https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0fHmkGh1A7c
As you pointed out, I’m going to hold up these books. So this is the new book, Beyond Order, and it does concentrate on pathologies of structure, and the previous book, which is 12 Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos. And the underlying presupposition there is that in our phenomenological landscape, so that’s the world as we experience it, complete with emotions and motivations and dreams, and so the full range of human experience, including the subjective and the objective, let’s say, can broadly be broken into two domains. And one is the domain of things that are beyond our grasp and reach, and that’s the unknown. The unknown emerges, when the unknown emerges, you tend to experience anxiety. And then there’s the known, and I define the known very specifically and very carefully. The known is the place you are when what you’re doing produces the results you want. And I say want because that brings motivation and emotion into the game. So you’re motivated to pursue something, you pursue it, and what you want happens. Not only do you get what you want, but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions. Now, if you imagine that you’re lonely and you approach a young woman in a social situation, attempting to make some contact with her, you want to alleviate your loneliness, and so you hope you make a good impression, and you tell a joke, let’s say, in a relatively awkward manner, and you get rebuffed, then you’re no longer where you control. You’re no longer where you exercise control. And that brings up all sorts of specters immediately. It’s like, well, why were you rebuffed? Well, maybe all women are to be despised. That’s one theory. Maybe there’s something deeply wrong with you. Maybe you’re having an off day. Maybe it wasn’t a very good joke. And so when you don’t get what you want, then a landscape of questions emerge, and those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity from the trivial, I told the joke wrong, to the profound. There’s nothing desirable about me, and I’ll be alone for the rest of my life. Now, you asked about identity, and I used the example of a child’s game, but I could go through an identity, and so I do this particularly in Maps of Meaning. And so, for example, let’s say I’m sitting typing. Okay, we could decompose my identity. So at the highest level of resolution, I’m moving my fingers. And so that could be my identity. I’m the thing that moves its fingers. And then at a slightly broader level than that, I’m typing words. And at a broader level, I’m typing phrases and thinking them up, and then sentences, and then paragraphs, and then chapters, and then let’s say full papers or books. That’s a productive unit. So I’m the author of a book or the author of a paper. That’s an identity. But then that’s nested inside, for me, it would be nested inside being a clinical psychologist, being a professor, being a good citizen. And then that’s nested inside something that’s even broader than that, and I would say that that’s nested inside a cultural heroism. And I don’t mean that specific to me. I mean that for everyone. That’s the outermost level, whether you’re playing out the role of hero or adversary, say. That’s the highest possible level of identity. That’s the level at which fundamental morality is adjudicated. And there isn’t really anything beyond. Outside that is it’s beyond us. It’s the transcendent itself. And you’re all of those at any one time. You’re all of those levels of identity. But those are all practical, right? So those are the roles that you’re playing in the world. All of those are a consequence of who you are. But in interplay, like in this situation with the child, all of that’s negotiated with other people. And so if you have a functional identity, you see, if you have a functional identity, when you act it out in the world, then you get what you want and need. And if an identity doesn’t do that, well, then you should you either retool your identity or you retool the world. Your conception of the world? Well, if you’re retooling your conception of the world, then you’re retooling yourself. No, you can actually mean what a revolutionary does is try to bring the world into alignment with literally change. Yes, literally. Well, and we all do that to some degree because we are practical engineers. You know, I mean, not only do we perceive the world, but we also interact with it so that it does manifest itself in accordance with our desires. There’s limits, obviously, to how far you can go or how far you should go with that. You know, and what are the limits? Well, there’s practical limits. Nature won’t do what you want it to unless you’re very sophisticated in your application of your knowledge and other people will object. So now you might say, well, you should forge forward regardless of their objection. And, you know, there are circumstances under which that’s true. But generally speaking, that’s not a very good idea. It certainly doesn’t make you popular as a child. And so that brings up one other issue. I would also say this I developed this idea quite a bit in the new book. You go from egocentrism as a child, you have to go through this period where you’re socialized as a child and adolescent. And that really means that you allow your identity to be molded and shaped by the group. And, you know, you think about how important peers, friends and peers are to children and adolescents. You know, your mother will say when you’re a teenager, well, if Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you too? And you say, well, no. But the real answer is, well, probably if all your friends are there taunting you, you would in fact jump off the bridge. And not only that, generally speaking, you should. Because it’s your duty. It’s your developmental duty as a child and a teenager to take your isolated self and turn it into a functioning social unit. Now, you could say, well, Peterson wants everybody to be a functional social unit, a robot, you know, a cog in the wheel. And I would say, well, that that isn’t where development stops. It has to go through that period before you can emerge as a as a genuine individual, which means you have to know the rules of the game before you can break them. But not being able to abide by the rules is not anything like being a genuine creative individual. Those are not the same thing. And there’s plenty of attempt to confuse the two things because it’s much better if you can’t follow the rules to view yourself as a avant-garde revolutionary than as a failure. And it’s not like I don’t know that that social molding crushes. Obviously, it crushes and everyone feels that these are existential problems. Everyone deals with the tyranny of culture. And the fact that it does want you to be a certain way and not other ways. And those ways might not be in keeping with your with your the deepest elements of your nature. Well, tough luck for you because you’re also the beneficiary of culture. And so you have to offer it your pound of flesh. Now, you shouldn’t do that at the expense of your soul, but you shouldn’t stay an immature child either. OK, so this notion of identity that we’re being fed is very, very it’s very thin. What are we being fed? Be very specific. Well, there is the idea, for example, that your identity is whatever you say it is and that everyone else has to go along with that. No, that isn’t how it works, partly because no one even knows how to go along with it. Like, let’s say, just for example, that your gender non-binary. OK. What am I supposed to do about that? Man, I don’t know. I hardly know what to do if the rules are already there. So let’s say I grow up, I want to being a heterosexual male. I want to find a woman, fall in love with her, raise a family, have children, have grandchildren. That’s a game. I know the rules to it. Not well, because everyone’s a failure at that. You know, it’s very difficult, but at least you kind of know what the goal is. And so does the person you’re with. Well, you leap out of that, which is already terribly difficult. You leap out of that into completely unknown territory, saying that I’m presenting yourself as something other than those categories leaves everyone around you and you. Completely bereft of direction. Let me put it in words that I get from your material. So what I heard you just say, tell me if I’m wrong, is part of the negotiation that we do from the time we are little kids and figuring out that play, we’re up on the bridge. We jump maybe because we want to, you know, fit in with our peer group. There is a sense of order to that. Now, you’ve been very careful and it would drive me crazy if people respond to this interview as if you have not already illustrated that it is the balance between two opposing forces. But so we need enough order so that somebody can find their way through the world and that many, I think a big part of the reason that your work has resonated so profoundly with people is there. Excuse me. They are left in a world where they don’t know how to move forward in a way that serves them spiritually. Practically as well for sure. And so everybody, both of those, both of those practically shades into spiritually as you move up into the broader reaches of identity. No. And look, this this see one of the things I really laid this out in Maps of Meaning. It took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion. So what happens is that if you act out your identity, if you act out your beliefs in the world and what you want doesn’t happen, what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action. And the reason for that is you’ve wandered too far away from the campfire. And now you’re in the forest and maybe you’re naked. And so what do you do then? And the answer is what you don’t know what to do. So what do you do when you don’t want know what to do? And the answer is you prepare to do everything. And the problem with that is that it’s unbelievably draining psychophysiologically like it hurts you. And there’s there’s an immense physiological literature detailing the cost of of of exactly that kind of response. And so people need people and animals. The people stay where what they do has the results they want. That’s partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions is because you know that, for example, even in small ways, let’s say you’re a country music aficionado and you’re hanging around with your cowboy hatted buddies and you throw on a tape and everyone says great tunes, man. And you know you’re happy about that. But you know, you throw on a piece by Tchaikovsky and you’re you’re in a different subculture. And who the hell are you? And people the people in your group will say, man, who listens to music like that? And that’s a trivial example in some sense. But I believe it’s one that everyone can resonate to. We like we it’s very hard on us not to be where we know what we know that what we want is going to happen. We hate that. We hate that. And no wonder. So and then, you know, there are there are varying degrees of that. Obviously, you can really be where you don’t know what’s going to happen or you can only be there to some degree. But by and large, by and large, we’re conservative creatures, even if we’re liberal in temperament, there is not we can’t tolerate that much uncertainty. And you might ask, well, why? And the answer is, well, because you can be hurt, pain, you can be damaged, you can become intolerably anxious and you can die. So it’s no wonder you’re sensitive or very sensitive to negative emotion. And so our identities rate functional identity regulates your emotion. Why Beyond Order? What is the genesis of that title? How did you arrive at that title? As far as I can tell, in the world of value. So let’s think about value for a minute. If you move towards something, you value it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t move towards it. You there’s an old joke about the chicken is why did the chicken cross the road? And the answer to that is, well, he thought the other side was better. Well, that’s that’s the case, you know, and in order we need a gradient of value to organize our action. And you have to prioritize because you can’t do everything at once. And so you do the thing that’s most important right now, now. And that means you’re in a world of importance. And that’s a value that that’s a value world. And the value world, as far as I can tell, has two broad components. The Taoists talked about it as yin and yang. And broadly speaking, it’s order and chaos. And order tends to be represented with masculine symbols and chaos tends to be represented for feminine with feminine symbols. That doesn’t mean order is male and chaos is female. And, you know, I’ve been pilloried for this, even though it’s hardly my proposition. But the the idea of the patriarchy is a symbolic it’s a use of masculine symbolism to represent order. So anyways, order is where what happens. Order is you’re in order when what you want to happen happens when you act. And so that’s reassuring because not only do you get what you want, but the fact that you get what you want indicates that your theory about how to get what you want is true. And every time you fail, you don’t get what you want. But you also undermine the validity of the theory that you’re using to organize your perceptions and your actions. That’s partly why people don’t like to fail, because you don’t know how far back that can echo how far down your hierarchy of presuppositions that can echo. If you’re clinically depressed, every minor failure means you’re worthless human being. And you never know when a failure is going to demonstrate that. You know, it can in any case. There’s chaos and order. They’re the two great domains. And you have to contend with chaos because too much of it overwhelms you. You drown in it. It’s the flood. And that happens when your life gets beyond you and you’re somewhere where no matter what you do, nothing you want happens. It’s a domain of terror and pain. Now, it’s also a domain of unlimited possibility, because outside of what you know is everything you don’t know. And there’s untold riches to be gathered from the domain of everything you don’t know. But that doesn’t mean it still needs to be managed. It’s dangerous. Now, the domain of order is the same way. It’s like if if order becomes too extreme, then everything becomes cramped. It becomes totalitarian. And then that starts to pathologize. That’s the dying king, the king who’s dying for lack of the water of life is the old tyrant who can no longer see beyond his own presuppositions. And so my first book concentrated more on pathologies of chaos and and the second book more on pathologies of order. And they’re they’re a matched set in that regard insofar as I was successful at doing that. And, you know, the liberal types, they’re very sensitive to pathologies of order and the conservative types are very sensitive to pathologies of chaos. But they’re both right. It’s just there’s no final solution to that problem. You’re stuck with it. It’s an existential. It’s an eternal existential concern. That’s why mythological language is standard across people is no matter who you are, no matter when you live. You always have to deal with the fact that some things escape your competence. And no matter where you are, no matter who you are, you have to you have to adapt to the fact of the existence of a value structure that’s shared across a social group. It’s the fundamental. So those are fundamental constituent elements of human experience. And we have symbols for them. And we all understand the symbols. So, for example, in Pinocchio, this is I’m not going to go into this because it’s too complicated. But no one box at a puppet going to the bottom of the ocean and being swallowed by a whale. Why? It makes no sense. There’s nothing about that that makes sense. Right. It’s not it’s obviously not an empirical description of the objective world. But it’s so clearly real that a four year old can follow it. It’s a mystery. You know, the whale breathes fire in Pinocchio. It’s a dragon. And why? Why is that? Well, we face dragons forever. That’s what a human being is. It’s a creature that faces the dragon. The dragon can burn you to a crisp, but it has it has what you need. That’s the world. It’ll burn you up, but it has what you need. And so then the question is, how do you stop from getting burned up and get what you need? And the answer to that is that you mold yourself into the hero. And that’s a religious story. And you say, well, is it true? And the answer to that is it depends on what you mean by true. And, you know, that’s a weasel answer in some ways, but it’s not. It’s because it’s such a deep question that it can’t be put forth without discussing the definition of true. So it’s as deep a question as what is true. Now, you know, it could be that. I would say that part of the cultural war is a criticism of the motif of the hero. That’s Derrida’s phallogocentrism. Western culture is phallogocentric. I would say human culture is phallogocentric. I think Derrida was wrong about that. It’s human culture. It’s man, so to speak, against nature. Although sometimes it’s man against culture and sometimes it’s man against man. It’s man against nature. And we triumph as the hero. And maybe that story isn’t true or isn’t correct. But that’s us. And if it isn’t correct, well, then we’re an evolutionary abortion because that’s who we are. And I would say, well, before you throw it aside, maybe you should try it. You don’t have a better option anyways. And there are… What does it mean to try it? Mostly, I would say it means two things. It means to practice love. And that means assume that things are valuable and act according to that assumption. And it requires truth, which is don’t say what you know to be untrue. And, you know, when I tried to unpack the first sentence of Genesis, in the context of the broader biblical narrative, what appears to be happening is that there’s a proposition that God is guided by love and uses truth to create. It’s something like that. And maybe love is something like the wish that all being would flourish. There isn’t a better story than that. What effect do you hope your new book to have? I know that might seem like a lazy question, but I’m going to keep it broad. I’d just be interested to hear your thoughts. What would be a successful effect for this book, looking back 12 months from now, 24 months from now? Well, I would like it would be lovely if it had the same effect on people as the last book appeared to have. You know, I mean, it’s comforting to me to read through my YouTube comments. Oddly enough, because that isn’t generally a place people would go for comfort. You know, untold numbers of people have said to me in person, but publicly in that way, that they put their lives together, at least in some ways. And you talked about Viktor Frankl. You know, when I wrote Maps of Meaning, I said, well, I was interested in malevolence. I was deeply affected by the accounts I’d read of what happened in the Second World War. And in Germany and what happened in Soviet Union and in China. These horror shows that characterize the 20th century. Constrained malevolence. And so if you study malevolence, you start to understand what the opposite of that is. The opposite of malevolence is something like the hero’s journey. You know, and it’s easy to be cynical about that, but well, it’s not that easy, because if you’re cynical about that, then you undermine your own life. And everyone knows this. This is the other thing that’s so interesting. Everyone knows this. You never teach someone you love to lie. You’re always appalled if you have a son or daughter. You’re always appalled if they don’t tell the truth. You know, in the deepest part of your heart, that if you don’t tell the truth, the world falls apart. And that’s actually true. Let’s dive into the book, because actually so many of the things that we’re talking about now are sort of part and parcel to all of the chapters here. So chapter one, and what I really liked about this also is the way you organized it, the new topics, because one of the questions we would get often in the Q&A that you would get is, oh, was there a 13th rule that you couldn’t get in the book? And you actually mentioned this in the book that you had, you had what, about 46 other, was it 46? 42. 42. You had 42. Yeah, the same as Douglas Adams’ answer to the universe, life, the universe and everything, 42 rules, which was actually a coincidence, but I thought it was comical in the aftermath. There’s 42 rules, so now I’ve written about 20, I’ve written essays about, on 24 of them. When you got to 42, how long did you give it before you said, okay, 42 is enough? Because I know you, you’re pretty methodical. I just did it in an afternoon, the original list of rules. I was playing on Quora. I wrote about 40 answers for Quora, something like that, and I really haven’t partaken in that forum for a long time now. I was investigating it, and some kid had asked, what do you need to know in order to lead a good life, or what’s most important to know, something like that, and I thought, well, I’ll take a crack at answering this, and I made this list of 42 rules, and it got very popular on Quora, much more popular. Typical Pareto distribution, like that one answer got more views than all of my other answers put together. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. You know, I had touched something for some reason, and out of that, when I was asked by an agent who contacted me, Sally Harding, of Cook Agency, she asked me if I was interested in writing something more popular, and I knew that those rules had found an audience, so that seemed to me to be a place to dive in. So anyways, I’ve only written about 24 of them. You know, in the two books, I have them both here, you can see how they’re structured. One’s white and the other’s black, they make a match set. You can read each of them independently, and one concentrates the first one. An Antidote to Chaos, 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos, does concentrate on the consequences of excess uncertainty, and the second book concentrates more on an excess of order. Both of those are fundamental existential dangers, as far as I’m concerned. And in this universe of value, in the world of value, there are two major domains, and one domain is the domain of order, and you can technically define it. The domain of order is where you find yourself when what you’re doing produces the results you want. And that’s a really tight formulation, because it gives you a particular idea of what a place in time is. The place in time you occupy is, at any given moment, is the place in time that’s defined by your current goal. And you have a map of value that guides you through the actions that are necessary in that domain, and if the result is what you want, which brings motivation and emotion into the picture, then, well, you get what you need or want, but you also validate your theory of existence, because it’s good enough to produce the results that you desire. And given that you’re fellible and that you don’t know everything, you have to use proximal truths. And so something is, it’s pragmatic, it’s a form of philosophical pragmatism. If you make a bridge and it stands up, then you know how to make a bridge. Why? Because the bridge stood up. Now, maybe you overbuilt it. You could have built it more elegantly. But it’s sufficiently true so that the bridge functions. And we’re like that. We’re like engineers. We’re cobbling together solutions all the time, and as long as those solutions work, we assume that we’re right. Well, that’s the domain of order. The domain of chaos emerges when you lay out a plan into action, and something other than what you wanted emerges, and sometimes that can be a catastrophe, an absolute catastrophe. And your brain, our psychophysiological, our psychophysiology is actually adapted to those two domains. When something unexpected happens, all sorts of emotions and motivations break loose, fight and flight among them, anger among them gets disinhibited because when you don’t know what’s happening, you have to prepare for everything. So you get anxious, and then you hyper-prepare, which is extremely stressful. And so the domain of chaos is extremely stressful. In small doses, it’s exhilarating. And that’s because, well, when you’re aware you don’t know what’s happening, you have the opportunity to learn and to expand your map. And so there’s always an interplay between the domain of chaos and the domain of order, but they can each pathologize, and the pathologies of uncertainty are more associated with anxiety and nihilism and depression, whereas the pathologies of order are more totalitarian. And then I would say as well, the liberal types, the more left-leaning types, are quite sensitive to pathologies of order. They don’t like them. That’s the patriarchy. The patriarchy is the pathology of order. And it’s symbolically masculine, something I’ve been taken to task for claiming, but the patriarchy itself, the idea of the patriarchy itself is a symbol. The patriarchy is a symbol. That’s why it has such power. And it’s a symbol that refers to the domain of order. Now, the domain of order is protective as well as oppressive, but when it degenerates, it becomes oppressive. And I would say it degenerates when it’s based on power rather than competence, but it can be based on competence. You know, the Marxist critics and the politically correct types, they insist that every element of the patriarchy is only a consequence of the imposition of order, forceful imposition of order. It’s all power. Well, no. No, it’s not. When it degenerates, that’s true. Because you can tell that because the thing is the domain of order will be upheld by those who inhabit it if it’s functional. If you have to use force, that’s already an indication that it’s become pathological because people aren’t playing voluntarily. So would you say we’re in a degenerative cycle right now, that the cycle seems more degenerative than, say, a building cycle? Or you think that that’s just the play that’s always going on and you have to figure out your role in it? Well, I think the play is always going on. And I don’t think… like the antidote to chaos isn’t order. And the antidote to order isn’t chaos. The antidote to both is the balancing of them, the active balancing of them. You used to do this a lot. You would say the balance, the struggle between liberal and conservative. So people see me doing this all the time. I always credit, well, Jordan was talking about this. But so you think that’s it? Well, it’s really important. It’s really important to understand that the antidote to chaos in the final analysis can’t just be order because order itself can degenerate. And so I believe that the antidote is active engagement with the world, honest, active engagement with the world, truth. And I think it’s also truth motivated by love, which is a motif that runs through this second book in particular. And love is the desire for all things to flourish. You know, in Christ says that you should love your enemies. And that’s an ins… what does that mean? And it’s really worth thinking about is you shouldn’t wish your enemies harm in this. Like, and by… what I mean by that is that it would be better for everyone if they would conduct themselves so that they would flourish. You know, and that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t defend yourself. It doesn’t mean that soldiers aren’t necessary or the police. It doesn’t mean any of that. It’s not a weak need statement. It means that if you’re if you have your if you have your if you have yourself pointed in the right direction, you don’t wish an excess of harm on on the world. You want it to flourish. That’s love. So you want yourself that way. And I do believe that that requires a certain courage because the world is so flawed and so painful. There’s so much suffering in it. It’s very difficult to fall in love with it. You keep getting bounced off. You think this is so terrible that maybe it shouldn’t even be. But that takes you down a very bad road. So it’s love first and then truth serves that. And I do think that’s the motif that runs through the Old and New Testaments, the combination of those two things. Love is the desire that being flourish. And and and I do believe that truth serves that. Well, that’s a no. Please finish your thought. Well, I also think that people find meaning in that. And you can everyone can answer this for themselves. It’s like you have to watch and you have to see where it is that you find the meaning that sustains your life. And I would say it’s certainly not been my experience that people find that in deceit or hatred. I mean, they may be tempted by that. They may have the reasons for it. But everyone is ashamed of that and wishes it could be otherwise, even if they don’t know what to do about that.