https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tJIxwJgSPn8
And one of the things that I pointed out earlier in my writing last year, which was so, it was so influential and a lot of my articles went viral right away was that race is not a barrier to my success. Like I live such a privileged life, stop telling me that I suffer from, you know, racial disadvantage or that other people have white privilege that’s helping them get ahead. Like I found that to be totally counterproductive and pathological. Like that whole narrative. Why did you regard it that way? Because I want to take ownership of my own life and there is no supernatural force of racism that’s keeping me down, right? Like I can write essays and publish my work in all these influential places and I get to talk to you here right now and I’m at a fairly young age and I’m doing all these important things. Race has impacted me, yes, but it’s not a systemic barrier. It’s not stopping me from succeeding in life, but that seems to be the narrative perpetuated by so many white people especially that there is this overarching force of racial victimization that’s at play. And so I stepped in. Yeah, well I think part of that too on the part of the white people, let’s say, is that they get to have, and this is something that really bothers me about the radical left, you get your privilege and you get to be morally superior because you’re standing up for the victim. So it’s like you get to be privileged and a victim at the same time. It’s like, hey, pick one, okay? Like maybe it’s just too much to be privileged and a victim at the same time. And that really, it’s not an effective psychological practice. It’s terribly socially divisive and it’s unbelievably hypocritical. Hi everyone. This is Rav Arora, independent journalist based in Vancouver, Canada, most frequently contributing to the New York Post and the Globe and Mail. And I am most known for writing about crime, policing, racial identity politics, and vaccine mandates. The following wide ranging conversation with Jordan Peterson and I centers on the absence or decline of spiritual experience in Western secular culture. We specifically talked about how ideological worship and political activism often unknowingly replaces real spiritual practices and contemplative traditions. Unbeknownst to me at the time of this recording several months ago, this whole conversation gradually inspired my new journalistic adventures in psychedelics, mystical experience, and new interesting mental health treatments. Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring the possibilities of human consciousness and inner healing, grounded in science and reason. And my new substack newsletter titled Noble Truths with Rav Arora documents my experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, mindfulness meditation, and talking to Sam Harris about learning how to live in the present moment and breaking down the mechanics of mental suffering. And my new essay published today, February 10th, documents my incredibly profound and transformational experience with MDMA therapy, in which I journeyed into the depths of my subconscious mind and gleaned new insights and lessons to apply to my daily life. And as I write in this essay on MDMA therapy, this whole process mirrors the hero’s journey in which the hero has a call to adventure. And then eventually, the hero, a part of him or herself dies and then a new transformed self emerges as Jordan Peterson has talked about before several times with respect to psychedelics in particular. So this whole conversation inspired my new work and inspired my new newsletter on substack dedicated to psychedelics and spiritual experience. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. And I hope it similarly sparks a call to adventure for inner transformation in your life. Way we go. Nice to see you. Yeah. Yeah. So you devote a whole chapter in the book about abandoning ideology and political dogmas. Now, you know, we as humans were primed for meta narratives, right? Like we have spiritual impulses that need to be satisfied. And so one of the struggles right now is that religion is on the decline, and it has been for a number of decades. And you refer to Nietzsche in the book about God being dead, and his observation about the rise of totalitarian ideologies coming with the decline in religion, and the various problems that come with that. And right now, particularly among young people and older people as well, we’re seeing politics replace religion, we’re seeing people now replace spiritual meta narratives with ideological meta narratives. So, so how do we how do we figure that out? How do we perhaps we’re seeing that, you know, that’s one hypothesis. And it’s one I favor. I did see polling data at one point, for example, from the Gallup Corporation, indicating that lapsed Catholics were something some multiple of times more likely to be separatists during the heyday of the Quebec separatist movement. And I lived in Quebec during that period, some of that period. And it did appear to me that nationalism was functioning as a replacement for for lapsed Catholicism. I mean, Quebec was an intensely Catholic country until the 1950s, late 1950s. So in some sense, they underwent their transformation to a secular society somewhat later than most other European nations, let’s say. And I thought that was reflected in the tremendous attractiveness of nationalism as a spiritual movement. And one of the things I learned from studying the psychoanalysts, both Freud and Jung in particular was that Jung, I suppose, had to do with separating ultimate moral authority from the figure of the father. So you might say that as you mature, it’s useful to replace your to realize that your particular father, your specific individual father isn’t omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He’s another person. And you have to realize that to some degree, to become a mature adult. And so you don’t want to confuse your father with the ultimate moral authority. And in the same sense, it’s psychologically dangerous to confuse political explanations and ideologies with religious and spiritual ideologies and movements. You don’t want the political to carry the weight of the spiritual. I don’t think. I think it’s dangerous. I also believe that ideologies essentially function as crippled religions. So they have the motive force of religious belief and the attractiveness of religious belief, which I think is actually a necessity for human beings because we’re religious by nature. But they don’t have the symbolic complexity that a religion has, a well-established religion with its mystical elements and its dogmatic elements. So now you say too that religious belief is on the decline. Certainly organized church attendance in some countries is radically declining. Christianity is growing at an unbelievable rate in China, for example. So it’s not necessarily a global phenomenon. And with regards to abandoning ideology, there’s danger in confusing your political beliefs and your religious beliefs, not noting that there’s a difference between them. One of the associated dangers there, I think, especially in totalitarian utopian systems, is the proclivity to raise the leader, whoever that might be, to the status of a demigod. That certainly happened in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China. Maybe will happen again in modern China. Who knows, as the Chinese premier centralizes his authority, which he appears to be doing. You know, you’re supposed to render unto Caesar’s that which is Caesar and render unto God that which is God. That’s the fundamental ethos that underlies the idea of separation of church and state. And I think it’s a good psychological truth as well. Right. So it’s almost like you can’t replace religion with politics. If you try, you’ll only get, let’s say, 60% of the way there. You’ll get the community, you’ll get the group discussions, you’ll get people who are like-minded, who want to make change, want to enact change, but you don’t get that spiritual fulfillment at all. Right. You just get the community part of it primarily. Right. Well, it doesn’t seem to me to be the right place to look for that spiritual fulfillment. Yeah. I also think in the chapter from Beyond Order, so this is the book that we’re discussing, Beyond Order, the problem with ideologies as far as I’m concerned is that they’re not useful as practical problem-solving guides. Most of the problems that beset us are very, very complex and they need to be decomposed in a sophisticated way into their constituent elements until they’re differentiated enough so that partial solutions for some of the problem can arise as a consequence of practical endeavors. And that requires the willingness to do that kind of detailed thinking and it requires the development of specialized expertise and ideology can blind you to your own stupidity and that’s actually dangerous. So we could take the case of poverty, for example, and I think we could all agree that poverty as such is undesirable. So that’s the starting point and the motivation. Then you might say, well, what is poverty? And you could conclude that it’s lack of money and from that you could conclude because there’s an unequal distribution of resources that if the rich would only loosen their grip on wealth, then there wouldn’t be poverty and then it’s not much of a leap from that to the rich are by definition causing poverty and morally culpable for it. And even though there is some truth to that some of the time in some situations, that doesn’t mean that it’s always true and it’s the only reason all the time. And then there’s an additional danger which is that you now have a solution and so you’re smart. You’re not the problem so that you’re moral. You have a convenient enemy so your dark unexamined motives have a valid target which you’ve already defined as immoral and that means that you’re more likely to give rein to violent impulses, let’s say that you should otherwise keep in control and that’s all very dangerous. It’s not sophisticated. It’s emotionally and motivationally dangerous. It interferes with proper problem solving. It confuses you as to the limits of your and depth of your own knowledge. You end up thinking you actually understand how the world works and you don’t understand it at all. You don’t even understand the problems. Think about poverty. Okay so what do you mean by poverty? Do you mean alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, physical illness, lack of education, lack of intelligence, lack of conscientiousness, antisocial behavior, relative poverty, absolute poverty. Do you mean a corrosive worldview? Do you mean lack of ability to plan for the future? Do you mean absolute privation of material goods? That’s all poverty and that’s just the beginning of a decomposition and all of those problems are markedly different and it isn’t obvious that there’s one solution that will address it’s not obvious at all. In fact it seems highly improbable that one solution is going to address all of them and then there’s the complex problem that you have a theory that identifies a problem and explains its existence and offers a solution and so now you’re going to assume that if you could only put that solution in place that you would do that competently and it would produce the result that’s intended. That’s wrong. It’s unlikely that you would do it competently because it’s very very difficult to solve a problem and even if you did it’s also unlikely that your intervention would produce only the positive result that you intend and nothing else. Well that’s a lot of problems. And then ideology I suppose it’s the it’s the enticement to pride that ideology also produces. Well now I have an explanation for how the economic system works. No you don’t. You don’t know the first thing about it. You’re like a monkey looking at a military helicopter. You don’t have a clue and you don’t even know it. Okay yeah so let me just contextualize this topic here. So among young people here in the West here in Canada certainly and in the United States members of Gen Z particularly there’s this growing sort of political culture right now where young people are out protesting the patriarchy, protesting against white supremacy and they’ve turned that into a religion. They’re fighting against this evil satanic force of sorts which is white supremacy or it’s toxic masculinity or it’s transphobia, Islamophobia. These are the things that they are fighting against primarily opposed to fighting sort of the the monster within. So there’s kind of like an external locus of control here right? It’s fighting against the external opposed to the internal. Well this is why and I outline this to some degree in Beyond Order and also in my first book. It’s a very interesting book. I think it’s called my first book Maps of Meaning. There are there are the world is characterized by ignorance and malevolence and danger always always always it’s an existential truth and then you might ask yourself well if that’s the case how might you know that? Well you can find malevolence and ignorance at the level of the individual and so we would say that’s the malevolence and ignorance that characterizes you and other individuals and it’s a it’s a viciously powerful and terrifying force and then there’s the malevolence and ignorance that characterizes social institutions. That’s the great father that the that’s the negative aspect of the great father in in my terminology and that’s derived to some degree from Jungian theory especially through a man named Eric Neumann who is a brilliant student of Jung. You’re always a victim of the evil tyrant and the reason for that is that human beings have a lengthy period of intense socialization and that fosters and develops your individuality in some ways but crushes and maims and distorts and destroys it in all sorts of other ways and so it’s a universal tendency to feel oppressed by the evil tyrant and it’s so powerful symbolically it’s such a powerful symbolic tendency that people don’t even notice that it’s a symbolic tendency so I’ve been taken to task for example for insisting that we use gendered metaphors to portray the two fundamental attributes of experienced reality chaos and order. Order is patriarchal that’s the symbol well people accept that at face value and don’t even notice that they’re trapped in a symbolic world. The very feminists who will criticize me for pointing out that femininity is associated with chaos symbolically accept the idea that masculinity is the proper representation for social order without question and are irritated beyond belief if you point out that things are not so simple they’re caught in a myth a religious myth and they don’t even realize it and so if you accept that the patriarchy is masculine well then what’s feminine? Well the opposite of patriarchy and order and that’s creative chaos and that’s not my theory that’s the Taoist theory of of being for example it’s the ancient Greek chaos and cosmos theory of being it’s an it’s it’s the uh ideational structure that underlies the first chapters of genesis where god makes order out of a patriarchal god makes order out of Tohu Vabohu which is the primordial chaos so now young people find themselves motivated to stand up against the evil tyrant and of course they should because it’s at that point when you’re differentiating yourself that you want to take a look at the group that you’re going to pledge allegiance to and note its its its shortcomings but you don’t want to be blind while doing that and fail to notice that well the social world is full of pathology and danger malevolence and ignorance let’s say but the natural world which you will automatically tend to romanticize if you only believe the patriarchy is evil the natural world is doing everything it can to kill you every second and the only reason you’re not dead is because the evil tyrant has a benevolent aspect that protects you in ways that are so deep and profound that you don’t begin to understand them i mean you are shielded as am i by a nuclear umbrella for example none of which you have to attend to and then the other loss of course is that yes there’s evil in the patriarchy that’s always how things are and sometimes it’s much worse than other times not right now by the way not by historical standards but it also blinds you to the fact that you’re culpable too deeply you have more ignorance and malevolence in your soul than you’ll ever get into on top of in your entire life and that should be part that should the knowledge of that stops you from being carelessly judgmental carelessly you should be judgmental you have to differentiate and discriminate between things but you shouldn’t do it carelessly and you certainly shouldn’t assume that all the fault lies outside which is the point that you made and so ideology is extremely dangerous if it convinces young people that the moral stance is that all malevolence and ignorance lies outside of them right yeah what do you think is motivating this kind of hallucinatory interpretation of our society being uniquely racist sexist homophobic like there’s this kind of self-delusion going on here where well some of its ignorance right and i and i mentioned this in one of my colette essays about our our society being one of the most free liberal open-minded inclusive societies that has ever existed right it is the most the most for ethnic minority sexual minorities transgender folks all of that but yet there’s this narrative that that you know me as a as a brown person as an immigrant from india like somehow i’m more of a victim than you are that i live under this on average you might be somewhat because it’s probably harder to be a minority in any culture than it is to be the majority but it isn’t accounting for it isn’t the fundamental determinant of the outcome of your life it’s one element and it’s it’s an important element it’s it’s not good for anyone if prejudice doesn’t allow us to use all available human capital right even from a purely selfish perspective yeah it’s foolish so and why do we think that a lot of its ignorance is you know people don’t know for example that the up until 1880 95 of the western world lived below today’s un established poverty line yeah we have no idea how much dramatic improvement has been made in the last 150 years and how absolutely god-awful things were before that it’s and we don’t know that because we’ve never been hungry for example not for one day right okay so now that we’ve laid out that yes we are living in the most free open-minded inclusive societies on earth then what’s driving this this well ignorance is part of it right we just don’t know and you look around and you see well things could be better so they’re bad it’s like true things could be better and that is bad well bad compared to what well certainly bad compared to a hypothetical ideal but not bad compared to all extant historical comparisons so right but you need but that requires differentiated knowledge and once you have the ideology you don’t need the differentiated knowledge because you already have the explanation plus it’s convenient you don’t have to look at yourself and you have an enemy and that’s the part that scares me the most you see i mean you don’t have to look at yourself yeah that’s a bad but now you have an enemy and that enemy is the cause of everything you hate and now you have all moral justification to go after them to hurt them to stop them because they’re evil and to elevate yourself morally as a consequence so you have this unearned pathway to moral superiority that’s actually dependent on your willingness to unfairly persecute based on your ignorance it’s terrible and universities promote this while you should be an activist that’s essentially what every 19 year old is taught yeah it’s like no you shouldn’t be an activist you should you should get your own house in order and then you should cautiously proceed to more difficult things if you dare right yeah and you can be an activist when injustice happens which it does just the problem that i’m finding right now among young people is the complete fabrication or at least and a total exaggeration of injustice happening like yes something bad happens yes if there is an act of racism or sexism let’s fight it but this whole idea of our society being governed by these these supernatural kind of forces of white supremacy and patriarchy it’s it’s almost like i’m listening to these people i’m talking to to young people no they are supernatural forces in some sense yeah i mean symbolically speaking yeah white supremacy is satanic yeah and and the patriarchy is the evil king and it’s got a satanic element too and that’s the look that’s the transcendental symbolic locale of malevolence and evil and those things are have to be contended with but you have to do that in a sophisticated way or it’s better if you do it in a sophisticated way you know there’s there’s other technical issues at you know here as well that we have to attend to um we’re so connected that any instance of racial injustice is immediately broadcast across our experiential landscape and so if you ask people the social psychologists have established this if you ask individuals how much prejudice has interfered with their movement forward they generally claim that they they’ve been relatively unscathed they’ve emerged relatively unscathed but if you ask them to what degree their group has suffered or is still facing impediments they rate the group victimization as much higher than their own personal victimization well you hear about all the group victimization plus now you add to that the fact that we have a bias towards negative information we find it more informative in some sense and that’s perhaps because we should be alert to areas of danger you don’t see headlines of racial about peaceful non-eventful racial harmony which is what exists almost all the time it’s not news that you know i can walk by you your skin is slightly differently coloured than mine and we can walk by each other on the street without hacking each other to death with machetes that’s not news thank god but how do you make peaceful you know infinite instances of peaceful coexistence newsworthy yeah you can’t you can’t you can do it with historical comparison yeah so so that’s a big problem and some of this is probably a positive feedback loop gone astray we paid more attention to issues of racial prejudice and perhaps that was good in many ways but because we’re doing that more attention is being paid attention to it and it becomes more and more salient and you can see that that can ease especially given all the new communication technologies and the rate at which outrageous occurrences can be distributed and our intense difficulty at separating at establishing base rate it’s like well who knows how many racial incidents of hate there are per day in a given city is that going up or down well we as individuals we don’t know that the historical answer is it’s obviously going down way down really fast sure yeah and one indication in my view of just how rare and marginalized racial prejudice is right now is when people are fabricating claims about racial prejudice or exaggerating them significantly so there was a recent shooting in atlanta that happened which is horrible the atlanta shooter he went to three different massage parlors and he killed a number of people and out of the eight deceased victims six were asian women and and if you look at all of the available evidence right now and if you uh if you read what the actual shooter said about his motivation he said that it was due to his sexual addiction and he was addicted he was addicted to pornography and he also seemed to be kind of a religious fundamentalist type of person who who felt guilty and he felt and he felt very ashamed about his his sex addiction and he would go to these massage parlors to get these other illegal sexual uh services there and he felt he felt bad about doing it every time but he kept on doing it and so there was this circular kind of battle that he was facing and so then one day he thought this temptation is bad i know it’s bad but i can’t i can’t stop myself from doing it so why don’t i go and just physically murder these people so well that’s a really good idea of demonization exactly what i was talking about before it’s like right his problem was within there’s a societal element to that um perhaps the the uh transformation of our society so that pornography is so rapidly accessible but we can leave that aside for the time being yeah he had an internal moral struggle and instead of dealing with that at the individual level he demonized the handy enemy those women who are tempting me in a satanic manner um essentially right opposed to my own uncontrolled sexual impulses that i need to get in order right yes right right precisely but so the point that i wanted to make here was about the media response okay so we just discussed basically in a nutshell what the current uh motivation seems to be here but the new york times usa today cnn the guardian all these big outlets they all jumped on racism in their headlines you know a racist shooting uh america’s story of sexualized racism and so this other now some of it’s a some of it’s a baseline problem right you said six out of the eight were asian okay well six out of eight of the normal population the general population aren’t asian and so it looks like a preponderance of asians but then you have to take the local environment into account while most of the sex workers in that area were asian so then the question is well did it deviate from baseline but that requires sophisticated thinking to ask that question and willingness to dig in and the newspapers you know they’re they’re becoming uh in some sense desperate yeah they’re not doing well they they don’t have the resources they once had and they’re very likely to jump on something salient and salacious and and and then of course also the most effectively salacious uh article tends to rise to the top so that’s another feedback loop that that we are caught in and and don’t know how to regulate right yeah and obviously you know six out of eight victims being asian women you know people make this mistake all the time of confusing disparities with discrimination just because well they make that mistake because sometimes disparities are a consequence of discrimination right and sometimes yeah some well and and often enough so that it’s a reasonable hypothesis right yeah but often i mean look um it’s definitely the case that in the united states in particular native-born black americans are underrepresented in positions of authority power and economic dominance right okay and so you might say well that’s a consequence of systemic racism and there’s no doubt an element of systemic racism the question is how much of the outcome is that accounting for okay so and and you might say well we could use that as the default hypothesis given the history of slavery and it’s which which is clearly unacceptable in every possible way morally although pretty much par for the course for most human societies throughout history right and and jim crow and other discriminatory yes exactly policies afterwards right so you say well systemic racism and fair enough that’s a reasonable hypothesis well except that there’s a disproportionate number of other minorities who are overrepresented in in pinnacle positions and in fact that’s that is happening compared to the cocaine you know the native-born caucasian group indian americans for example their family income now is almost twice that of the typical median caucasian family twice and the top six or seven are all southeast asian so then you say well if it’s systemic racism what about you know maybe you could write off the indians and the muslims um because they’re more or less caucasian and and i don’t mean that positively or negatively um but then the the the chinese the japanese the koreans they’re more visually different than caucasians but they’re doing just fine too and and then if you assume systemic racism it also blinds you to all sorts of other factors as we already discussed that might be contributing so i know for example and i looked into this 20 years ago that it looks like it’s the familial structure and ethos of southeast asian first generation immigrant families that are producing overperformance in their children that disappears by the third generation as assimilation completes itself so among southeast asians the emphasis on conscientiousness essentially perhaps with an additional um what would you call it positive aspect of higher higher likelihood of intact family two-parent family there’s this emphasis on conscientiousness and conscientiousness is essentially hard work southeast asian students that’s children of first generation southeast asian immigrants do homework spend many more hours on homework well conscientious striving actually does predict success and the data that i reviewed this was two decades ago indicated that the typical southeast asian child gains a competitive advantage from the conditions of their upbringing that’s equivalent to 15 iq points yeah and that’s a huge difference it’s the difference between someone who’s normal and someone who’s borderline impaired mentally handicapped it’s the difference between the typical high school student and the typical college student it’s a walloping difference well now if you if it’s if you’re blinded by the fact of racism to everything else because racism exists then you’re not going to be able to decompose the problem and say well look those southeast asians they’re outperforming southeast asians who are third generation in the u.s also caucasians why well it looks like there’s familial structure issues and an emphasis on work well you don’t want to miss that man it’s actually important yeah and also the attitudes on life like in my colette essay the peculiar racist patriarchy i looked into different attitudes towards life towards education and one interesting finding that i came across was that if you look at various polls asians and asian americans are most likely to believe in the idea of self-made success they’re most likely to believe that if you work hard you can you can achieve what you want in your life compared to right a white supremacist racist trope that’s now uh what what would you say under attack well it’s it’s a form of microaggression that’s that’s frowned upon whose utterance is frowned upon in many universities formally you can’t say that that hard work puts you ahead it’s like it’s it’s a microaggression and you can see why look here’s the reason it’s like yeah well there are lots of people who are poor who are poor and dispossessed despite the fact that they’ve worked hard right they’re they’re ill let’s say or they’re they’re impaired in their intelligence or they haven’t managed an education or there’s all sorts of reasons that that hard work isn’t going to work but that doesn’t even bad luck even bad luck of course tragedies that happen in your life yeah yeah you get hit by a bus because you’re standing in the wrong place that that’s why you need enough sophistication to look at a multifactorial explanation right and even you know you can control for economic status and still find some of these racial disparities so low-income asian americans have higher upward mobility compared to low-income black americans and white americans and hispanic americans so and it’s probably native-born black americans because nigerians seem to do pretty well and yes generally speaking black immigrants to the united states outperform just as just as let’s say people from the indian subcontinent outperform native-born caucasians in the u.s the yeah immigrant black population outperforms the native-born black population in the u.s by a substantial margin yeah even if you look in the in the same city so thomas soul has done some great research on this in the city of boston you have the native-born black americans and you have the immigrant black american group and the the immigrant black american group their performance is much higher their education rates their high school completion their earnings they’re much higher but so in that same city right whatever force of systemic racism that exists it’s constant right because you can’t distinguish between somebody from nigeria versus somebody who’s black who’s well you might think that it’s actually worse for the immigrants because they have an accent and and you know there are other marks there are other features that mark them out as strange different right they’re unaccultured to the various norms in society lower rates of english speaking proficiency all those things matter but there seems to be this kind of disinclination towards behavioral explanations for success there only seems to be sort of external prejudice based explanation so so well part of it is that people are loathed to blame the dispossessed yeah and fair enough but but fair enough it it’s it’s it’s reasonable to check yourself against doing that because you can pass the homeless person on the street and say if you weren’t so goddamn useless you’d get a job it’s like well you know um maybe but maybe not and there but for the grace of god go i which is something always useful to keep in mind but the problem with not assuming that individual planning and diligent effort and moral evaluation and ambition matter is that you take away the very tools you deny the validity of the very tools that could be most effectively used by most individuals who are dispossessed and that’s a terrible thing to do i mean the reason i emphasize individual responsibility there’s two reasons one is well you can start right now right where you are no matter what you’re doing so you have that at hand second if you become more responsible you probably won’t hurt anyone by doing it right it removes the convenience of the enemy and that’s given how terrible it is for us to generate say class-based explanations of enmity or racial-based explanations of enmity that’s something we really have to step carefully around i mean the worst crimes the human race has ever committed have been generated by class-based hypotheses of malevolence class or ethnicity based hypotheses of malevolence it’s terrible and and we need to avoid that and i don’t see that adopting more individual responsibility even though it’s not a cure-all it doesn’t that’s one danger it doesn’t pose in my estimation right yeah and just to go back for a second to the the white supremacy discussion and the different racial groups you know that whole narrative seems to be on life support right now the idea of white supremacy being the governing force of western society whether it’s the u.s or canada so so one thing that i mentioned in the colette essay the the main finding that i was exploring there was the fact that last year for the first time in history asian women had higher earnings than than white men did for earnings in 2020 and this was where where was that in the u.s in the u.s and this was controlling for full-time working asian women so that was the variable full-time full-time yeah but that’s a staggering finding and the difference was very it was marginal but still for you know there are various gender differences at play here but that finding is is completely uh it shatters the whole narrative of race and gender for that matter and the whole intersectional claim of race plus gender you know giving but certainly complicates it very giving you various disadvantages and and so i looked into this i said i you know i went on this about two months i looked into the data and i and i wanted to answer that question of why why are asian women making more than white men what what are the explanations and and a few of the things that i found was that asian women are least likely to have kids out of wedlock compared to women of other racial groups um they have uh less kids on average compared to other groups um and they tend to have kids later so the median age for having kids is about five to ten years later compared to white women black women hispanic women um and they tend to have more family support in raising their kids they tend to have more support from their parents grandparents and helping raise their kids another advantage to intact family structure another advantage now you know moral judgment is irrelevant here right you know i’m not saying that you know you should have less kids or you should have more kids but no but you can make a limited moral judgment you can say if you want to be hyper competitive in the male dominated capitalist environment here’s the sacrifices that are useful right it’s a bounded moral claim right because you don’t have to say well that’s how you should be who knows how long you should put off having children but if you want to compete economically that might be a strategy that doesn’t mean it’s in that doesn’t mean it’s an advisable strategy no no and that’s not the only way to be happy in life too right like it’s maybe not even the most effective way sure yeah if a woman doesn’t want to work so many hours and and have less kids and devote so much time towards education career right that’s that’s her choice right but these explanations these factors that i just laid out for you this explained so more having more stable families uh more financial security and more time devoted to pursuing a career these are the results of having kids later having less likely to have kids out of wedlock right these are some of the consequences of these decisions but these behavioral explanations just seem sort of taboo in a way because the implication there would be that if you make these decisions if you if you take responsibility you can actually achieve success it doesn’t matter if you’re asian or if you’re a woman and of course there is sexism of course there is anti-asian bigotry which seems to be on the rise by the way in canada and the u.s over the past year since covid started right all those things exist but they’re not a barrier to success right they don’t stop you from getting ahead in life but but the narrative seems to be that it is which just seems totally perverse and counterproductive to me well it is it it it has perverse and counterproductive effects there’s no doubt about that and those can get very badly out of hand any political movements that are motivated by resentment any actions that are motivated by resentment are to be viewed with extreme skepticism it’s it’s a very very very dangerous state of mind resentment right so yeah now going back to the earlier discussion we were having here about spirituality and young people so observing that young people are becoming sort of increasingly politically active they’re engaging in this protest culture this fight against these various forces that they’ve identified and it’s being incentivized by the university by mainstream media by hollywood celebrities you know people posting about racism all the time and so there’s this exaggerated sense of this problem existing so all of that being true you know how do young people get out of that position how do they find and this is a question that i really want to ask you here is how do young people find a value system to adhere to given that religion is on the decline given that religion doesn’t seem cool or just for whatever reason it’s not resonating right ideology is resonating not religion but how do we replace that with something spiritual that fulfills our inner innate desires to strive for you know god the infinite being the divine whatever name you want to use for that well we could take that apart i mean sure you might say well what might you replace an ideology with and i would say well a differentiated view of and strategy for life and so when i work with my clients i never start with high order problems to begin with like how do i orient myself spiritually so let’s just leave that aside for a second okay we’ll return to it so what do you need to get straight in your life well you need a job or a career career preferably perhaps the advantage to a job is that you do it for eight hours let’s say and you’re done right with a career you’re in it all the time now you’ll make more money you’ll advance up the economic hierarchy but you’re never done with work if you have a career and maybe that’s what you want but in any case you have to have a job or a career why well you you don’t want to starve you want to take care of yourself and the people that are dependent on you they’re practical obvious practical reasons but there are psychological reasons too i mean a job gives you something to do every day just as your career does and it’s it also addresses the deep human need to be of value and service to other people and so that needs to be attended to so if you’re a young person it’s like okay get have a plan you need a job and a career it would be good if it was something that you could be competent at so the smarter you are pure iq the more complex job you can manage and then if you add the development of discipline to that so that’s the development of conscientiousness that can further you so you need conscientiousness and intelligence to be competent and the more hardworking you are and the more intelligent the more complex the job you can manage so if you’re of average intelligence which you’ve probably figured out by the time you’re 18 or so it’s going to be very very difficult for you to be a high-end corporate lawyer unless you work insanely hard so your better bet is to pick up profession that isn’t so cognitively demanding that’s still useful and trades are great as far as i’m concerned there it’s not like trades people aren’t skilled and it’s not like intel it’s not like trades don’t require intelligence i am not saying that but um the it doesn’t require as much abstraction generally speaking like if you want to be a lawyer you have to be hyper literate and like 90th percentile literate fundamentally and you have to be able to formulate verbal arguments or you’re going to get crushed by someone who can do it okay so job and career you need a plan okay education you should be as educated as you are intelligent you should have a plan for that yeah okay and it should continue because things change quick and you better keep up okay so you should have a vision of that um people don’t seem to do well without an intimate relationship uh it’d be good if you could have a family and bring peace to the family that you have because family is important uh extraordinarily important those connections so intimate relationship and family whether that’s your parents your siblings or the family that you start you need a plan for that and a vision of that um you have to take care of your physical and mental health you have to regulate your drug and alcohol intake um you have to figure out how to make productive and meaningful use of the time that’s allotted to you outside of your obligations that’s extraordinarily useful and you have to address your philosophical or spiritual slash aesthetic yearnings such as they might be well so that’s better than an ideology a plan sure right now you know and as you climb up your career as you expand your competence and power well then you can get involved in larger scale transformations if that’s where your interest takes you and so with job and career you should be competent and interested in it that’s a good pathway to success all right so so that’s the right place to focus as far as i’m concerned if you’re a young person it’s like well have a plan have a plan right make a plan and and then educate yourself because you’re much more powerful and competent if you’re educated so so why not do it yeah but the thing is if you have a plan that that’s great and young people should have a plan and they should stick to it and they should they should have a vision for themselves of what they want to do and they should persevere towards that vision but the problem is finding meaning is like what oh look you worry about that afterwards look we outline domains of meaning sure look family is meaningful right career is meaningful you can mentor people helping other people develop that’s extremely meaningful like a lot of the high-end people that i’ve seen who are extraordinarily successful in the socioeconomic domain derive a tremendous amount of their meaning from fostering that development among young people and so so there’s micro meanings to be found in all of those domains now you still might be searching for something transcendent right whether you know it or not even like well something something different kind of something you need is like the analogy would be like a crush right when you’re striving towards your vision and things don’t go your way tragedy happens malevolence happens as you say and you’re suffering in your life you need some kind of base meta narrative something you know whether it’s prayer or meditation or you’re reading various types of scriptures something to give you meaning to give you hope faith and trust in something else and just let you know that that you’re not in this alone that you can get to where you want you need that kind of emotional spiritual crutch in your life and this is what i wanted to ask you about is that young people they seem to have that less and less so how do we find that spiritual crowd is the question well i wouldn’t say it’s a crutch i don’t i don’t think that’s that’s reasonable because any genuine spiritual practice places a tremendous moral burden on its practitioner so let’s say foundation a spiritual foundation is what i mean well and some people need that more than others like if you’re the sort of person who are and i would say that that’s likely associated with high trade openness that’s the creativity dimension and so if you find yourself yearning well how do you address that literature art that’s the domain and and then in that domain there’s the mystical religious domain and the philosophical domain well reading is your best way into that and you also describe the ritual practices and they can be very useful to people i mean my wife found repetitive prayer of aid when she was undergoing interminable repeated scans for the presence of cancer it’s like well what do you do in a situation like that well one thing you can do is turn to a ritual and you might say well that’s a crutch it’s like well no it’s a practice it’s a meditative practice that helps regulate your physiological reactions under extreme duress people who think that religious belief is a crutch um first of all they’re they’re they’re guilty of something i think is an unbelievable impediment to reasonable progress which is casual contempt like are you sure you know enough about that to be contemptuous of it religious belief has a history that’s tens of thousands of years old um the capacity for religious experience and perhaps even the need for it is coded in us biologically it’s it’s unbelievably complicated problem and solution you don’t want to casually dismiss it there’s you can read philosophers and great yeah great uh great writers and great religious thinkers and great psychoanalyst carl joseph campbell for example is a great entry place for anyone who wants to take religious thinking seriously right and so this is where i’m getting at here is so you’re saying spiritual experience is encoded in our genes and i agree with that whether you know even people who say they’re atheists or they don’t believe you know i think this is universal for everyone but for people who don’t have religion who just have ideology star wars right yeah you know the atheist materialist types the engineers skeptical and unlikely to personalize the world they get their mythology through science fiction and they don’t even notice it but people who don’t have that spiritual practice don’t have that religion who are watching star wars participating in protests against white supremacy how do they how do they find that spiritual experience how do they achieve that state that’s kind of the fundamental thing that i’m wrestling with as our society becomes more and more secular and saturated with technology and and political polarization all these other forces that seem to be distracting us from our inner it’s primal need for for spiritual experience i would say to some degree that’s the fundamental unanswered question of our age you know i’m reading this book right now is it the religion with no name it’s about the illucinian mysteries i should get that right the immortality key the secret history of the religion with no name okay so the greeks greek society was grounded in a spiritual experience and practice that centered on elusus i hope i have that pronounced properly the initiates were inducted into the aliceinian mysteries and this book is one of a long line of books a relatively long line of books really started in the 1960s suggesting that shamanic experiences which are tens of thousands of years old perhaps older and religious practices in more sophisticated societies that were profoundly influenced and affected by hallucinogenic substances it seems highly probable to me in fact i think the evidence is incontrovertible we have no idea what to do with that fact now the hallucinogens the psychedelic experience adds an experiential element to religious belief religious thinking but we don’t know what we don’t know what to make of that we don’t know what to make of the fact that apollonian greece this shining beacon of rationality was embedded inside a mystical psychedelic experience right right well and so our modern religions they’re they’re experientially dead in in a very unfortunate way and i mean that really mean that it’s unfortunate but even the materialism is it suffers from the same problem so so what do you mean by that that they’re they’re dead what do you mean exactly well if you go to a rave even if you don’t take any substances the music and the dance can produce an experience that lifts you outside of yourself yeah an intense aesthetic experience can do that and we have our our religious structures in the west are divorced from that to a to a to a degree that i think is is is untenable over the long term and we insist upon faith we insist upon a faith that the rational atheist types find contemptible and have very powerful arguments at their fingertips to to drive home dawkins and and sam harris and and and hitchens those people are formidable intellectually and and they they take apart at least from their perspective these preposterous supernatural claims and and leave everything in ashes on the ground what to do about that i don’t know i mean i would say that’s something i think about all the time i i mean i’ve been talking as well to people like bjorn lomborg and matt ridley who are these rational optimists who note that human material progress is progressing michael schermer would be in that camp as well human material well-being is progressing at a staggering rate and we’re going to solve a lot of the problems of absolute material deprivation in the next 30 years and that data is there and it’s available but it has almost no compelling nature it’s the same problem we discussed earlier that yeah there’s not a story there like when you take your idiot ideologue your 18 year old highly committed ideologue out of the crowd and you say look we’re going to incrementally improve our way out of absolute privation over the next 15 years so just calm down do something productive and wait and they say to hell with you what i’m doing is way more exciting which is true and so we we have a real problem we we don’t know how to marry either formalized religious belief let’s say or even utopian materialism in the enlightenment manner we don’t know how to marry that to the dianesian and that’s a big now the thing about an ideology is that that gives you the dianesian man you can go you know so you’re part of black lives matter you’re part of anti-fund so what do you do instead of being like 7-eleven clerk and relatively unattractive romantically by the way because of that particularly if you’re male you put on a mask and you take your club and you go out to fight evil and you know there’s fire and there’s noise and there’s the terrible tyrannical police and like you get to be a hero and that’s real now you can say well that heroism is misguided and i would say it is ultimately considered but it’s not obvious to me that the desire for adventure that possesses the 7-eleven clerk who’s dissatisfied with his you know comfortable satiety the call to adventure is real well it’s it’s it’s incumbent upon the culture to satisfy the call to adventure right well we don’t know how to do that we don’t know how to do that and so the the whole black lives matter thing or fighting against even you know climate change white supremacy the patriarchy that then becomes the spiritual mission then that becomes the goal that becomes the vision opposed to something truly spiritual and religious right but so so one thing that i wanted to question one thing i wanted to pose to you here was so so you’re saying that in western religious traditions so you’re saying that they are divided into two groups so you’re saying that they are divorced from spiritual experience is that what you’re saying yeah they’re divorced from practical mysticism you know you you can that’s more that’s more of an eastern type of thing right so like meditation contemplative practice that’s something that well there are contemplative practices in the west but very few people very few people they’re certainly not popular like yoga no and there is mystical tradition in the west and but um there’s the and the in the mass celebration for example which is eating the flesh of god essentially a very very very very old idea incredibly powerful idea to incorporate the divine there’s a spiritual transformation that’s attendant upon that but it’s it’s it isn’t delivering what it promises not and not in any self-evident manner and i think that’s probably because we’ve lost the technology that’s my guess strange as that is you know merchea eliad who’s a great historian of religion wrote about shamanism and and the typical shamanic experience which by the way is replicated experientially all over the world from the the deepest reaches of northern asia into the amazonian jungles the experience is very similar that the shaman report um remarkably similar but we have the same biology and uh eliad i believe that those the shamanic practitioners who relied on hallucinogens were practicing a debased form of the of the religious practice i think i have great respect for eliad i learned a lot that’s another person people can read is merchea eliad if you’re interested in spirituality he’s an absolute genius right um but i think he was wrong i think the shamanic tradition was clearly embedded in tens of thousands of years of powerful psychedelic use i think the data on that are are pretty pretty much clear right yeah and you know i’ve been to church many times before and i’ve been to temples and and so you know i come from an indian background and my parents were raised uh with hindu and seek religion in india and so i was raised with sikhism hinduism i never really resonated with it and i always sort of rebelled against organized religion and then then came high school and and sort of i was i was developing my identity and i had these larger questions about existence and about the world and to some extent religion did help with that and and i did go to church for this short period of time and and that was very interesting and i learned a lot of things even if i didn’t you know let’s say commit to being a christian it was still learning the lessons about about forgiveness about mercy about uh right right right well some spiritual practice might be better than none sure but but still but still going to church and and and i guess you know i don’t want to sound like i was fully immersed in that environment because i i certainly wasn’t i wasn’t practicing as a christian and and obviously people who are practicing christians they get something that i’ve never experienced right so i can’t speak to that but for my limited time going to church and also going to various uh seek and hindu temples as well uh primarily seek temples which are all over canada um going there i i still didn’t feel like i was having that spiritual experience that i wanted to have i still felt like there was something lacking and so i was very confused for a long period of time and i talked to bishop barron about that sort of thing recently i’m going to release that podcast relatively soon you know i think one of the problems that the modern christian church has and i’m speaking broadly and and out of my place here to some degree is that part of the reason that young people aren’t adhering to the religion is actually because it demands too little you know if you present and i’ve seen this with my own undergraduates the ones that i’ve taught because my course especially maps of meaning which was a primary course i taught for decades had a very large impact on the people that i was teaching and um and it it’s full of i religious ideas it’s a psychology of religion course essentially and it it was i mean what i what i strove to transmit to my students was a religious idea which is look you’re way more than you think for good and for evil and actually the easiest way to discover that is to take a look at the evil you can become convinced of your own evil and terrified of that in a way that’s easier than to become convinced of your own good in any case there’s more to you than meets the eye a lot more and you’re much more dangerous and promising than you think and what that means is that you have an ethical requirement to discipline yourself and turn yourself into something because the world depends on it and the churches they don’t say that and that’s what you have to say to young people it’s like get yourself together everything depends on you your decisions are important and you ask why people turn to ideology or maybe even to atheism or nihilism it’s like it’s no trivial matter to take yourself seriously yeah especially when you start to you know i tried to learn the lesson of the holocaust which is what yeah everyone who attempts to derive moral lessons from the holocaust insists is the right response what’s the moral lesson you’re a nazi you better get control of yourself right you could delight in the torture of other people it’s very frightening to realize that yeah yeah you know and the church of course the christian church has a very well developed model of evil it’s very sophisticated christianity is very sophisticated in its representation of evil unbelievably sophisticated and that’s extraordinarily useful and necessary and i think the church i don’t think the church demands enough of its young practitioners it doesn’t offer them enough and it doesn’t scare them enough right so so i wanted to finish my thought from earlier so what i was saying was that participating in organized religion sort of ironically didn’t seem enough to fulfill my spiritual impulses and i could be speaking you know maybe not sort of in a representative way maybe if i did fully immerse in the religious lifestyle maybe i could have achieved that state but for me it just seems sort of i don’t want to use superficial i don’t want to use pejorative terms here but but there was something more that i needed and and so then i sort of veered down this path of mindfulness meditation and contemplative practice which did then start to fulfill my spiritual impulses of you know meditating 10 to 20 minutes a day focusing on all the the flurry of thoughts that are appearing in consciousness and how we seem to identify with these thoughts and they completely you know you needed to practice yeah you know and that is something else that yeah the church the christian church could offer to young people it’s like okay you want to be a christian okay what do you do sure you know maybe you volunteer at a hospital right so you need practice it’s not just religious belief religious life isn’t just belief right it’s not it’s not a set of philosophical propositions it’s also a practice and you found some solace and some utility and a spiritual discipline and so do many people you know many people study yoga and so what’s the christian equivalent of that well well is there nothing there a question yeah well no there isn’t one that’s popularized and detailed and available to people to practice there are mystical prayer traditions yeah rosary and the catholic rosary is a form of meditative practice right right yeah so okay so we we’ve established that western traditions western religious traditions are divorced from spiritual experience right we agree on that well they’re divorced enough so that they don’t seem to be they’re not they’re not motivating in the same way for see you you said it yourself where we talked about this well let’s say you’re an ideologue and you’ve decided that the patriarchy needs to be smashed well what do you do well you go to protests well that that’s that’s that’s smoke and fire you know it’s dramatic well if you’re a christian a young christian yeah well what should you do well be good well it’s a little vague sure yeah yeah and reaching those high states those different states of consciousness where you’re aware of your inner primal impulses and how they can lead you astray that seems to be something that i’m finding in eastern spirituality in meditation being aware of my own flaws and how i sort of dupe myself with with all this negative thinking and identification with thought and you know becoming practically a slave to whatever internally or externally that i’m experiencing whether it’s an impulse to do something or it’s you know somebody says something bad or i don’t get the job i want and that just completely becomes my reality and i don’t recognize that that is separate from my own consciousness that i can take a step back and not let it define my experience right that is something profound that i’m finding within mindfulness meditation and i think you can do that with prayer and i think that’s okay purpose of prayer is that right well imagine that you want to engage in a practice that would orient you away from evil and towards the good so that’s your goal okay so you can ask yourself and this is i would say this is a form of communion with your hypothetical higher self and perhaps it’s through that that you find your relationship with god something like that speaking psychologically you ask yourself well what i’m what am i doing that’s corrupt and stupid that’s a prayer it’s not oh i wish i could find my wallet you know when you lose it you don’t pray to god to help you find your wallet i mean i’m making fun of it but yeah but you have to ask the right question well what’s the right question how am i stupid and weak in a way that i could change and then maybe you ask well if i don’t want to change but no i should well then you ask yourself well how is it that i could take a step forward to wanting to change and and so you can see even if you only speak psychologically you posit an ideal within yourself that you can commune with and then you ask that ideal to guide you well that will work that’ll work yeah now it may not be unerring or infallible but you’ll get better at it across time what that might mean is that god speaks more clearly to you across time right but again the the absence of spiritual experience within within christianity and other western traditions that seems to be an interesting place we’re at right now so we’ve established that so so are you saying that in some ways christianity and other western traditions aren’t fulfilling our fundamental innate spiritual impulses is that what you’re saying because you seem to be you know throughout why would people be leaving the church like we see these unbelievably impressive magnificent cathedrals emptying well with some there’s something wrong we’re doing something wrong like well something wrong something something wrong within the church or something wrong within society right the other political polarization the rise of technology other secular idea yeah both right well the church is us after all you know what i mean these medieval people spent vast fortunes and unbelievable effort making these incredible places of worship they’re so beautiful that it’s right beyond comprehension and what’s happening inside them is so insipid that no one will attend well that’s wrong look i learned something when i was a clinical psychologist about talking to my clients if it was boring it’s the same with podcasts if it’s boring you’re doing it wrong there’s a lie in it somewhere so you know we’re having a reasonably intense conversation this is going well we’re both engaged we’re doing it right now maybe we’re not doing it as well as it could be done but here we are and we’re in it yeah well if that experience isn’t being offered by the church yeah then the church is doing it wrong well what’s right well i don’t know well maybe i know a bit i did a lot of lectures on the bible yeah public lectures and they’ve been popular can i put my finger on why not easily i took them seriously i took them seriously i suppose now is that to say the church doesn’t yeah it is to say that the yeah the seriousness actually matters like i took the story of cain and abel seriously i studied it for years trying to figure out what the hell it meant the story of adam and eve the story of abraham and those things have to be made alive if you don’t make them alive then you’re doing it wrong and as soon as they come alive then they attract people right and so it seems like we’re touching on this disconnect this difference between religion and spirituality they’re not the same they can be the same but here we’re saying they’re not the same well they need to be melded that’s the dionysian and napolinian marriage that nicha spoke of but it’s also that it’s the place where dogma and spirit look spiritual experience without structure can make you insane it’s very very dangerous but dogmatic structure bereft of the mysticism and spiritual is dead it’s a corpse and and the proper balance is somewhere in the middle and we’ve known that as a species forever i mean the egyptians regarded the highest god and so he was the he was the the embodiment of the principle of sovereignty itself he was horus who was the eye the capacity to pay attention allied with osiris who was the patriarch so it was this living dynamism between lived experience dionysian experience even and you know intense emotional highly motivated and structure well that’s where that’s where valuable religious experience the most valuable religious experience occurs right it doesn’t tear you into bits you know right which is the problem with unbridled mysticism and say and the problem with psychedelics i mean when psychedelics were reintroduced to our society it caused a tornado a hurricane we had no idea what to do with them and so we made them illegal immediately it’s like wow we don’t know what to do with these things you know they’ve been reintroduced into our culture after an absence of several thousand years we have no idea how to deal with whatever they are and and we have no idea what they are sure yeah no idea and then yeah and i would argue just as a side note that the closest thing to psychedelic experience is in meditative practice primarily mindfulness meditation you know people have talked about this ancient yogis and sam harris talks about this as well about reaching states of consciousness in consistent discipline practice of meditation that is akin or almost identical to psychedelic experience which is very powerful and and that’s a different whole conversation but so so you’re saying the the spiritual absence within christianity that’s a problem that you’re identifying and that’s a big problem you’re saying right it’s a catastrophe it’s a catastrophe but the nica knew this 150 years ago right you know he said god is dead and we have killed him we’ll never find enough water to wash away all the blood mm-hmm so so modern christianity you’re saying is not centered on spirituality and that’s a problem just to be clear i’m not saying it’s not centered on it exactly i’m and i’m not i’m not criticizing it as if i’m the man with the answers or as an outsider it’s our problem as westerners let’s say that our central religious core is has been hollowed out and it’s it’s the fault of everyone that the church practitioners the religious authorities it’s their fault but it’s also the fault of those of us who are let’s say alienated from the church we we can’t we we we haven’t managed to the proper spiritual relationship with existence we haven’t managed that we and and that’s a terrible catastrophe interesting right it’s and it’s no and it’s it’s vitally important it’s vitally it’s it’s more important than anything else it’s it’s the most important thing right yeah it’s just interesting to see you make this observation which i completely agree with but you always seem to be a proponent of religion speaking good about religion doing lectures and debating sam harris about these things while he is identifying problems within religion yet you now well the problem with the materialist atheist is they don’t leave people with anything you know dawkins for example who i respect especially i just respect his intellect and his his verbal capacity but his conclusion is essentially well it’s a clockwork universe that’s meaningless right well you know people take that sort of thing seriously and it isn’t obvious what you do when you’re a serious nihilist and but it looks to me that if you’re a serious nihilist what you do is not good it’s not good to yourself but it’s also not that good to other people and so it’s and to think of all we’ve left behind the whole shamanic tradition and it’s ancient ancient ancient roots and the greek mysteries and christianity to leave that all behind and to say well that was nothing but primitive superstition it’s that’s that casual contempt that i was talking about it’s like those people weren’t stupid and what you don’t know about religious experience would fill many many many books right right so don’t just casually dismiss it and perhaps that’s that spiritual experience is is preserved within various eastern traditions like buddhism and hinduism again with the whole meditation well pieces of it are certainly and and right i mean there’s no shortage of westerners going to the amazonian jungle to reacquaint themselves with shamanic shamanic traditions and that’s actually how psychedelics were reintroduced into western culture it was gordon wasa and his crew who found magic mushrooms in mexico and that launched the entire psychedelic revolution we reestablished contact with our lost shamanic past we have no idea what the consequences of that will be and and no way of formulating it intellectually in a manner that’s comprehensible or or we don’t know what to do with it right so you so you’re always a proponent of judao christian values in our society of some kind of religious structure that we have right you’re always a proponent of that but right now you’re also identifying this fundamental disconnect this kind of pathology almost within we’re talking about christianity specifically is that fair to say yes okay yeah do you see that as a disconnect that you’re always sort of arguing in favor of religion when you’re debating sam harris but you still know identify this pathology that exists the the the father is always dying or dead and it’s always your job to revitalize him always you can’t leave the past behind we are the past you’re old us human beings we’ve been around a long time we can’t just leave the past behind so you go back and with some humility and you think well we’ll sift among the ashes and if we can find some treasure thank god we need it and i look look i i’m watching people like lombard and matt ridley and and i just spoke with uh marian toopy who runs human progress dot org he’s another incremental materialist optimist i say this with all respect i’m thrilled as everyone should be that 200 000 people are being lifted out of abject poverty every day but we see that happening at the same time we see this spiritual malaise grip the west to such a degree that we’re undermining our own presuppositions right and we seem actively involved in this process of destruction and i would say well that’s perhaps that’s partly because these axioms are being challenged by people who are angry for for valid and invalid reasons and we cannot mount a counter defense we’re too weak to defend ourselves well that’s not good especially because i do believe that the west got many many things right yeah yeah and i think the evidence for that is clear individual autonomy even the protesters when they go out and protest are acting out the proposition that the west got things right because they wouldn’t regard themselves as autonomous individual agents who have a political responsibility if they weren’t saturated in western thinking right yeah that is the great irony there and by the way have you ever tried mindfulness meditation have you gone down that eastern consciousness kind of road have you been there or have you not explored that in depth i would say yes and no i mean as a clinical practitioner i did mindfulness meditation all the time and i do that podcasts and interviews you do it during interviews okay yes because i watch right i watch and all i’m trying to do is watch and say what i think that’s it i don’t have a ulterior motive in mind except to pay as much attention as i possibly can to what’s happening and to respond in his untrammeled a manner as i can possibly manage right okay so you’ve thoroughly engaged with mindfulness meditation well i don’t sit by myself and in contemplation i do it in the way that i just described and try to fall into the conversation and that was very useful to me as a clinical practitioner and it’s been extremely useful i would say as a speaker and also as you know i’m doing all these podcast interviews and that sort of thing and when they go well they’re sure they’re there they go well and and that’s why it’s a tension like i learned from my studies of egypt of ancient egypt that the eye is sacred to pay attention not to think it’s different it’s a different thing right yeah and ultimately the the barrier between meditating sitting down and focusing on your thoughts versus living your life that barrier is artificial right the idea well the goal is the goal is to be mindful in your day-to-day practice exactly yeah yeah the barrier is artificial between sitting down and practicing versus living your life like you see people who meditate so much you know consistently yet if something irritates them they’re yelling right away and they’re screaming on the top of their lungs and they’re right well people ask me sometimes how i can maintain control of myself in provocative interviews for example where there’s lots at stake and the answer to that is what i just said is that i’m paying attention and i’m doing my best to say whatever is appropriate to that particular situation right and i i can do that better sometimes you know i get pee vision irritable and and when i’m off my feed let’s say yeah but when it works it really works right yeah i guess the thing that i was curious about here and maybe this is unanswerable to some extent but i was wondering if you’ve ever derived any spiritual experience from mindfulness meditation but maybe that’s something that’s uh in the future you might well i’ve had powerful religious experiences i would say as a consequence of of of attentional focus that’s like that i made this piece of art called the meaning of music which is my logo essentially and um it took me four months to make it i carved it out of foam core it’s about 80 inches thick about 20 layers thick and it’s about six by six and i was trying to understand the meaning of music it was an exploration and i had an intense religious experience while looking at it and and listening to motzart’s 41st symphony at the same time like i was completely transported it was it was it was uh it was my pupils dilated completely right yeah it was an overwhelming experience i mean that’s how that particular experience happened to me three times in my life wow okay and that was a consequence you’re saying of the mindfulness practice well i kind of opened my mind i thought i was looking at this thing that i had produced which was also a mandala it’s a three-dimensional mandala and some people who’ve studied young will know something about what that means mandala is a symbol of potential it’s a symbol of the higher self it’s a symbol of possibility it’s a symbol of structure i was meditating on this mandala which move because that’s how i designed it it it moves visually like music does and listening intently to music music is intrinsically meaningful and what happened was that that sense of intrinsic meaning magnified itself intensely and that was the basis of the experience right and it just it just knocked me over and it was a complete transformation of consciousness and i thought i was in a different state of mind i thought well i could be like this all the time and then i thought well i wouldn’t know how to conduct myself if that was the case and then it dissipated and but it gave me a glimpse of it gave me a glimpse of of something i certainly don’t understand but certainly see yeah maybe something into a psychedelic experience yeah that’s what i was going to say and i do want to dig deeper into this intersection of spirituality religion meditation art this kind of thing but i do want to move on to the more important stuff here so let’s talk about good luck let’s talk about uh victimhood here victim culture so so why do you think victimhood is so attractive right now in our culture why are so many young people and also older people well there’s two identifying as victims along along gender lines racial lines or just just in general too there seems to be this push against personal responsibility and there’s all these psychological and sociological factors at play here that are incentivized within the culture within the media within within hollywood and all these things so so that’s kind of this cultural pathology that i’ve identified here and i want to hear your thoughts on that well you should always start by giving the devil his due right okay okay so um one source of moral action is empathy clearly and we admire and even hold sacred the empathic capacities of a mother caring for an infant right it’s a primary religious symbol in many cultures certainly you see it in christianity with mary and and and christ but it’s not unique to christianity and any society that doesn’t hold the mother and infant as a sacred image is doomed obviously right because that means you don’t like mothers and children and so that is doom literally so okay so so we can say well practice empathy and you can see that that’s as if insofar as morality can be encapsulated in one statement that’s not bad but it can’t be encapsulated in one statement it’s too complicated we’re more there isn’t only one dimension of morality but that is an important one and so well you can’t be too empathetic yeah well yes you can degenerate into sentimentality and you can do too much for people and you can over mother them and so so it has its boundaries but they’re very difficult to identify right the opposite of empathy looks like predation right so yeah so somebody who’s in a car accident who’s going through a difficult time yes you want to care for them be empathetic but at a certain point they need that force of self-determination to take action and get better themselves from their well that’s the tension isn’t it and it’s the tension yeah it’s the tension that every parent faces it’s like well you have to take care of your infant but as the infant matures you retract the care yeah and let them because then and if you don’t the empathy the reflex of empathy that you would show towards an infant is is downright pathological if you’re dealing with a three-year-old and absolutely counterproductive if you’re dealing with a competent adult let’s say yeah somebody who’s rehabilitating from an injury or drug addiction right empathy is not limitless right there are constraints at play here and there is some virtue in personal responsibility obviously and letting go of empathy and let yes well that’s also why we even have two personality dimensions that are separate we have agreeableness which is basically the empathy dimension and we have conscientiousness which is basically the effortful striving dimension or something like that and they’re both sources of moral virtue right so okay so anyway victim victim culture why is it so attractive why are so many people identifying as well the first part of it is people don’t necessarily regard themselves as victims they tend the activist types they tend to regard themselves as spokespeople for the victims so and this right well right so they see an ethical an altruistic ethical motivation in that and regard it as admirable and to some degree it is subject to the constraints that we already discussed but those are important constraints so it’s just not good enough that’s the thing it’s it’s and and it has this market disadvantage and then you know there’s all the ways that it can be manipulated and shifted and twisted and and and and and used counter productively and that’s highly probable unless you have a saint doing it so but the first level of attraction is well it is a pathway to to moral behavior it is a valid pathway and if you don’t have a more valid pathway offered to you then you know compassion for the dispossessed is not a bad first pass approximation but it’s not good enough and so you know that’s maybe why you should go to university it’s like well you’ve got to figure out what’s better than mere reflexive empathy and you know there’s the unearned first of all what makes you think that you’re a spokesperson for the oppressed what makes you think that you have that right why should anyone take you seriously how do you know you’ve got the message right why do you think you have the solution at hand how do you know you’re not more dangerous than the problem itself how do you know that you’re dark and unexamined motivations aren’t blinding you etc etc etc well that’s the issue but you know as i said you give the devil his due and the empathic striving is a valid source of moral endeavor right yeah and when we can look specifically on the racial dimension and maybe this can elucidate some of the underlying cultural pathology that’s at play here so in my experience as a young person of color somebody who’s been uh tormented bullied for his skin color in elementary school all things which you know you know i went through a hell of a time in elementary school for for looking different and being mocked in so many different ways and i used to wear a turban on the top of my head as well you know being of Sikh background and so that was always a point of of being bullied and you know people saying you know Indian people are dirty and you know you’re brown and and you know sort of yeah well you’re going to get you’re going to get sorely tested if you’re different because if you look at act like everyone else you’re not a mystery but if you don’t then you are a mystery and how do children solve mysteries well that’s easy they poke at them and see what happens so that’s what happened to you it’s like you had a turban it’s like who’s this well let’s make fun of them and see what happens because if you want to find out who someone is one way of doing it is by making fun of them yeah you know and if they can take and i’m this is i’m not saying this is justifiable and i’m not saying anything at all about right but you know generally speaking the better you are at taking a joke the less you’ll get tormented all things considered and so it is a reasonable exploratory mechanism although it can go completely out of hand but it’s understandable yeah right so so i would say there is a sign of progress here the fact that that after elementary school i wasn’t really bullied for my skin color and eventually i did cut off my hair for various religious reasons i didn’t really resonate with yeah you know if you hadn’t been harassed for being a Sikh there’s pretty high probability that the kids who are prone to bullying would have picked something else about you and tortured you about that and it might not have been as horrible as your ethnic identity say but most kids are subject to a substantial amount of provocative bullying right yeah definitely yeah and just you know putting aside the religious part of it which is sort of another area of exploration just the skin color part of it let’s let’s look at that so you know in ninth grade i remember this one incident and the reason why i remember this right now is because i i mentioned this in my column from today in the new york post about um about cancel culture about victimhood about racial transgressions and all these things and i remember in grade nine uh being in this classroom where two white boys basically singled me out and they said you know you indian people are dirty and and just all sorts of things of using my racial identity as a point of targeting me for my various social eccentric behaviors my various you know problems and flaws that i had using race as like okay yeah the dirty element that’s really telling because the dirty one of the things that regulates our intergroup behavior is um disgust sensitivity not fear and this is something everyone should know we aren’t really afraid of strangers however we are easily disgusted by them and that’s worse because you destroy disgusting things it’s discussed not fear it’s a major political discovery that’s only been made in the last 30 years so the dirty element that’s really crucial and also it’s a terrible thing to be um accused of right you’re a contaminating agent yeah exactly yeah that’s a good way to put it yeah right and then i remember with that yeah and i remember being totally paralyzed in that situation it was ninth grade all of the other white peers and classmates they were sort of paralyzed too they didn’t want to speak up for me um and so i left the room crying probably didn’t know how yeah and it was ninth grade too so it was embarrassing to be crying in ninth grade oh absolutely you’re a teenager right um but but so the point of saying that was that yes racism exists we should acknowledge that and racism has impacted my life at the margins i would say in various individual incidents and obviously you know you know i know of people who were bullied far more people who are white for being fat for for just being socially awkward various other sort of things that can be used as targets for bullying yeah about 75 percent of children have one observable physiological abnormality that can be used as the focal point for bullies exactly yeah but so the point that i want to make here is that yes racism exists and it has impacted me at the margins but but so this is sort of how i how i came to uh be sort of where i am right now so last year i started writing about white privilege intersectionality the ideas of systemic racism and i you know i noticed this pathology of like okay i’m a person of color yes i’ve experienced racism but i don’t identify as a victim but it’s incentivized for me to be a victim for me to be protesting against white supremacy of being this victim of systemic racism it gives you an easy as we discussed an easy pathway to moral unearned moral superiority which is really attractive because earned moral superiority is unbelievably difficult right i mean right there’s nothing more difficult than this the attempt to be a good person that’s hard and so if you can just be a good person because you believe you know the right three things well how convenient is that and that’s another reason for when people do take on the role of victim you know plus they can wield a club righteously and that’s i mean that’s an extraordinarily attractive option right right and and one of the things that i pointed out earlier in my writing last year which was so it was so influential and a lot of my articles went viral right away was that race is not a barrier to my success like i live such a privileged life stop telling me that i suffer from you know racial disadvantage or that other people have white privilege that’s helping them get ahead like i found that to be totally counterproductive and pathological like that whole narrative why why was it why did you regard it that way because i want to take ownership of my own life and there is no supernatural force of racism that’s keeping me down right like i can write essays and publish my work in all these influential places and i gotta talk to you here right now and i’m at a fairly young age and i’m doing all these important things race has impacted me yes but it’s not a systemic barrier it’s not stopping me from succeeding in life but that seems to be the narrative perpetuated by so many white people especially that there is this overarching force of of of racial victimization that’s at play and so i stepped in yeah well i think part of that too on on the part of the of the white people let’s say is that they get to have and this is something that really bothers me about the radical left you get your privilege and you get to be more morally superior because you’re standing up for the victim so it’s like you get to be privileged and a victim at the same time it’s like hey pick one okay like maybe it’s just too much to be privileged and a victim at the same time and that really um i’ve that i it’s it’s not a an effective psychological practice it’s terribly socially divisive and it’s unbelievably hypocritical you know anybody who comes to stands up and says well you know i’m a professor the system that produced me yeah was so racist that it’s or was so prejudiced that it’s racist it’s like okay you just admitted you have no moral claim to your position resign yeah now right right otherwise otherwise i wouldn’t say shut up because no right people need to talk and they need to express their opinions but if you’re if your statement is that the system that produced you say as a professor is so systemically prejudiced that it it’s racist you don’t have a valid claim you’re actually an incompetent fraud you’ve just said that yeah yeah who who’s being paid far beyond your competence for reasons that have nothing to do with your ability the only truly ethical thing to do if that’s true is to stop doing what you’re doing and go find a job that you’re actually qualified to do yeah yeah and i’m glad i’m glad you brought this up here because one of my earliest critics was the editor of my local newspaper here for the chill black progress his name is paul henderson and initially he was critiquing my work and a very progressive guy and you know that’s fine but he disagreed with me rejecting the traditional narratives of of white privilege and systemic racism and and that was great that he was critiquing my work but then then you know he was targeting me for being associated with alt-right that my articles rejecting these racial grievance narratives are are alt-right which is just a euphemism for white supremacy right and and then one of the things that so so so he wrote this column i remember last summer where it was titled something like dear white people dearest or dear straight white males in our city and so many people read this and i remember reading this vividly and one of the arguments that he made was that throughout history and even today straight white males have the dominant power in our society so and he’s a straight white male and so he’s saying it’s time for us to listen to people of color it’s time for us to step down and let them achieve some success in our society and the irony was that he’s a straight white male saying that and either you know like you said resign for your unearned position or you know even you know listening to people of color i remember this explicitly in the column listen to people of color listen to their struggles and this whole stereotype of people of color being you know victims it’s like i’m a person of color does my perspective matter and the answer is no right it’s it’s the individual you know activists it’s the the people who align themselves with left-wing ideologies that align with uh well you know your your status as a minority immigrant to canada yeah means that you have some things to say to someone like me let’s say that right that i might benefit by hearing but to think of that as something that’s going to constitute an insuperable barrier between us that’s right and and and to think about that as fundamentally what you have to bring to the table that’s unbelievably demeaning right i’m not talking to you because you’re young or because you’re a racial minority yeah i mean but i’m listening to you about your experience of those things right but that certainly doesn’t it would be horrible it would be horrible if that’s what i how i conceived of you i mean the reason i’m talking to you well it’s because you ask that’s part of it but you know you’re a bright young character and you’ve managed some accomplishments and that’s kind of interesting to me and you have a developing voice you’re a competent writer you’re credible despite your youth let’s say and so and i wanted to hear what you had to say and what questions you wanted to formulate that’s why i’m talking to you and it would be really something the only reason i’m talking to you were for reasons that would make you easily replaceable by someone exactly your age and background it’s like who cares about you bring in the next young seek because they’re all the same anyways right right there’s this assumption with these racial narratives that you jordan peterson as a white man you have a fundamental advantage in our society because you are white compared to me i have a disadvantage because i’m because i’m of a certain skin color here right that’s that’s the yeah well i probably do have a bit of an edge there all things considered well i’m not sure about that well it might not be true it might not be true now it might not be true i’m you know i’ve certainly seen in my in academia if you’re a white male a young white male it’s like forget it and let forget it your your probability that you’re going to find a high-end academic job which is very difficult and unlikely to begin with it’s vanishingly small and it’s not impossible but but you have to be hyper hyper competent so there are places definitely places where maleness and and being caucasian are working against you it’s definitely the case in in academia it has been for 25 years maybe longer right yeah so yeah i just mean you know this idea of white privilege is that because i’m part of the majority culture right i’m never the stranger as long as i stay in my own culture and that that that deprives me of certain experiences but it’s easier obviously so we can we can leave some residual amount of explanation for success or being you know arbitrary racial prejudice that’s fine it’s probably i think it’s reasonable to argue about how much of it’s there and whether it’s flipped around entirely because it might have by now you know right yeah but and i certainly have seen in organizations law firms for example i worked with a lot of law firms and if they have a high-powered minority female oh they’ll bend themselves into knots to keep her and as they should because if she’s hyper competent like great hyper competent people are rare but but and i’ve worked with women asian women mostly who faced all sorts of obstacles within law firms you know angry men who were competing with them getting in their way in all sorts of ways so that still exists but that was more at the level of one-to-one competition the firm itself generally did absolutely everything they could to right allow the career to develop right yeah so it’s not universally advantageous to be a minority that’s one of my arguments so yes being a person of color in a majority white classroom yes i’ve experienced uh prejudice because of that but in other spaces being a minority is seen as a benefit right when applying for various jobs you know there’s so much data on this too in the united states of being um of being black and being no you definitely have an advantage if you’re a female and you’re applying for an academic position that’s clear and it’s been that way for a long time with sat scores there’s affirmative action in place if you’re black and you’re qualified and you have and you know you you meet the sort of minimum criteria you have a you have a much higher chance of being admitted to harvard yale big law firms big tech google you have a much higher likelihood of being um accepted or getting the job compared to a white person with equal standing with equal credentials right if you’re black or if you’re a minority you have much more likelihood of uh of getting well unless you’re asian and trying to get into harvard yeah asians yeah that’s where well that’s why i see this so interesting because i think a lot of this intersectional nonsense is going to be caucasians especially male caucasians they’re not in the argument they can’t solve the argument this is going to be settled amongst the minorities that’s how it looks to me right right yeah now so with victimhood we’ve talked about the cultural part of it and this is the crucial part is asking about your experiences here so so i’m going to segue into you now um how did you well so clearly you’re not 100 recovered right now as you’ve said i think you said 40 before five five percent yeah right now i’ve had a good week a much better week um i i was diagnosed with sleep apnea not only like three weeks ago i was waking up i’m i was stopping breathing 25 times an hour and so i have no idea what but since i have a machine now that that regulates my breathing and all right now i i’m praying that this is actually the problem but i felt much better since i’ve had this machine and and right and the data suggests that you continue to get better over about a 40 day period it’s only been about a week so you know maybe finally the finger has been put on at least part of it and so yeah and i like i’ve been in excruciating pain yeah unbelievably high levels of anxiety unbearable and then i also had a movement disorder which i wouldn’t wish on hitler himself for 10 minutes it was absolutely intolerable um right and i’ve been so and i just talked to my wife about all this this week i’m bitter i’m angry i’m resentful all of those things i shake my fist at god it’s like what’s the justice in this trying to scour my conscience to see what i’ve done wrong it’s and so that’s all victim that’s all victimhood but it’s not helpful i’m doing my best to drop that you know life is unfair to many many people and i think well this is a special kind of unfairness and it probably is but you know that’s not rare special unfairness is not rare the tolstoy said you know every happy family is happy the same way but every unhappy family is unhappy in their own unique way and i think unjust suffering is like that it’s it’s arbitrary and unfair none of the victim responses have been productive for me i’ve tried to fight them and off tried to fight them off so the temptation the attraction is always there you know because of what we face you know how can you your your parents die in an automobile accident you’re 13 like how can you avoid feeling like a victim you are a victim you are a victim well yes yes so then what what let so but then you think well i’m a victim and therefore my anger resentment is hostility is justified and really it’s it’s anger at god fundamentally resentment at its core is anger or the or at the conditions of being let’s say which for all intents and purposes is equivalent psychologically to god you shake your fist and say how can things be this way and fair enough like i understand that but it’s not helpful and it does me damage i can see that even though it’s very difficult to escape from it you know when i can barely stand up which is not an uncommon experience and i can’t even imagine how i’m going to get through the next hour much less the next day or the next weeks which i don’t even think about because it’s like an infinite landscape of pain that anger and resentment they spring to mind instantly but it’s not there’s nothing in it that’s helpful yeah okay so you just basically answered the question because we talked about this before this podcast which was how do you defeat the temptation for victimhood of developing that mindset so so you’re continually struggling with this internal psychological turmoil of like you said battling you know with god and dealing with this unfair just extraordinarily unfair and and painful situation that you’re in to put it mildly even um yeah i mean i’ve looked at my contribution to it at least insofar as i could i took benzodiazepines and that seems to have been ill-advised i’m very sensitive to benzodiazepine withdrawal i mean when i took them i was really sick i i was insomniac for a long time weeks three weeks i was freezing i couldn’t get enough clothes on i my blood pressure was so low i couldn’t stand up i was like terror in absolute terror i have no idea what happened um and then i went to the doctor and was prescribed this medication and i slept and i felt better and i i didn’t think much of it my life was very stressful at that point and that turned out to be a very bad decision but i yeah and but but but it turned out to be a bad decision i didn’t do it without cause i was genuinely ill in so severely i didn’t know if i’d be able to return to work or conduct any of my uphold any of my responsibilities so you know i’ve looked at that did why did you start oh yeah you were really sick well why didn’t why did you continue well your life was stressful and and you didn’t realize i wasn’t aware of how dangerous this could be for some people right so you you’ve been at this this extremity of battling with the victimhood mindset right because dealing with what you’re dealing with is infinitely worse than dealing with racism or or well maybe i mean racism can get pretty bad you know sure sure sure i mean sort of like my experiences like you know dealing dealing with racist people in society like like so that’s one aspect of it or other forms of suffering in your life of being broke of being you know all sorts of other things like you’ve been at the extreme state based on what you’re describing extreme enough for me like i and yeah anymore if it was any more extreme it would have killed me i i believe exactly yeah yes i couldn’t believe that i i couldn’t believe many days many many days in the last two years i truly believed that i would die before the end of the day wow that that was i just couldn’t see how i could possibly be that impaired and live it turns out you’re a lot tougher than you even want to be sometimes yeah you’re a lot more resilient you know i mean people were very very tough sometimes so how did this morally or anything like that i just mean you’re not that easy to kill so how did this unimaginably difficult period in your life how did it change your your perceptions of spirituality or your well two ways relationship with god religion how did that change because that’s something that’s really important because some people like i described earlier when they’re suffering a lot in their life when tragedy happens the attendees religion as a kind of crutch so people who don’t normally pray something bad happens then they go to religion searching for answers you know why am i suffering other people when they’re experiencing tremendous hardship they they lose their faith they’re like you know my right my mom died in a car accident where the fuck is god yeah no kidding why am i experiencing this so and even if he does exist why should i be his friend exactly yeah so so you can go sort of both ways either becoming more religious in some ways or becoming nihilistic cynical misanthropic about society so i’m curious where you what i learned was that yeah um even though i had i had already concluded intellectually that there was nothing good about nihilism and and bitterness and resentment that it was unbelievably dangerous and that it isn’t justified under any circumstances and then i entered these extreme circumstances and i thought well this justifies it it’s like i i can’t see how anybody could be in this situation and not shake their fist at god and and yeah and in outrage but i really really thought it through and talked to my wife about it and and all i could conclude was that that was wrong is that it didn’t justify it it’s there was nothing good in it there was nothing helpful in it all it was doing was hurting me it was interfering with whatever good i still might be able to do in the world um you know the last chapter of my new book is be grateful in spite of your suffering and and that was a chapter i you know worked on and and was doubtful about and returned to and was like thoroughly uh what i rate about and felt hypocritical about and and so on and so forth the full gamut of emotional responses but it’s the right thing to do to be grateful it’s it’s and i’m not claiming this for myself it’s it’s tightly allied with the kind of existential courage it’s a decision and you know undoubtedly there are people who’ve been pushed farther in the domain of pain than me burn victims people you know suffer unimaginable agony and i would never dare to compare my pain to someone else’s extraordinarily extraordinary pain it was certainly far worse than every day that i spent in the last two years was worse than any day i had before that by a huge margin yeah so for me it was well like i said if it had gone any more extreme i can’t imagine that i would have lived through it but the okay so the first conclusion was you still under those conditions you orient yourself upward and you try to do good in the world and you and you don’t if you fall prey to resentment and and anger and hostility however justified not even however rationalized but however justified even if an objective observer would say well no wonder you feel that way it’s not helpful so there is no good in it that’s what you see no good in it but then i wonder like like i i would agree with you i’m inclined to agree with that that there’s no good in that but but you know through you know there’s old cliched adage about going through hard times revealing certain silver linings and certain benefits that you may not see in the moment so are you open to that possibility of in the future some realization there has been i guess that that this thing we already discussed i would say is of benefit whether that benefit justifies what i went through i would say so would i repeat what i went through and still going through for that matter i mean i’ve only been feeling somewhat better for five six days right i wouldn’t repeat it to learn that and i think maybe you’re still learning something maybe there’s still something that’s to come some realization i mean i’m not well i’m not saying that’s the case i know you i know you’re not well god only knows right i mean right god it wasn’t until this last week that i really thought that through and realized that however extreme my pain which was diffuse um yeah um it didn’t justify resentment it didn’t justify ingratitude it it didn’t certainly didn’t make those things work but then the other thing that i did realize was and people have commented on that being a difference between this book and the first book the second book is more communitarian there’s less humor in it because i just wasn’t up to humor you know but there’s more emphasis on cooperation and and and the social role in ethical behavior and i think that’s partly a consequence of me observing how far above the call of duty my friends and my family went while they were caring for me and not only my friends and my family but medical personnel and the general public who’ve been my well the general public my viewers readers and listeners let’s say have been unbelievably loyal and supportive and so i’ve seen this outpouring of love from you know at the micro level within my family and and from my friends and from people i don’t know but who i communicate with um that’s well that saved my life for sure there’s no doubt about that multiple times many many times and has really you know i saw my my father-in-law years ago um sort of a man about town kind of guy um extroverted and and gregarious and um and amusing and um a real character everyone in my small town knew him he’s still alive his wife developed prefrontal dementia and he took care of her over 15 years and right and you mentioned this in the book yeah he did a stellar an admirable job i mean it just it just floored me how how he how he did that with no complaints and and allowing help and and loving her throughout her lengthy lengthy decline that was staggering to me to witness i’m thought i’m not sure i could do that it isn’t obvious to me that he’s doing something that i’m capable of doing and i certainly felt that way about my friends many friends my my immediate family my kids my wife my parents but my sister-in-law um met an old college friend who’s still walking with me virtually every day um and then relative strangers that we hired to help to help with my care also yeah um my i’m in a state of jaw-dropping admiration for the capacity of people to care of yeah amazing so i i saw it more deeply into that and right so now i’m not saying that made it all worthwhile it’s like no no yeah no not so far i certainly wouldn’t have drawn that conclusion but that’s not the point right you know here i am this guy you know i’m a clinical psychologist i got tangled up with benzodiazepines um i’m talking to people about getting their house in order and things collapsed around me and right like it’s it’s the irony is well it’s almost unbearable that was part of what made this so difficult was not only the pain that physical pain but this absurd paradox and yet people have forgiven me and right yeah right yeah right now we’re amazed i’m amazed you know we say that culture has no capacity for forgiveness you know you hear that about cancel culture and about people that are being eradicated for making one mistake and we have to learn to forgive it’s like i experienced a lot of forgiveness and and then again you know when i’ve been attacked in the press when people have gone after my reputation with all guns blazing that’s for sure you know our lives my family’s life was punctuated over the last five years with two week periods where i’ve been attacked for something accused of something like you know wanting the government to distribute nubile women to undeserving men to preserve social harmony right all these things that that look absolutely reprehensible being compared to hitler etc etc there’s always a two-week period after that blows up where we have no idea if i’m done at that point and yet the support that i’ve received has been continuous and so why why that is i don’t know i think i i have hypotheses i mean i include myself in the audience of reprobates to whom i’m lecturing i don’t assume that you know i abide by all these rules there are their targets for attainment and right hopefully that you know has protected me at least to some degree against the perception of undue moral superiority yeah yeah you sort of answered my first question and then you answered one of the other questions that i was going to ask which was the the irony here of of the guy who’s supposed who we’re supposed to go to for advice for self-help wisdom somebody who’s supposed to teach us how to put our house in order has his house completely collapsed at least psychologically speaking and so physically too physically why practically and so this is what i wanted to pose to you and you’ve sort of answered this you know from a devil’s advocate perspective many people many people on the left were saying this especially many prominent journalists critics intellectuals like like this guy’s a complete fraud like he went through like all this stuff he’s completely destroyed he can barely you know get his his speech in order and like so much suffering going on and so why should we read his book about getting our own lives in order like maybe this guy should take a year or two get his life in order you know fix whatever he’s going through and then we can listen to his wisdom afterwards but not right now while he’s dealing with this immense hardship and again i’m not saying that but that’s the that’s one of the the main criticisms of your new book like without even reading it is that you’re trying to teach the world you’re trying to impart your values onto the world yet you have gone through this period where you’ve become completely destroyed and petrified by these these psychological physical problems that you’ve you’ve dealt with yeah right well believe me i’ve tortured myself about that plenty yeah and i’m glad you yeah i’m glad you see that irony you said there is an irony there yeah you have to be pretty blind not see that i mean yeah but you know it’s been a source of constant torment and i was very apprehensive about writing this book or certainly about releasing it but what’s your response i’m encouraging people i’m what’s your what’s your response to that critique though that because you’re going through this much because you don’t have your you don’t have your house in order so to speak in one way why should we listen to you that’s the critical well i guess the first thing would be is that it isn’t self-evident that whatever happened to me was a consequence of not having my house in order i mean if someone has cancer you don’t come up to them and say well you know if you if you would have just you know acted more ethically that you know you deserve what you get you’ve got this cancer it’s obviously your fault it’s like well my whatever happened to me whatever my illness is or was wasn’t as clear cut in some sense as cancer um so the edges are fuzzy but but you know everyone is susceptible to be cutting off to be cut off at the knees at any moment that happens and you can protect yourself against that to some degree by putting your life in order and by living properly and and but that doesn’t mean that you’re fully protected from it we all die we all get sick and so if we don’t take if we can’t communicate with anyone who doesn’t get sick or die then we can’t communicate with anyone and so does that mean we’re all so radically imperfect that we have nothing to offer and right no it means we’re all so radically imperfect that we should be careful but but we’re stuck with our inadequacies and yeah and i have my inadequacies and you know you yeah you can say well look look what he did he should have known better it’s like that’s possible it isn’t self-evident to me what i did wrong i’ve had this right propensity for depression forever it’s it appears familial it’s affected all my male relatives on my dad’s side pretty much very very intensely um and my children my my daughter not my son he he seems completely free of it um thank god oh so you’ve had this for a while this is a natural well i’ve had this pro propensity for depression for a very long time right probably from the time i was about eight years old maybe earlier than that a long right yeah is that does that relate to like you sort of being more serious in general like lots of people have said like we’ve never seen jordan pearson laugh a lot like there’s that one time where you laughed really hard on theo theovon’s podcast and people are like oh that was that was cool like we can count you know it’s funny because um look since i’ve been launched into the public eye let’s say or launched myself or whatever um since i’ve become notorious my life has been very complex and and so the the levity has declined the playfulness has declined and it’s really unfortunate i’m a very playful person all i did with my kids was play with them and right laugh with them and joke with them when i get together with my son and my daughter and we’re healthy which is quite rare because my daughter’s yeah very ill very much of the time all we do is laugh and and make fun and play um you know when i tried to bring that to my lectures before before making them public let’s say you know i i i i leave in my seriousness with with jokes i i can’t tell a joke to save my life but i can say funny things and i like talking to comedians and um so i if you had known me before you would have thought that i was one of the most most playful people you’d ever met but you know since 2016 i mean things have been complicated to say the least i mean my my daughter was extremely ill my wife was extremely ill and we thought for sure she was going to die she had a cancer that only 200 people only 200 um cases have ever been reported and every single one of those people died wow so and then she had terrible surgical complications that were that appeared that they were going to be fatal and and so she lived on the edge of life and death for five months and then and that was just after i got back from switzerland being in the hospital with my daughter to have her ankle replaced yeah wow and then at the same time you know i was i had this meteoric rise to to public notoriety fame yeah which hasn’t slowed down at all no um in fact seems in some sense to be accelerating me we use social media a lot and so we’re accelerating it i suppose to some degree trying to communicate what trying to communicate and to learn all these technologies but you know and my reputation was on the line in in an international way dozens of times and generally what i’ve observed in people’s lives is if something like that happens to them once on a local scale that’s enough to traumatize them and that happened to me like every week it’s happened to me every week essentially in multiple countries for like five years so right yeah you know so people can look at that and think well he should have managed it better it’s like well okay fair enough you try it yeah yeah exactly see how you do i don’t even want to say that i don’t want to say that because i wouldn’t wish this on anyone right i wouldn’t wish it on anyone yeah i mean i i don’t think i wouldn’t wish it on anyone for any reason and i’m not i’m not complaining like i’m i mean um and you know you might also ask well why did why do you think you have the right to continue because really that’s the question why do you think you have the right to continue it’s like well i don’t necessarily think that i certainly doubted it profoundly i thought well i’ll get back on my feet so what did i do first some podcasts well do people find this useful will they find it useful how will they respond well positively okay i’ll do another one yeah how will they respond well positively so i think well i’m i’m either going to curl up and die right or i’m going to continue and so i’m continuing and you still have your you still have your wisdom intact like as we’re talking right now well that’s up to that’s up to people to decide and say what i believe to be true and if people find it useful well good but they’re deciding that you still have that intact right you’re still a useful figure despite well that’s what they tell me it’s i watch the comments and they say well you know you you you are okay and i listen to i talk to my parents actually i talk to my parents every night they’re in their 80s and and they keep an eye on what i’m doing and they’re encouraging thank god and you know i’m i i’m doing what i’ve done before i’m doing what i’ve always done i’m trying to figure things out right and to communicate about that and and lots of people are along for the ride and an ever growing number i mean we have translations slated for 13 languages all be launched this month and we’re using social media to break down all the talks into one minute two minute five minute segments and we have a real unbelievably qualified and and able person doing that communicate with young people on tiktok and all these social media platforms yeah and if people find it useful it’s up to them to decide yeah okay um we have two loose ends here to tie we have a couple of things that we should finish that you’ve touched on which were related to my question so so in the book yeah we have to stop we have to stop real quick oh it’s much later than i thought so oh wow holy totally lost track no that’s good isn’t it but it does mean that we’ll have to wrap up okay um should i end off on i guess one of the questions sure that i have okay sure yeah um so in the book you state that you’re frequently plagued with doubts about the role that you play um you know many people see you as this kind of avatar that’s science oriented religion inspired that is supposed to help us with our own lives and you’ve touched so many people obviously and you know i can talk about so many people personally um you know one person that in particular that i met last year 17 year old girl at the time she was going through an abusive relationship and and she was listening to your lectures during that time and eventually she she escaped this relationship through watching your lectures and mustering that self-determination that confidence and that assertiveness to make that decision of of not being sort of psychologically sort of held hostage to this person right and and you know many people um i tweeted this out last night many people have this caricature of you having you know a male dominated you know audience for you know men 25 and older or whatever but but this was a young girl who was deeply deeply touched by you and i just remember it vividly and i i never forget it so so how do you make sense of this role that you have like do you consider it a moral responsibility to empower people to give them the psychological wisdom to take action and and find the self-determination like with not to give it to them but not to give it to them but to help them find it right that’s your role you consider that to be yes that’s my moral obligation that’s everyone’s moral obligation right but not everyone though like for you it’s different because you’re an author you’re a public speaker right you have the role now to to tell yes it’s to learn your wisdom on millions of people right very different from anybody i hope to engage in a collaborative process of finding wisdom with millions of people yes you know and well i i i have my phd i taught at harvard i’m an educated person i’m a product of the best universities in the world i’m the inheritor of the western tradition i’m a defender of that so you so you think you have that responsibility to keep on i know i know i have that responsibility right clearly i mean that’s that’s what you do with your privilege right right you turn your privilege into responsibility yeah okay what else would you do with it be ashamed of it hide it right right especially because you’re punish other people for it yeah and you’re helping so many people too right so it’s working right it’s not just some people are listening so many people young girls older men people in their marriages people who are young people like me who have listened to your stuff and in large part you know me being in this place you know being 20 and and writing for some of the biggest publications right now it’s been through listening to your lectures throughout high school and and learning learning so much right it’s because of you like even even just from an intellectual perspective like listening to your lectures on marxism postmodernism quoting you in my university essays and my lectures and you know i mentioned that must have gone down well yeah yeah but you know in the colette essay i i had your your video oh there’s an interesting eric my my producer one million sixty four thousand females have watched our videos on youtube within the last 28 days way to be eric that’s a great stat that’s incredible yeah yeah but yeah but yeah just to finish off like yeah like you’ve inspired me in so many ways man like just just intellectually in so many ways and it’s a privilege i’m so happy to hear it good work man keep it up who knows who you could be you’re only 20 you get your act together man you’re an unstoppable force yeah and and i i thank you for that so my pleasure so please always always think about always know the amount of people that you’re touching is truly like near infinite so you should you should you should know that thank you work great man thanks you bet my pleasure so you