more and more likely to manifest yourself in a way that makes those things less and less likely. And you know, even, like here’s a proposition for nihilists. I think these are good propositions. Okay. Argue yourself out of pain. Oh look, you can’t do it. Well, so much for the limits to your rationality. And it isn’t that things are meaningless. Because there’s pain. And that’s a form of meaning. It’s not a form of meaning you want, but it’s there and you can’t argue yourself out of it. So the next thing you might say, well, how about a little less pain? How would that be? And then you say, well, what difference is it going to make? It’s like, get away from that person. Because I think some things are self-evident. Don’t torture kittens to death. Well, who’s going to care in a million years? It’s the wrong level of analysis. So that’s just a trick of the rational mind. So you don’t play along with that. You notice, man, that’s upsetting. That’s horrible. That’s terrible. I don’t want to go anywhere near that. Great. Don’t go anywhere near it. That would be a good thing. And so you can start by avoiding. That’s the way to bring meaning into your life. You start by avoiding hell. And then if you’re lucky, well, if you avoid it enough, then maybe you can start thinking about how you might climb the stairway to heaven. But the first is the first. Because it’s really easy to believe in pain. And so all you have to notice is that you believe in it and that maybe you’d rather not have any more of it than necessary and perhaps that that would also be good for other people. Hey, that gives you a starting point. And once you have a starting point, it’s like Archimedes. He said, you know, if you gave him a lever and a proper hulk, then he could move the world. Well, as far as I can tell, that piece of knowledge is precisely that. Because I don’t think you can’t dismiss it. Not without in instantaneously establishing yourself as an agent of malevolence. So. So. That’s that. So I would say. You orient yourself. You orient yourself. You have to do that. You have to orient yourself towards an ideal. And you’ll have to figure out what your ideal is. You can figure out partly what your ideal is by noticing who you admire. Because the phenomena of admiration is the attempt of your psyche to construct an ideal that you can follow. And it’s involuntary, which is another thing that’s interesting to notice. Right. It’s like you don’t pick who you admire. It just manifests itself. And so it’s an unconscious manifestation of your psyche. Or you could say it’s a revelation of being. It’s the same basic idea. And so you think, well, you admire this person. OK, well, that’s a hint. It’s like, OK, there’s an ideal nested in that. What is it that you want from that? What is it you want to derive from that? And you derive that, and then your ideal will shift. And so it’s a moving target in some sense. But it’s well worth following. So. And again, it’s nothing that you can rationally undermine, as far as I can tell. Anymore than you can rationally undermine being in love with someone. You don’t be trapped to being in love with someone either. You can’t control it. So you can accept it as an existential fact. And then you can work forward on that basis. So then I would say, well, part of the idea is orient yourself towards the improvement of being. So the idea is, and it can be vague, because what the hell do you know? But the issue is you’ve got to decide. Do you want things to be worse or do you want them to be better? That’s the first decision. And you might say, well, obviously I want things to be better. It’s like, don’t be thinking that’s obvious. Because it’s not. And people are always working to make things worse. And there’s a part of everyone that works to make things worse. So if you think that that’s not part of you, then you’re not even in the game yet. Because you’re naive, fundamentally. And you’re going to get walloped. And if you get walloped enough, you won’t be naive. And then you’ll start seeing this. And that will be painful. So it would be better just to circumvent that completely, if you could. So you think, well, am I going to make things worse? Am I going to make them better? Well, what’s worse? Mao is China. That was bad. Soviet Union. That was bad. Nazi Germany. That was bad. Let’s not go there. OK, so we’ve got how to make things worse down. We’re going to get away from that. How to make things better? Tougher question. At least stop making them worse. You know, and then I would say, aim low. You know, the other exercise that I think is very useful, apart from watching your speech and don’t write things you don’t believe, and that is really dangerous. You’re warping your character. And once you do that, it’s very difficult to get the warps out, because you’re actually rewiring yourself. Writing does that. You’re changing your memory structures when you write. So I think that’s even more the case when you write than when you speak. The same thing happens when you speak. The next thing is, in part, notice what you could make better, that you would make better, and then make it better. Because you might say, well, I don’t know what’s good. I know what’s not good. So that’s a start. That’s really a useful start. But that doesn’t, just because you specify the end, one end of a continuum, doesn’t mean you necessarily specify the other. So it’s fuzzy. What’s the opposite of being a Nazi? Well, we don’t really know. We don’t know exactly. But you get glimmers. And I think that’s the right way of thinking about it. There are things that glimmer. And one glimmer is, oh, this isn’t right, and I can fix it. And then it’s like, you know it’s not right. You don’t have to question it. And these aren’t grandiose things. These are small things. Really, they’re small things. There’s some things I should attend to today, little tasks, things that you know that if you don’t do, your life will be worse at the end of the day than it was at the beginning. Good enough. And some of those things you might say, well, I’m not going to do those. And OK, fine. Or I don’t know why. But some of them will be the things that you could do that you know you should do. Do them. And they’re little things. They’re little things. But if you do 100,000 of those things, then everything will get pristine and beautiful around you. And that makes life a lot more bearable. And then you can kind of start distributing that around. And that’s really, really helpful. It’s really helpful. So you need to know where you’re going. And hopefully up rather than down. And if you’ve got desire for down in you, then well, then the first thing to do is notice that, at least. Know that that’s the case. And people are very destructive. And they will hurt. And they will destroy. And so that’s part of you. And you have to grapple with that. And you have to decide if that’s what you want. And I would say that’s all there is to it. You have to decide if that’s what you want. Once you notice, once you decide that, you try to orient yourself towards that. And start watching. Watching. What makes you strong? What makes you weak? Do the things that make you strong. Stop doing the things that make you weak. And while you’re doing that, try to make things better. Now, not in a grandiose way, because what the hell do you know? You don’t want to fix everything, because you’ll just screw it up. You want to fix a few things around you that are within your realm of competence that you know absolutely that you could make better. Now, you might not know why, but it doesn’t matter. You have the confidence. You know how to do it. A child comes up and they’re cut. Or maybe they fell down. You give them a hug and you pat them on the head. And you know that works. It works. Okay, so that’s something you’re competent to do. So that’s the right thing to do in that situation. You know, it’s… You don’t have a discussion about that, because it’s already established. And there’s lots of things that you guys already know that are like that. So you do that. Microsteps, in some sense. And then you stand back and you have some faith. And faith is the willingness to try that, to see what will happen. That’s all. Because there’s no proof. Like, I can tell you about this, but I can’t prove it within the confines of your own experience. And so you have to manifest faith that things could possibly be right. And that’s an act of courage. And then… Then things around you sort themselves out. And hopefully they sort themselves out for you in a way that also sorts them out for other people. And then things get better. And maybe as they get better, we won’t be so concerned about how horrible things are. Because you’ve got to think, we’re so bloody creative and amazing. If everybody on the planet was like laying things out as fast and hard as they can, man, we’d solve every problem there is in no time flat. So, it seems like a good deal. But beasts complaining about how miserable, wretched, and destructive human beings are. It’s not good. It’s not good. It’s not a sign of ethics to do that. It’s quite the contrary. So… Okay, that’s about all I have to say about that. So, we’re going to have questions, right? Okay. So, what I’m going to do partly here is I’m going to answer questions that I haven’t answered yet. So, if I don’t pick the question, it’s either because we don’t have time, or because I’m too tired to answer it, or because I can’t formulate a reasonable answer. So… Okay. Is it morally right to bring people into existence without their consent, knowing that they will end up in a terrible state of despair? Okay. Is it morally right to bring people into existence without their consent, knowing that they will inevitably endure suffering during their life? Isn’t it selfish? Good question. Tolstoy asked that question in his Confessions. So, if you’re interested in an answer to that question, one of the things I would recommend is that you read that book. Because that was kind of his conclusion. He looked at life and he thought… Yeah. He tells this story, it’s a Buddhist story, about this guy who’s out in the field and he’s being chased by people who want to kill him. And so, he jumps into this hole and he’s hanging on… It’s like an old well, and he’s hanging on for dear life to this branch. And at the bottom of the hole there’s a crocodile. And so, he’s hanging on there. And while he’s hanging on, he notices two things. There’s some grapes on the vine, and there’s a little bit of a And so, he knows… He can get out and get killed, or he can fall and get killed, or he can wait. Well, so what he does is he eats the grapes. And it’s a Buddhist story, a Taoist story, because the white mouse is chaos, or order in the black mouse is chaos. And there’s always things working at the vine of being. There’s no doubt about it. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. And so, he’s hanging on there. The Dostoevsky took from the newspapers about this family, mother and father. They were angry at their four year old daughter. And they locked her in an outhouse overnight. And she was screaming out there. And she goes to death. You know, it was news in Moscow. And Ivan basically says to Alyosha, it’s like, you know, who’s making a case for the goodness of being, or the goodness of God, depending on how you want to look at it. And Ivan says, how can you even dare to make an argument like that? It’s like, this is the sort of thing that happens in the world all the time. And then he asks Alyosha, look, would you be willing voluntarily to torture that girl to death to ensure that things would continue? And Alyosha says, well, no, I wouldn’t do that. And Ivan says, well, I knew you wouldn’t do it. So it’s like, what’s your conclusion about that? Being shouldn’t exist. And then Gertha asks the same question in Faust. He has a character named Mephistopheles. And Mephistopheles is kind of the intellectual angle of Satan. That’s what I’m thinking about. And he says the same thing. He’s talking about his motivations. He says, well, what motivates the great adversary of mankind? And Mephistopheles says it’s straightforward. Being is so terrible that it should be eradicated. OK, fair enough. Strong argument. People try it. It’s not clear to me that that’s where we should go. So because as far as I can tell, when people work for the eradication of being, it makes everything that they’re complaining about way worse really fast. And so then the other thing you might ask yourself is, do you really think that’s the motivation? It’s really so pure-hearted. They’re going to destroy mankind to save it. And they’re making a judgment. The judgment is being is so terrible that it shouldn’t exist. Now, don’t get me wrong. I get the rationale for that argument. It’s Ivan’s rationale. It was never put more strongly than in the British Grams. It’s a famous passage in Rightly So. The question here was with regards to bringing children into the world. Well, it’s a variation of the same question. You know, the question is, what do you have to conclude if you’re not going to do it? You’re concluding that being is not worth, that being is not justifiable. Well, that’s a hell of a conclusion. I would be very careful before I made it because there are places it takes you that are not good. So and then you might also ask yourself, are you so sure that you’re asking that question just because you’re a good person? Are you maybe asking that question because you don’t want the responsibility, say, of having a child in this particular example? Or maybe you’re afraid that you won’t know how to fortify the child properly, so you’re withdrawing the fear. Fair enough. Look, what you do with children is you encourage them. And I mean that literally. It’s like you have a little kid and you say, look, man, you can take on the world. You don’t sugarcoat it. It’s like it’s not it’s all, you know, fairy tales and roses. It’s not. You don’t shield kids enough so you don’t damage them. It’s a really tight balance because you don’t want to overwhelm someone, hurt them while you’re teaching them. You have to expose them gradually and with intelligence. You do that by having a relationship with a kid. You don’t want to shield them from existence. You want to show them just what it’s like. And then you want to tell them, doesn’t matter, man, you’re tough enough. You can do it and you can do it right. And it’s true. They can. And if you if you fortify them with that knowledge, man, their their being is not characterized by the kind of suffering that makes existence intolerable. And so the answer is not to have children. The answer is to have them properly and to encourage them. And that’s tough because, you know, you’re kind of fragmented and broken. And if you treat your child right, they might exceed you. And that’s annoying. So you may do everything you can to bloody well make sure that your kid is broken enough so there’s no way they’re going to do any better than you. And so I wouldn’t recommend that. But people do it all the time. But that doesn’t mean that existence itself is insufficient. It just means that you’re not handling the property and you’re making it far worse than it has to be. And one of the things I asked myself a long time ago was, first of all, I know there’s a distinction between tragedy and evil. That’s an important distinction. Tragedy is when things happen that aren’t good. Someone gets cancer. You know, your child slips and breaks his or her leg. Your parents die. That’s tragic. Evil is when something tragic happens because someone wanted it to happen. So we can distinguish between those two. The first thing I would say is people can handle tragedy. You can get tough enough so you can handle tragedy. In fact, I think you can get tough enough so that you even get tougher if you’re exposed to tragedy. That’s sort of Nietzsche’s statement about whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Obviously it’s an overstatement. It’s very hard for people to tolerate evil, malevolence. So like I’ve seen people, for example, give an analysis of clients with post-traumatic stress disorder, they’re very often traumatized by malevolence, not tragedy. They fall victim to someone who wants to hurt them. And maybe it’s either themselves that wants to hurt them and that’s revealed to them. But sometimes they’re often naive people. They come into contact with someone whose purpose is to hurt them. And that shatters them so badly they can’t put themselves back together. Evil is really devastating. I think human beings can tolerate tragedy. And I also think that if people oriented themselves towards the improvement of being, we could continually ameliorate tragedy. And I do also believe that being is striving to perfect itself. Now that’s obviously a metaphysical statement, but I don’t really care if it’s a metaphysical statement. I have my reasons for believing that. And I think that the purpose of human life is to participate in that process. And because, again, the alternative is things are pointless and life is suffering and it should be eradicated. It’s like that leads nowhere good. It really leads nowhere good. So I can dispense with it. It’s a bad argument because we’re a tasty. It’s like a bad roadmap. Because most profound ideas are roadmaps. They tell you how to get from one point to another. You know, do you want to get to the depths of infernal chaos? Or do you want to move towards something that approximates paradise? Well, you better make sure you have the right map. And so, and most belief systems are roadmaps. They’re not descriptions of reality. They’re not descriptions of objective reality there. That isn’t what they are. So have kids, for God’s sake. Well, look, it’s one third of your life. You will bloody well regret it if you don’t do it. You’re not going to be 20 forever or 30. Someday you’re going to be 50 or 55. And maybe you’ll be alone. That’s not so good. And so you’re a fool if you don’t have kids. Now, I mean, I know people have their reasons and some people have appropriate reasons and all of that. But if some ideological hang-up is stopping you, you better dispense with that instead of dispensing with the kids. Is there a book you could consider essential reading? Oh, yeah. It’s too bad you have to ask that because after all, you are at university. You should read Dostoevsky’s Five Great Points. They’re unparalleled. So that’s notes from underground, crime and punishment, the possessed or the devils, it depends on the translation, the brothers from Amazon, the idiot. There’s also one called The Adolescent, so I guess there’s six. So any of Dostoevsky’s great novels, you can’t not read. They’re key pieces in the psychology of the bandwagon. Solyan Nixon’s Gulag Archipelago. That’s a major book, man. And that’s a description of his experiences inside the Soviet prison camps. And that book helped bring down the Soviet Union. It destroyed the intellectual and moral credibility of communism. It was an atom bomb, that thing. He memorized it. 2700 pages long. So it’s hard, man, because it’s nothing but atrocity and terror. But there’s no shy way. And this is one thing I really like about Dostoevsky. Most of the time, the novels are intellectual bouts. They’re moral bouts. That’s a better way of thinking about it. And most of the time when you hear people have an argument, they do tricks. Let’s say you and I are going to have an argument about something. The first thing I’m going to do is listen to what you say, and then I’m going to create a stupid form of it, and then I’m going to destroy that stupid form. And when you try to object, I’m going to interrupt. That’s the straw man argument. What I should be doing is I should be listening to you. And if you’re not very good at formulating your arguments, I should help you formulate them so they come out as clearly as they possibly can. And then we should have a discussion to see where we go. And that’s what Dostoevsky does. He was an Orthodox Christian, a Russian Orthodox Christian. His atheists, man, those are deadly atheists. They make Dawkins look like a piker. Dostoevsky takes Ivan as a really good example. That guy’s got everything going for him. He’s really good looking. He’s really strong. He’s really courageous. He’s sharp. He’s admirable. He’s fearless. He’s a major contender. And he formulates arguments in favor of atheism that are almost… In fact, Dostoevsky actually cannot write a rejoinder. What he does instead is he plays out the consequences of the ideas, you know, as the characters develop. And he takes his other characters, like Alyosha, who don’t adopt that way of being and then plays that out and shows you what the consequences are, which is brilliant. It’s like if you read The Brothers for Amazov and then The Possessed or The Devils, and then you read The Gulliver and Paligot, you have the perfect merging of literature. You have the perfect marriage of literature and history. Because what Dostoevsky says will happen and why it happens is exactly what happens. So it’s this unbroken sequence of moral revelations. And you can’t under… You can hardly overestimate the impact of Solzhenitsyn’s book. First of all, we want to know about Pricewood. But more importantly, he did more to knock over totalitarian communism than the American military. Now, I’m not saying necessarily that the American military was a major player in that, although I certainly think they were, because Stalin was perfectly willing to tromp into Europe with hydrogen bombs. You know, he was a serious… He was seriously not a good guy. So… So… Okay, so those are absolutely necessary books. Most books written by people who are universally regarded as great… What was the book for, three minutes? That’s why they’re regarded as great. It’s not… And you’ll hear, you know, you hear this again on the edges of literary criticism in the humanities, that the canonical writings were selected because of the desires of the oppressive class or some sort of absolute relish like that. It’s like… …partly, but it’s not relevant. Because all… Like these people, like Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s books are full of… …dare derogatory comments about women, you know. They’re not full of them, but they happen now and then. Well, he was writing by himself, he was really, really sick, he never sold any books. He was so ill that he could hardly write at all. He had to confine his writing to like 10-minute bursts. And he was isolated and alone. So now and then he got tired and resentful and wrote something rude, you know. I mean, the guy had it all the time. He died when he was like 40, you know. And he was a bloody genius. He was a full professor when he was very young. It’s like cutting some slack, you know. It’s not pleasant, but what you’re supposed to do when you read a great work is… …sit the job from the week. You’re not supposed to notice one stupid thing and say, oh, the whole thing is rotten. That’s a… You’re so pathetic if you do that. You know, you read Freud and like, yeah, he wrote in the 1890s and some of his ideas are outdated. But what do you expect? He wrote in the 1890s. What do you expect? It’s like, so you say, well, you have to discard 20% of it and you pull in the other 80%. You’re bloody lucky that the 80% is there. You’re supposed to be reading not to get rid of things, but to take the things that are valuable. And so I would say, you know, I learned a lot from reading Freud. I learned a lot, a tremendous amount from reading Jung. Jung is so profound that it’s really unspeakable. It’s no wonder they don’t teach him in universities. Like, I’m serious, man. That guy was…he was a whole different form of life. So, he’s terrifying. Jung is the person who will convince you that there are things going on in your head that have nothing to do with you. And that is not a very… That isn’t one of those things that’s designed to make you sleep easily at night. So, Rogers, I learned a lot from Carl Rogers. Like all the great clinicians, they really have something to say and practical to say that will help you live your life. George Orwell, Elvis Huxley… Well, that’s not a bad start. But if it’s part of the canon, especially the literary canon, you can assume that there’s something to it. And you can also assume that if you read it and you don’t get it, it’s probably you. Okay, so that’s…what does forgiving yourself look like? That’s a good one, but I’m not going to answer it. What’s the best strategy to help people? Get your act together. Lead by example. And then if somebody comes and asks you for your opinion, tell them the truth. That’s one thing I can tell you. Never lie to someone who’s in psychological trouble. You’ll just make it worse. Especially if they’re kind of on the schizophrenic ends of things. Do not lie to them. Because they’re barely clinging to the reality as it is. And if you…you know, they’re already poorly structured in some sense. You drop a little bit more nonsense into that. You know, it’s hard to tell the truth. It’s tricky. Because you have to be telling the truth sort of at all levels at the same time. So it has to be…the word has to be right, the phrase has to be right, the sentence has to be right, the paragraph has to be right, the dialogue between the two of you has to be right, you have to be oriented in the right direction. Like all of those things have to be happening at the same time for it to be true. Because otherwise you could say it’s something true that’s destructive. Just so that you, you know, fulfill the demands of the darkest part of your being. And then you could say, well, it was true. It’s like, no, it wasn’t. It was true at one tiny level of analysis. And what you’re doing is using sophistry to demonstrate your moral superiority when actually you’re acting in a Mephistophys…bad manner. So listening is really useful too. That’s really useful. So you mentioned that part of us wants to make things worse. What exactly do you mean? Is there anybody here in this room who’s actually never wanted to hurt someone? Look deeper. Look deeper. How about yourself? It’s okay. You don’t have to answer. You don’t have to answer. I mean, the reason that there are… People want to make things worse fundamentally is because they get irritated at the structure of being. You know, they get tortured by being. Because life is suffering and then they get resentful and angry and then they want to take it out on someone. You know, and you really see that. You know, the US has an epidemic of mass shootings, right? And it’s not so often that we don’t even report that. It’s like two times a week. But who’s doing that? Well, resentful people who want to make things worse. And they’re people. They’re like you. You know, not exactly like you, but they’re quite a bit like you. And so if you can’t imagine what they’re doing and why, then… Well, one thing I would say is you don’t know very much about yourself. And you’re actually not watching very carefully. Because, I mean, I think I might have a darker side than most people. I’d be inclined to believe that from time to time. Although I’m not sure if it’s true. But if you watch yourself, you can see how you want to hurt all the time. It happens, I bet it happens 50 times a week. You know? You want to win an argument with someone you love. That’s a good example. You don’t listen. You’re not trying to solve the problem. You just want to win the argument. Well, that’s not very helpful. It makes things worse. So, this isn’t my opinion. Although it is my opinion. I mean, one of the oldest stories… You know, there’s a few very old stories of mankind. And one of them is that there’s a battle between good and evil going on in the human soul. And that’s exactly right. It’s as right as people can make… It’s as right as people can state… You know, you might say, well, you know, how do you define good? How do you… Auschwitz. We don’t have to have that discussion anymore. I’d like to know a bit about your personal ideal. What are your long-term goals? What motivates you in your life? Well, my… What motivates me? That’s, I think, fairly straight. I mean, all sorts of motivations. But I mean major motivations. I like to figure out what the hell is going on and communicate it. I believe that I’ve done my best to actually pursue the truth. And it’s so useful. It’s so useful. And it’s so fun to communicate with people. Because one of the things I see, and this is really fun, is when I talk to an audience, it’s so cool. Because lights go on. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. That’s really fun. So I see that all the time. If I’m really communicating to an audience, because someone will go like that. And then they’ll nod. And you think, yes, right on. A bunch of connections just got stuck together. And the person got a little blast out of it. And that’s like turning on lights. You know? And so that’s fun. That’s fun. So that’s my long-term goal, man. Turn on lots of lights. Yeah. What motivates me in my life? I would really rather that things didn’t get as bad as they could. So that’s motivated me since like 1980, I don’t know how long, 1980 probably. Because it was in the height of the Cold War, you know? And things did not look good. And I was starting to read about the history of the 20th century. Oh my God. It’s so terrible. And I would just rather that didn’t happen. It seems unnecessary. So whatever I could do to make that even somewhat less likely to happen again, that’s fine. That’s fine. And I don’t question that. It’s like… Because it seems so wrong. You know, I remember this story about Auschwitz that really stuck with me. And there was this story about… You know, Auschwitz was a big city, basically. It was a huge place. One of the things the guards used to do was when the people were unloaded, you know, they were separating families. And anybody who didn’t look like they were going to be useful to do a bunch of useless work before they died would be just sent off to the gas chambers. And so that’s pretty imaginative, I would say. But that wasn’t bad enough, you know, because if you did survive, even after having lost everything like that, then there was always the opportunity to torture you with useless work. And so one of the tricks of the guards was to make people pick up a sack of salt that weighed 100 pounds and carry it from one side of the camp to the other, and then back. Brilliant. Brilliant. Evil is an aesthetic, and it has a sense of humor. I mean, the sign over Auschwitz read, work will make you free. That’s a joke, by the way. It’s like the mutual assured destruction. The geopolitical idea in the 1960s and 50s was mutual assured destruction. You launch an nuclear weapon, you’re done. You’re done. There’s nothing left. And the afternoon is mad. It’s like that’s a joke. It is. It’s a joke. But it’s not funny. And, you know, that’s a place where you see the archetype of evil emerge in the midst of the geopolitical debate. To emerge from the pit, so to speak, and utter a joke like that, and then to retreat. That is not… That’s a thing worth fighting. We should decide someone. When do we start? One more question. Okay. One more question. How do you compromise making it, i.e. becoming successful, while being true to yourself and not falling victim to the system? Great question. That’s an existential question, by the way. The reason I frame it that way is because it’s an eternal question. Like it isn’t… It’s the question that human beings have always had to face, no matter when and no matter where. Because the system is always corrupt. It’s always corrupt. That’s an archetype. It’s like the old dead evil king. And the reason it’s corrupt, there’s two reasons. One is it’s out of date. And, you know, because it’s lagging behind the present and the future. So it’s just designed for the wrong era. That’s part of it. And then the other part is people aren’t updating it because they’re willfully blind. And so the thing is tottered away. But… And so, you know, if you align with it too tightly, then you risk becoming a carbon copy of that. But by the same token. The thing is it’s one sign in some sense, and this is a really important thing to learn in university, is that culture is the tyrannical king, but it’s also the wise king at the same time. And, you know, you’re obviously oppressed by the University of Toronto, but, you know, here you are. And so you’re unbelievably privileged at the same time you’re being torn apart. And that’s exactly what it’s like to live within a culture. You know, you’re lucky if you’re… You’re lucky if all that’s happening is that you’re not being torn apart. You know, because it’s the typical tyrannical system. All it does is chew people up. It doesn’t do anything good for them. At least you can sit here in relative peace and say what you want when the lights are on and it’s warm. You know, so that’s actually pretty good. So the first thing you have to understand is that you need to be grateful to the system. It’s given you everything. Now, it’s taken away a lot too, but that’s just like, yeah, that’s the existential issue. It gives with one hand and takes away with the other. So the trick isn’t how to not become corrupt by identification with the system. It’s how to balance gratitude with awareness and the desire to make change. And that actually is being represented in religious thought in many ways. So with the ancient Egyptians, for example, they represented the system with the god Osiris, who was old and blind and likely to fall under evil influence, and a different god named Horus, who was the eye of Egypt, you know. And Horus’ job was to see evil because Osiris was blind to it and then to enter into combat with it, even though that’s very difficult and like Horus had one of his eyes torn out when he did that, and then to go bring Osiris back out of the dead, basically. Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’ve got an old dead cane, always, and your job is to pay attention to it, see where things are not right, and fix it. And if you do that, then you can align yourself with the positive element of the culture while you simultaneously act as the living corrected to its excesses. And you can do that. Here’s one way to do it. You can start a university. Well, one is don’t write things you don’t believe. I would also say, and this is partly why you’re supposed to challenge things at university, don’t act like you believe things you don’t believe. Because what’s going to happen is you’re not going to fight a battle with culture. You’re going to fight 100,000 micro-battles with culture. And you have to decide with each micro-battle what you’re going to do. And it’s really important, so I can give you an example. So let’s say you go to work, and there’s a bully there, because there will be. And the bully comes into your office, and you have 10 seconds to make it clear whether or not you’re going to be bullied. That’s only about 10 seconds, because he’s going to figure it out that fast. Well, so how are you going to not be bullied? You have to have transformed yourself into the sort of person that isn’t going to be bullied. And the bully will figure that out right away, and he’ll go find someone easier to pick on. And you win, and you’ll hardly even notice. So if you continue to fight against, if you continue to fight in a wake and careful way against things that weaken and oppress you, then you’ll become strong. And if you become strong, then you won’t be co-opted into the evil of the system. And a lot of that has to do with the Egyptians have this right. The Byzantinians had the same idea. Their god, their chaos, eliminating god, had eyes all the way around its head. Whereas the Egyptians just worshiped the eye. And that’s what we’re thinking about, because I don’t think you fight corruption with rationality and intelligence. There’s no correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness, by the way. So it’s not a moral faculty. It might be a discriminating faculty, but it’s not a moral faculty. And attention, that’s what we fight against corruption with. You watch. You pay attention. Because paying attention means I’m willing to see what’s happening. And if something happens that you find objectionable, and you know what to do about it, and you could do it, and you would do it, and that’s a battle you feel you should engage in, then engage in it right there and then. Because that will stop the system. It’s micro-challenges that stop the system from degenerating into corruption. And actually, that’s not a theory. We already know that. If you read the Gulag Archipelago, one of the things that Solzhenitsyn does is say, okay, how did the Soviet Union develop into something that ate its own children? That’s his question. And what he said was, people lied about everything all the time. So they would claim to be happy and satisfied when they were terrified and angry. And they were micro-decisions, you know. They were little things. Like, they’d lie not happily for three hours to get bread. Now, that’s not a great example, but I can’t conjure up a great example right at the moment. The bully example is not a bad one. And then I guess the other thing would be, it’s associated with the ideal. If your ideal is to make things better, then you put that above whatever else it is that you’re doing. And if you’re offered the opportunity to engage in something corrupt for a short-term material gain, or even to avoid conflict, you shouldn’t take it. You should say no. But you have to be ready to say no. And I don’t think you’ll be ready to say no unless you know what the consequences are of not saying no. The consequences are you’ll get weak, things will go downhill, it’ll get worse and worse, and then you’ll start, you’ll be increasingly motivated to start hurting people. So if you don’t want to go there, then when you’re offered the chance to go there a little bit, don’t go there. And you have to be terrified. Because the thing is, there’s going to be conflict, right? If you say no about something. First of all, if it’s a moral request, you’re exposing the corruption of the person who’s making the request, and they’re not going to be happy about that. And the second thing is you have to engage in some conflict. That’s not pleasant. So you’ve got to think, well, what’s going to fortify you enough to do that? And that’s easy. All you have to do is know where the hell you could end up. And if you really know that, if you really know it, you’ll think, oh yeah, man, I’m not going there. I’m not going there. And if it means we have to have a bit of an argument for an hour, no problem. No problem. And what you’ll find, it’s pretty cool, it’s what you’ll find is that people just don’t buy it. People just don’t buy that much about those sorts of things. They just don’t come and do that to you because it just doesn’t work. Don’t go find someone easier to corrupt. But you have to know the difference. You have to want to know. And then you can do it. I think you can do it because I think that the truth is more powerful than deception, and I think that good is more powerful than evil. And I really mean that. I think evil and deceit are weak. And so how could they withstand the truth? How would that even be possible? The truth is reality. How do you withstand reality? If you can’t withstand reality, it just rolls over you. And so people who are devoted towards malevolence and to use deception pathologize their relationship with being. You can’t be strong if you do that. It’s not possible. It’s like you’re driving a rickety car across a really bumpy landscape. So…