449. Trauma and the Demolition of Faith | Ronnie Janoff-Bulman

This episode delves into the psychological impacts of trauma and how it challenges fundamental beliefs and assumptions, influencing both personal and political realms.

1. Trauma can profoundly disrupt foundational beliefs, leading to a state of existential reevaluation.
2. The concept of "shattered assumptions" explains how people’s implicit beliefs can be fundamentally challenged by traumatic events.
3. Political ideologies may be deeply connected to psychological mechanisms of approach (liberalism) and avoidance (conservatism).
4. Understanding trauma requires a multi-disciplinary approach that includes psychological, social, and neurological perspectives.
5. Recovery from trauma involves reconstructing shattered assumptions into a new, often more resilient worldview.

1. Introduction to Shattered Assumptions

Dr. Janoff-Bulman explains the theory of shattered assumptions, which posits that traumatic experiences can deeply affect our implicit beliefs about the world’s benevolence and predictability. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman: "People's beliefs about the world being meaningful, not random, benevolent people being worthy, all of a sudden, they really questioned these very, very basic beliefs."

2. Psychological Impact of Trauma

The discussion explores how trauma can lead to hyper-vigilance and a radical change in how one views the world, linking it to broader psychological theories. Jordan Peterson: "If something happens to us that violates those assumptions, then it blows the waiting system, it demolishes the weighting system that we use to prioritize our attention, and everything comes flooding back."

3. Political Divides and Trauma

This chapter discusses how trauma and psychological theories can help explain the stark divide in political ideologies, particularly between conservative and liberal viewpoints. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman: "Liberals and conservatives differ significantly on how they perceive threats and challenges, which shapes their political ideologies."

4. The Role of Narrative in Recovery

The potential for narrative and storytelling to aid in the recovery from trauma is discussed, highlighting the importance of reconstructing a shattered worldview into something coherent and functional. Jordan Peterson: "The pathway to redemption through narrative reconstruction is not just about recovering but about understanding the deeper meaning of events."

1. Acknowledge the Impact: Recognize that trauma can alter fundamental beliefs and perceptions.
2. Seek Understanding: Delve into the psychological theories that explain responses to trauma.
3. Engage in Narrative Reconstruction: Use storytelling as a tool to rebuild a coherent worldview after trauma.
4. Explore Political Ideologies: Understand how your psychological orientation might influence your political beliefs.
5. Promote Psychological Resilience: Encourage discussions that help in the understanding and recovery from trauma.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with social psychologist and author, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman. They discuss how most implicit beliefs are consciously unknown to those who hold them; the human reactions to fear, disgust, pain, and the destruction of hope; why people blame themselves for truly random events; what the experts get wrong about motivation; and the difference between proscriptive and prescriptive morality.
Ronnie Janoff-Bulman is Professor Emerita of Psychology and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is a social psychologist and the author of two books and over 90 published papers. Her first book, “Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma,” has been cited over 9,500 times. She was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for her research on morality, which serves as the backbone of her recent book, “The Two Moralities: Conservatives, Liberals, and the Roots of Our Political Divide.” She is the recipient of teaching and mentoring awards and is the former editor of Psychological Inquiry, an international journal devoted to advancing theory in psychology. A mother and grandmother, Dr. Janoff-Bulman lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband of over 50 years.

People

Jordan B. Peterson, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman

Companies

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Books

Shattered Assumptions, The Two Moralities

Guest Name(s):

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman

Content Warnings:

None

Jordan Peterson
Hello, everyone. I'm talking today with Doctor Ronnie Janoff Bullman. She's a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She's a social psychologist and the author of two books, one from about 30 years ago called Shattered Assumptions, and the other called the two moralities, the origin and Fall of Right and left politics. Why did I want to talk to Doctor Janoff Bullman?

Well, I'm very interested in both angles of her work. First, because the notion of shattered assumptions is associated with the idea that there's something like a hierarchy of values in our beliefs, in the structure of our beliefs, that we have some beliefs that are more fundamental than others. Those would be beliefs that many other beliefs depend upon. And so I wanted to talk to her about what it might mean that the assumptions that orient us in the world are organized hierarchically, right? So that some things are deep and other things peripheral, and so that the deep things are, in some sense, the most real and vital.

All of those topics we're going to talk about in the discussion with doctor Ronnie Janoff Bulman. So I'm interested in your two major works. I want to talk to you about shattered assumptions, and I want to talk to you about the political divide. And I think we'll start with shattered assumptions. And so why don't you start by letting everybody who's watching and listening know what you meant when you discussed shattered assumptions and why you felt that was a reasonable way of approaching the problem of traumatic injury, post traumatic stress disorder.

Right? Profound disillusionment, even. Okay, I mean, that's work. That's now 30 years old, I should say that. But I'm a social psychologist, not a clinical psychologist, and I did a great deal of research on victimization back 30 and 40 years ago.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
And what I was finding was some commonality, actually, a great deal of commonalities, false victimizations, things that we would now call trauma, rape victims, loss of loved ones, early accident victims, natural disaster victims. And at the time, the clinical literature really was somewhat problematic from my perspective, because it was looking at people as pathological as opposed to the situations as pathological in some sense. And I kept hearing the same thing from people across these domains, which was, I never thought it could happen to me, which was kind of surprising at the time, because we assume people know bad things happen, right? But it led me, actually to do some work and further research. And I posited this notion of shattered assumptions based on a sort of people finding that what we now know as implicit cognition.

At the time, there was no work really, or very little work on implicit cognition, but finding that basically, people's beliefs about, these fundamental beliefs about the world seem to have gotten shattered, that beliefs about the world being meaningless, meaningful, not random, benevolent people being worthy. All of a sudden, people really questioned these very, very basic beliefs that they didn't even necessarily know they had. And it led me to this notion of shattered assumptions, which now, if I wrote the book, now would be a little easier to claim because of all we now know about implicit cognition, right? These are implicit beliefs. And these beliefs actually were not necessarily illusions.

I mean, they were these sort of working models of the world, a good enough world. And after these negative events, they did seem to get shattered. People had a sense of their own fragility, their creatureliness. We're humans and species with symbolic systems, and yet we're food for worms. That notion of fragility, terror, so forth and so on.

So, basically, I was writing it in some ways, as a corrective to much that was out there in these very distinct domains. So there would be a literature on rape victims, for example, or literature on natural disasters. Now, I should say there were wonderful people working at the time, clinicians, who certainly knew, certainly as much as I did, and probably lots more, but they had a very different perspective. Social psychology, I think, is a very healthy way of viewing the world because it normalizes, as opposed to pathologizes. And that's where I was coming from.

I don't know if that sufficiently responds. Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Peterson
Well, it's definitely a good start. Okay, so now you mentioned something that I'll just get you to clarify a bit. You said that if you were writing this book today with what we know about implicit cognition, that your argument would be easier to justify. So, just, like, flesh that out a bit before I ask you some other questions. Well, the notion.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Well, the fact is that now we have implicit beliefs that people don't necessarily know they have. So it's easy to argue that when something happens and the inner world gets shattered, that these very fundamental beliefs now, which really are at the base of our conceptual world, can be impacted by real life events, even though we don't know we hold them. Do you see? Yeah. See, at the time, that wasn't necessarily clear.

People would say, well, we know what we believe. Everybody knows. You see? That's all I meant by that, Jordan. Yes.

Jordan Peterson
Okay. Okay. Okay, good. Well, that's. I presume that's what you meant.

Okay, so now let me run an idea by you, and you tell me what you think about this and see if it's in accordance with what you believe. So I've been trying to think about this, in part neurologically, because I'm interested in why anxiety and terror might be radically disinfectant. Anxiety and terror and pain radically disinhibited by the shattering of belief and hope destroyed at a fundamental level. Okay, so now you believe in something approximating a fundamental level. So let me.

Let me explain what I think that might mean, and then you tell me what you think about that. Okay, so in the landscape of implicit cognition, there are hierarchical dependencies. There are some presumptions that we make. They might be implicit upon which many other presumptions rest. That's a good definition of fundamental.

Here's a way of thinking about it. Imagine that you track the citation count of a scientist's work. Well, the more if the discipline hasn't become corrupt, the more citations, broadly speaking, that a given scientist has, the more their work is fundamental to the field. And the reason for that is because much other work in that field depends on those publications. Otherwise they wouldn't be massively cited.

And so then you can imagine that in a system of belief, there are levels of dependency. Those levels of dependency have a bedrock, and at that bedrock, everything rests. That seem reasonable to you? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Oh, okay, good. Okay, so let me go a little farther with this, and you tell me if you object to any of this. Okay, so I've come to understand that that implicit structure through which we see the world is equivalent to a weighting system. It looks to me like it's equivalent to the statistical weights that large language models extract. Yeah, that makes sense to you, too.

Okay. Okay. So then we have to filter the world through a system of weights. That's how we prioritize our attention. We have to prioritize our attention because there's too much information.

There's way too much information, there's way too many possibilities. So we prioritize, and we do so in keeping with our axiomatic assumptions. And they have a hierarchical structure, structure of dependency. Now, if something happens to us that violates those assumptions, then it blows the waiting system, it demolishes the weighting system that we use to prioritize our attention, and everything comes flooding back. Okay, do you know Carl Fristons work, by any chance?

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Not well. So, okay, well, this is an exciting thing. So Carl Friston has a model of perception that's very well developed, and he's a very well cited neuroscientist. He invented most of the what would you call it the procedures that people use to investigate MRI images, for example? Right.

Jordan Peterson
Okay, so Fristen's a very well established neuroscientist, and he believes that both anxiety and positive emotion are related to entropy control. So this is different than terror management. It's way diff. It's a very different idea, although they're analogous in some sense. Okay, so anxiety signals the collapse of a system of orientation so that hierarchical waiting is no longer possible.

So that way too many things impinge upon you at once. And anxiety is actually the signal that that happens. Technically, it's the signal that that's happening. And so it's the flooding back of chaos. Right.

And that. Enough. Okay. Now, the consequence of this, we know the psychophysiological consequences of this. The psychophysiological consequences are accelerated and acceleration of the stress response.

Right, exactly. Hyper preparation on the psychophysiological side. Right. And that is sufficiently stressful to be physiologically and neurologically damaging. Right.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
The hypervigilance that comes with trauma is clearly consistent with that. The thing I would say that's interesting is one doesn't even need to. I mean, obviously, there is a waiting system. And, you know, the accuracy at the top, very top levels is absolutely essential. And at the fundamental levels, at some level, you can have some illusory beliefs, because, I mean, if it's very dangerous, I believe I can swim, and I'm a great swimmer, but I go into a pool and I can't swim, I'm in trouble.

If I think the world is sort of more benevolent than it really is, that's not going to get me. That's really a fundamental belief. That's not going to get me into as much trouble, but can guide me in a positive way. Okay. One of the things I was going to say is I'm not sure you need to even posit the waiting system in the case of trauma, because I think what.

Although I don't think we would disagree about this, what is being shattered and disrupted is the base of the fundamental of the system, the conceptual bedrock of the system that's shattered. And the anxiety is really a double duty anxiety. First of all, understand living in a world that does seem more dangerous all of a sudden, when you've been sort of horrible things have happened to you, right? There's this real world phenomenon, and on top of that, you have lost the guideposts to survive it. The conceptual system that orients you, as you would say, friston's work would talk about.

So you've kind of so you now have this double, this anxiety. That's quite remarkable. That leads to what, really a sense of terror. It's not just. Yeah, well, there's two things that happen in Friston's conceptualization, and I wrote a paper about this with some students of mine, too, when we were trying to tie anxiety to entropy.

Jordan Peterson
It's not only that anxiety mounts. That's bad. That's terrible. Right. And it does result in this state of psychophysiological hyper preparation, which is physiologically devastating across time.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Right. It can cause brain damage. It does, in fact, make you old because you're burning up excess resources. The other thing that happens, though, is that it destroys hope, and that's also an entropy problem. So pristin characterized positive emotion as a signal that entropy in relationship to a valued goal had decreased.

Jordan Peterson
So imagine that you posit something of value, and then you move towards it, and you see yourself moving towards it, and that's happening validly. Then the diminution of the distance between you and the goal is signaled by dopamine release, and it shows that the probability that you're going to attain that goal is increasing. And that's what hope is. Now, if you blow out your value structure, if it's pulled out from underneath you because your assumptions are shattered, then your conceptualization, or even your belief in the possibility of a valid goal, also vanishes. So not only are you subsumed by anxiety, you're overwhelmed by hopelessness.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Yes. No, there's no question. I mean, and I talk about that actually in the book, but I don't talk about. I only have a few pages on the neurophysiology of trauma, because you have to remember, it was published 30 years ago. So research was 35, 40 years.

We have learned, or trauma researchers, and I haven't, by the way, done research on trauma for many years, but trauma researchers have learned a great deal, as you're pointing out, about some of the physiological, neuropsychological bases or ramifications and consequences of trauma, which is not something that long ago we knew much about. It is interesting, though, that from social psychology, we do think about emotions as signals. I mean, you don't even have to posit the physiology or neuroscience. You can say your emotions are sort of the experiential automatic signals about how you're operating in the world. Yeah, they're navigation guides.

Yeah, navigation guides. So, which is very similar, but we're talking about at different levels of analysis there. Yes. Okay, so now let's go to the idea of the shattering so there's something else I want to weave in. So imagine that you have an aim and that it's predicated on a set of values.

Jordan Peterson
Now, imagine that those values have a hierarchical structure in the way that we just described. So there's something at the bottom. Now, the question is, how would you characterize that structure? So I have a hypothesis for you, and you can tell me what you think about this. It's a hypothesis that I've developed fairly extensively, but I'm working on, in detail in the new book that I'm working on right now called we who wrestle with God.

So I think that a description of the structure through which we look at the world, the hierarchy of values through which we look at the world, I think that's literally what a story is. See, a story. Okay, so a story, like, if you go to a movie and you watch the protagonist, hero or villain, here's what you'll see. You'll see a sequence of situations in which the aim of the character becomes clear. Right?

Now, when you watch that, what happens is that you infer his aim and you adopt that. You embody that. This is literally how you understand it. You embody it. You come to see the world through that perspective, and you experience the emotions that are part and parcel of that aim, right?

So that's a form of exploration, right? Because it means you can go to a movie or you can watch a piece of fiction, you can adopt a temporary aim. It's like a game. You can adopt a temporary aim, and in consequence, you can explore the consequences of that aim, but also have the experience that goes along with it. And it's the same thing that people are doing, by the way, when they go to a sports stadium and they.

And they watch someone aiming at the goal, right? And being skillful in their approach. Right. They adopt the aim, which is the goal. That's why they identify with the team, and then they embody the emotions that are appropriate to that aim.

Okay, so. So I think this is. I think this is a fundamental. See, I figured this out in part 30 years ago when I was looking at the neuropsychology of expectation, right? There's a big cognitive psychology literature on expectation.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
The idea is all about it, right? Right. But there's something about that that's wrong, because we don't expect in the world we desire. We desire, right? Our expectations are specified by our desires.

Jordan Peterson
And that's a useful twist because it brings in, it integrates motivation. See if it's cold. Cognitive expectation. We're prediction machines, but we're not. We're motivated machines.

We're pursuing our desires, and so. Right, our aims are motivated. Right, right. And so we're upset when the outcome doesn't match our desire, not when the outcome doesn't match our expectation.

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Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
That's very interesting. I guess I agree in part. I do think that, I mean, there's such a huge literature in psychology on expectation that doesn't necessarily, let's assume you're responding to somebody on the basis of a stereotype. For example, you're responding based on expectation. You generally operate to confirm it.

But I'm not sure that's based on a desire. So I'm not sure all of it is motivated. I think some of it is. Some much is motivated. I agree with you, but I think much is, there is a great deal that's not motivated cognition.

The bulk of our human functioning is. Okay, well, so I think we can solve that conundrum given the framework we're already using. Imagine that we're seeing the world through a hierarchy of value with something, okay? The farther down the assumption hierarchy, you go towards the base, the more motivation is involved. If you're just playing on the periphery where things don't matter, then it's expectation.

Jordan Peterson
But if you go down into the depths, then it starts to become highly motivated. And that's, that's because part of that motivation is the fact that as you go down into the depths, the world, like your stability, depends on the what? On what you desire making itself manifest, or at least not being radically violated. Right? Right.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
That's right. Your stability depends on your working models actually working. Right. And I do agree. It's interesting we talk about motivation, because when I was doing the two moralities book, of course, all of that is funneled right through motivation.

I mean, the fundamental notions of approach and avoidance. I mean, that is really how we organize our lives. Right? Sure. I believe in motivation.

Believe for sure. Okay. Okay. Okay. So the expectation model came out of the cognitive and the neurophysiological literature of the early sixties, and it came out of cybernetic modeling, and it came out of neuropsychological modeling and early cognitive science.

Jordan Peterson
And the notion there again, as I said, was that people were rather cold prediction machines, expectation machines. That's where the notion of something like working model came from. But I believe that there's a serious flaw, the fact that that doesn't incorporate motivation, the fact that it's expectation rather than desire, it does two things. It's a fundamental flaw because it takes motivation out of the picture. And that's a big problem because we're highly motivated.

And the second thing it does is it obscures the fact that what we're not modeling, we're telling a story. Those aren't the same thing. And this is relevant. Okay. Okay.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Now let's go to say I agree in part. I just wouldn't paint the entire picture that way. I do think there is much where we are not so many things are operating without our awareness. Okay? And I'm not talking about freudian unconscious.

We have automatic system, one system, two kinds of operations. So much of that, um, it won't necessarily. It is automatic. Now, you can still say that automaticity derives from a system that's fundamentally motivated, okay? But I do think, I do think in its operation, there's a kind of automaticity to so much that we do that.

So much, you know, that at least, you know, I don't have any problem saying it's consistent with a motivational model, but I feel like that, that in fact, as it operates, it does look like pure cognition in many cases. And that we're just, we're confirming expectations because that, because that's how we can operate in the world, and that's motivation. Okay? So let me take that a little part bit, because I'm going to reformulate it, and I'll tell you why. And I'll tell you why I think that's in keeping with your theory.

Jordan Peterson
So confirming in expectation, no. Testing our fundamental narrative hypotheses and why? Because we want to make sure that the foundation is remaining intact. Is that automatic? It's automatic until the assumptions are shattered.

And then automaticity. Well, exactly. So that's the thing. So that's the, that's the key that shows you that even the automaticity is dependent on the integrity of the model that's motivated. Right.

It's automatic within the assumption. It's automatic within the maintained assumption, but the story is invalidated when the. Okay, so let me tell you a story, and you tell me what you think about this, because I think this is a story. It's a fundamental story, and it's germane to your hypothesis. I want to put forward the hypothesis that the framework of meaning that's shattered in the case of trauma is a.

It's a naive framework. Now, it might be implicit. It's a naive form of faith. And we know that naivety is a risk factor for trauma because we know that people who are dependent are more likely to be traumatized. So, okay, so here's the naivety element of it.

I want to tell you. I want to bring in a fundamental story since I think these assumption networks are stories. Okay, so I've been studying the story of Job, and the story of Job is the story of suffering. Yes. Okay.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
And meaningless. Right. What seems like random events, right? Well, or worse than random. Malevolent.

Malevolent. Right. So worse than random. Okay. So this is how the story sets itself up.

Jordan Peterson
So we're told at the beginning of the story that job is a good man. And so, and we have the testimony of God himself on, on Job's account. And so God is up in heaven bragging away, so to speak, about how good job is. And his sons come to observe, and one of whom is Satan. And Satan says, I don't think job is that good.

I think he's just fortunate. And God says, no, I think he's good. And Satan says, why don't you let me have a crack at him and we'll see if he's good? And so God says, yeah, okay, do your worst. And in consequence, and that's the malevolent element.

Let's say at least the arbitrary element, but perhaps the malevolent element. Job loses everything that he's worked for, virtually everything he works for. He loses much of his family.

He becomes very ill. And not just ill, but ill in a way thats disfiguring and shameful. And then his friends come along, his friends, and tell him that, well, you know, if he had been a better guy, none of this would have happened. So really it's his fault. And then Job, Job has a response, and this is why I'm bringing up this story.

Job's response is to insist that despite proximal evidence, it's a requirement to maintain faith in the essential goodness of the individual, especially an individual whos been conducting himself ethically, which Job has been by his own testimony, by gods testimony. We know Job is a good man. And Job, Jobs wife tells him when she observes his suffering, she says theres nothing LEFT for you to do but shake your fist at God, curse him and die. And Job says instead, and he insists this to his friends, he refuses to lose faith in his essential goodness. And he also refuses to lose faith in the essential goodness of God.

And there's something, it's something like this. And this is what's relevant to the shattered assumptions notion is that in order to stabilize the structure through which you view the world, it is necessary to adopt as axiomatic the notion that whatever happens to you, if you conduct yourself ethically is the best thing that could happen regardless of the proximal evidence. And also it's necessary for you not to lose faith in the essential goodness of being itself. And those are, those are religious proclamations, right. They're proclamations of a kind of religious faith, right.

Right. Well, and it seems to me. And tall orders at that, right? Oh God, yes. The tallest in fact.

The tallest, exactly. Because, well it's interesting because the book of Job is one of the books that really sets the stage in the biblical corpus for the story of the crucifixion. Right. Because the crucifixion story is, the story of job expanded even more thoroughly. Right.

Now, these shattered assumptions that you describe, they seem to me to be identical to axioms of faith, conceptually speaking. Right. They're a priori commitment except, yes, at some level. Except, you know, they develop, you know, the way we think we should need to think about them is these developed from early infancy, from childhood. I mean these are, they're based in, you know, it's not like somebody's taking a leap of faith.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Faith is based on, you know, you don't need sort of validity in the world is irrelevant. Do you know? That's what faith is about? Right. Um, you don't, things don't have to.

There's no proof. Right. Um, it's, it's, it's, it's, it. You take a leap, an act of faith. These are fundamental beliefs based on experience.

They're not, they're not just, you know, sort of pie in the sky. They're not things that, you know, I want to believe that these are not desires. They're based on, let's say, the infant who is getting good enough parenting, not great parent, good enough parenting, realizes the world is predictable. The child cries, the mother, the father come and help the world becomes meaningful, becomes benevolent, you know, it's good world, I'm getting fed. I must be worth something.

I mean, these are very rudimentary kind of beliefs, but it starts there and it builds and what comes first obviously gets confirmed. I do think, though, you are calling them naive at one level. It's what allows us to wake up in the morning and approach the day. Okay, yeah. Assuming our assumptions haven't been shattered.

They haven't been shattered. That's right. But even if they have been shattered, what is also important to recognize is people that started with these positive assumptions actually do better in coping with the shattered beliefs because they actually have something to kind of move back to. Okay. If you start with very negative beliefs about the world, if you start with, you are going to be more prone to possibly a realistic view of the world being bad.

If that's what bad things do happen in the world to good people, bad things happen to good people that nevertheless you are going to be more prone to depression and anxiety. Just living in the world is harder. Some of these what seem like illusory beliefs are what allow us to be. You talked about motivation. It allows us to be motivated on a daily basis to function and operate and love and care.

So I do think, and they have long term consequences when bad things happen. Because what happens after the shattering is people try to rebuild these assumptions in the best cases. And by the way, most cases, not the cases that all go to psychologists and whatever, if you did huge community surveys, which we did, you find lots of people have gone through some really horrible things and don't necessarily go to a clinician now. Everybody goes to clinicians. 30, 40 years ago, that wasn't the case.

People coped. They did well. No, they had people who cared around them. Their own sort of internal world allowed them to try to deal. One thing that I found that was fascinating, for example, is that self blame was remarkably common after all of these things.

Even when I did some work with people who are paraplegics or quadriplegics from being shot randomly on the street or just truly random events you and I would unquestionably call random for the victim, and these people would still gaze in some self blame. Now, why? And by the way, the only literature that talked about self blame were rape victims, because everybody was blaming the women anyway, right? Which was, just because victims blame themselves doesn't mean they're blameworthy. Okay, so why.

Why blame? Why engage in this in ways that seem inappropriate, given the true situation? It's because that allowed people to get some sense of control, to start believing the world isn't random, to start believing the world is not as bad as they thought, taking some of the blame on themselves. Now, the sad part of that is, of course, other people could then blame them more if they were blaming themselves, when that is not appropriate or legitimate. But what we do in terms of our own coping, I think, is really kind of fascinating.

And that was something that was surprising to me, seeing all this self blame. But there are lots of other ways people coped. They think of worse cases, but people would sort of try to rebuild assumptions. Of course, initially, there's a lot of numbing, and people can't kind of deal with the situation. But over time, you get all the intrusive thoughts, right?

Not the denial, but the intrusive thoughts when you're ready to work on it. And our brains or human species systems are remarkable at working on things that need to be solved, even when we're not consciously doing it, right. And over time, what I found is people did remarkably well. That doesn't mean they barely return to the same, as you would say, naive assumptions. But they turned to more positive assumptions about the world and were sadder but wiser, and now felt that they could basically incorporate the negative events in a broader sort of belief system that still fundamentally positive.

Right? Okay. Okay, so let's. Okay, so let's take a bunch of that apart. Are you or someone, you know, fighting the battle against cancer?

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Jordan Peterson
The first issue I'd like to address there is probably the notion of illusion. So I spent a lot of time looking at Shelley Taylor's work, the necessity of positive illusion. Yeah, well, I am not a fan of the idea of positive illusions in the least. I think it's one of the most dangerous philosophical ideas ever put forward by academics. And I know it's allied with terror management theory too, that we need to.

That we need to inhabit a world of something like necessary fiction. It's predicated on the idea that reality itself is so unbearable that if we ever saw it in its unvarnished form, it would demolish us. But no, I'm not there either. Okay, so a better model, perhaps. Yeah.

Okay. No, go ahead. Go ahead. No, I was going to say, one thing is you were talking about the hierarchy of belief earlier. Go back to that.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Illusory beliefs at the very fundamental level, which allow you to have some positive motivation. Getting up in the morning, dealing with life and so forth. Those actually could be very good. They're a very strong positive motivation to move ahead, to go, to act in the world. You don't want illusions at the higher levels.

Right? You can't. If you do, you're gonna. You actually will not be able to deal with the real world. As I was bringing up before, if I have an illusion about what a good swimmer I am, and I jump into a pool and I can't swim, that's pretty damn unfortunate, right?

So I do think, you know, Shelley and others didn't make this distinction about using hierarchy. But go back to what you were talking about earlier. If you incorporate it into a hierarchical system, illusions at the bottom could be wonderfully and positively motivating. As you move up. They're very, very dangerous.

Right. Okay. So let's focus on that. Because I don't think that the proper replacement for a naive optimism is a functional illusion. Because I don't think that the.

Jordan Peterson
The retooling produces an illusion. So let me explain why.

If you are dealing with people with an anxiety disorder, you can have them organize a hierarchy of fear things they'll avoid, right? And then you can take. You can get them to rank order the severity of that fear and then you can get them to start working on, let's say the least, severe fear, and you can start to expose them to that. You can have them imagine them being in that situation or start acting it out. Now, that exposure is predicated on the idea that if they face what plagues them, they'll prevail.

And that's a faith in learning itself. Because we learn on the edge. Everything we learn is on the edge. Everything we learn is in consequence of some minor confrontation with something we don't understand, some minor retooling of our assumptions, and some growth. Okay?

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Right. Go back to assimilation, accommodation. Exactly. You do that. You do that in a certain way with a certain degree of trepidation and excitement, right?

You learn when you need to accommodate an assimilator. Right? Okay. Right. Right.

Jordan Peterson
Okay. So here's a fundamental assumption that's not illusory. If you face the world forthrightly and voluntarily with faith in your ability to prevail, the pathway forward will make itself known to you in the best manner possible. It's the axiom of learning itself. It's what we facilitate in our children.

And you can make an assumption that it's not unreasonable to make the assumption that the cosmos itself is established on that principle. And I mean that in that deep sense. So the terror management theorist characters, right, deriving their theories from Ernest Becker. I loved Ernest Becker's point. I love Ernest Becker.

But he's also deeply wrong. The hero myth that Becker lays out is not an illusion. It's actually the fundamental principle by which adaptation takes place. Because confronting. So confronting a sequence of minor, no, confronting a sequence of minor traumas, let's say, is exactly what fortifies you, right?

It's the principle of medicine itself. A little bit of the poison is what strengthens you. And it's also, but it's also the nature of learning. And so to have faith in that capacity, above all, is not illusory. In fact, it's faith in the fundamental mechanism by which people formulate their adaptation.

And that's, see, Becker, Becker. There was a whole literature that Becker didn't know of that he didn't pay any attention to, and so he went astray in his fundamental presumptions, and so did the terror management theorists in Congress. But you've got to say, you've got to believe also that not everything works on faith. I mean, there, if you know, the fact that you can't swim, I'm going to go back to this example again, and you jump in the water because you think you can do it. Faith is not going to allow you to survive.

That's stupidity. Yeah, well, that's stupidity. But that's what you're saying. But it sounds like stupidity. But that's what you're saying.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
I mean, the fact is, I think, you know, it's all a matter of opinion, but I think we learn by being exposed to situations that are new that we are able to assimilate if it is too assimilate. Or we can assimilate it because it works, or we can accommodate our structures to basically incorporate it. If there is too much of a disconnect, it doesn't. It can't happen. Right.

Because we don't know. That's right. We don't know how to manage the reorganization. That's trauma. That's right.

In trauma, the disconnect is at the bedrock level, whereas in much daily life, the disconnect. You know, I don't want to talk about small traumas. It's sort of interesting, Jordan, that the word trauma gets so overused now. Right? Yes, that's for sure.

I get a call from a podcaster in England that wants me to talk about all the people being traumatized by the queen's death. This is an old woman that you could expect would die. You know, that's really. I don't call that trauma. Right, right.

And you probably wouldn't either. We now live in a world where the word has gotten so overused that I feel it demeans it in a way that people who really are traumatized and go through your trauma sort of aren't being recognized for what they have. Right. Of course. It's very careless.

Jordan Peterson
Okay, so let's go back to the notion of assimilation and accommodation. Okay? So I want to put a neurological spin on that in relationship to what we're discussing. Okay, so. So you said, and rightly so, you said that we can bite off more than we can chew, and we can neither assimilate nor accommodate.

We can't. We can't digest and we can't adjust ourselves because the. The mouthful was too big. Right. We've taken on.

Okay, okay, so. So here's something. You tell me what you think about this, because I think this is, like, the coolest idea ever. So we're attracted towards optimal challenge by the sense of meaning it grips us. Okay, so instinct is the.

No, meaning is the instinct that puts us on the edge of optimal change. Okay? If we talk about meaning as assimilation. Yes. Yes.

Okay, well, I would say meaning. Meaning is the motivation that puts us on that edge. Okay? Right? And it's something like.

Okay, so now it grips our attention, right? It activates positive emotion. Right? And it. It does something like optimize anxiety because zero anxiety isn't the right amount.

You want to be on. You want to be a little bit on edge. Yeah, a little bit optimally. Optimally. Just like you are when you're preparing to play a game with an optimal opponent.

Right? There's a challenge. Okay. Meaning. Meaning signifies the presence of an optimized challenge, okay?

And that. And that meaning that's not the illusory consequence of a delusional belief designed to protect us from the anxiety of death. Instead, that meaning is a signal that we're on the developmental edge that will best prepare us for all challenges that we might confront in the future. That's fine. Yes.

Okay. Okay. But that. All right. But that's.

So in a hero story, back to Becker. In a hero story, the hero takes on something like a maximal challenge. Now, Becker claimed that we identify with those heroes in an illusory manner to fortify ourselves against the anxiety of death, sort of narcissistically elevating ourselves. But the alternative view is that, no, as a proper sojourner forward, what we're doing is taking on exactly the optimized challenge that expands our skill, that expands our knowledge, that retools our maps, and that makes us optimally prepared when all for the future, even if all hell breaks loose. That seems reasonable to you?

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
I mean, I don't think we go through. I don't think all these things we do in life is based on trying to deny death, which is, of course, Becker's notion. So I do agree with you. I mean, there is this sense of, yes, the challenge. We like the hero stories.

We learn from them. We kind of, life is not simply on a daily basis about denying death. There's no point that we do. I mean, I think we frequently do deny death, but it is not the essence of motivation, which, of course, is what he would claim. Well, I would say, I'm not disagreeing.

With you, that the challenge is extremely important in terms of moving forward both as individuals and as species, you know? So I don't disagree at all. Okay, well, the model that I talked about earlier, the Friston model, the model that I worked on with my students as well, the entropy control model, it's also an interesting and compelling alternative to the death anxiety model because the fundamental enemy in the entropy model isn't death per se. Death is a consequence of unconstrained entropy. Too many things going wrong at once.

Jordan Peterson
Do you in? Right. And so we're trying to constrain and regulate the chaos of our lives and we do that. The question is how we do that. Well, we can do that with illusory and naive beliefs, but they're subject to shattering.

Or we can do that. See, so let me offer you, let. Me tell you another story. I think the key to shattering is not that they're illusory, it's that they're bedrock. That's the shattering of illusions at the upper level.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Wouldn't matter. I mean, that would be very, very unfortunate for dealing with everyday life, but it wouldn't shatter our assumptions. I mean that, you know. Right, well there, I meant that they're all lose. The only reason I meant that they were a loser is because they're susceptible to shattering under dire circumstances.

Jordan Peterson
Right. That's all I meant. That's right. No, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
And they to some extent bellusory because they tend to be positive, right? Well, they tend to be naively positive. Naively positive. Naive. Okay, so let me tell you another story.

Jordan Peterson
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Jordan Peterson
So there's a story at the end of the Exodus adventure. And the reason I'm bringing these stories up is because I believe that the assumption structure that we see the world through is a story. And so I'm looking at the bottom of stories, at the most fundamental stories. Well, our lives are narratives. I mean, there's a very good, there's no question our lives are narratives, right?

Right. Yeah, question. That's. Well, and that's a. That's a hell of a thing to say, because it.

It begs the question, you know, is life itself a narrative? And that begs the question of whether reality itself is best construed as a narrative. It seems to me that it's highly likely. Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
I meant we live our lives as narratives, and when something doesn't fit, we have to make the plot work. Right, right. The Exodus story. Yes. Okay.

Jordan Peterson
So, yeah, so there's a. There's an event that occurs at the end. It's quite. It's a remarkable story. So the Israelites are.

They've made it most of the way through the desert, and they're. But they're still bitching and whining and complaining. They're longing for the previous tyranny. Right. So that's the previous set of assumptions.

They don't like to be lost, which is where they are in the desert when their assumptions are shattered. Yeah. Right. That's exactly right. The desert, that desert sojourn is the shattered assumptions that are a consequence of leaving the tyrannic, tyrannical state.

It's exactly what that represents. I mean, I might not say they were traumatized. I would say that they are, but they are very well, but nevertheless. Go ahead. They're lost.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
They're lost. That's right. They turn to Moses and Aaron and. Yes, okay, right, right. They're lost.

Jordan Peterson
And they're out of water in this scene. Okay. And they get all bitchy about this. They're sick of eating the food that they have, and they're lost, and they're hopeless, and they're longing for tyranny. And God gets tired of their complaining, their faithlessness, let's say, their rebellion against movement forward, and he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes in to bite them.

And so the Israelites get bitten by all these poisonous snakes, and they get kind of sick of it after a while, and they go ask Moses, who they know, to have a connection with God, to intercede, and Moses agrees, and he goes and has a chat with God. And then what should happen is that God calls off the poisonous snakes, and the Israelites move forward. But that's not what happens. And what happens instead is insanely profound. And you know that healing symbol of the physicians?

That's a staff with a serpent around it. Okay, so this is one of the variants of that symbol. Okay, so God tells Moses, take the bronze of the Israelites and cast a staff. So that's like the rod of tradition. That's like the fundamental axiomatic assumption.

Put that in the ground. And on that put a bronze serpent and have all the Israelites look at this, and if they look at it, then the poison won't affect them anymore. Now, this is very interesting. It's very interesting because God could just call off the snakes, but that isn't what he does. He fortifies the Israelites against poison, and he does that by voluntary exposure.

Right, okay. Like aversion therapy. Right? Precisely like that. Precisely like that.

And that's, you know, that's. That is the therapeutic approach, that approach of exposure that every single psychotherapeutic school has converged on in the last hundred years doesn't matter with the origin. The psychoanalysts, the cognitive psychologists, the behaviorists, the existentialists, they all come to the same conclusion. Get your story straight and confront what challenges you. That's the pathway to redemption.

Okay, so here's a cool twist on that story. This has to do with what beliefs are fundamental at the core, not illusory. In the gospels, Christ says to his followers that unless he is lifted up like the serpent in the desert, there's no possibility of redemption. Now, this is a very weird narrative twist, because, first of all, it begs a variety of questions. The first question being, why in the world would Christ refer back to that story?

The second question being, why would he assimilate himself to that figure? It's very unlikely, right? A serpent on a pole. Okay, so this is the conclusion. This has to do with the validity of beliefs, I believe, and it's the antidote to the notion that we need illusion to survive.

So a snake is a pretty bad thing, and a poisonous snake is worse, and a poisonous snake in the midst of a desert is even worse. But it's not the worst thing. What's the worst thing that would be, like, a meta snake? What's the worst possible thing? Well, the worst possible thing is something like an amalgam of the tragedies of life.

You could throw some malevolence in there just for spice. Right? So the worst possible thing is the core of mortality and the fact of malevolence. All right? It's the full confrontation with that that's illustrated in the gospel narrative.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
And so the notion. Okay, well, I'll just close with that, and then I'll let you respond. The idea there, it's something like this. The idea there is that faith in your ability, faith in the human ability to fully confront the limits of mortal experience. And malevolence is the proper foundational axiom, and it allows for the existence of evil.

Jordan Peterson
Right. Okay, so that's right. Yeah. No, I'm totally. I mean, so, you know, that's right.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
You're saying that essentially that these, these illusory, or as you're saying, naive beliefs at the fundamental level allow us to function in the real world. That's right. I mean, I mean, that's a very, this is a very mundane way and simplistic way of saying what you've been talking about. But one of the things I do want to bring up is when we're talking about sort of things that are illusory, in part, they're illusory because they're over generalizations. Okay?

If you say the world is benevolent, you have these beliefs. Part of it is just, it's an overgeneralization of in general, things are. Right. It doesn't take into account all the, you know, all the bad stuff that we know happened. But, so at the fundamental level, what we're talking about, these over generalized beliefs, when people actually end up managing and coping successfully with trauma, they still end up having some beliefs that are essentially less overgeneralized.

They're beliefs that are positive, that now can account for, as you're saying, and these negative events. Okay. But it's interesting to talk about that cognitively. We cannot, as you know, all too well, you know, we cannot actually sort of respond to every single little thing in the world. Most of our beliefs and all of our knowledge involve some over estimation, abstraction over generalization.

Abstraction over abstraction. You know, and when you get to that very top of that hierarchy, then the things may be very, very specific. Right. But the further down we move, the greater the generalization. Yeah, well, and you're pointing out that I don't think there's any difference between noting the undifferentiated and over generalized quality of those initial beliefs and naivety.

Jordan Peterson
That's the same thing. It's the use of an insufficiently detailed map. So the map that the. Or a too optimistic and naive story. So the problem with the belief structure that's amenable to disruption by trauma is that it doesn't take into account the existence, let's say, of tragic randomness and outright malevolence.

Right. And so, and that works fine until you encounter it, but it doesn't work at all once you do. And once you encounter it, having those beliefs actually enables people to actually rebuild the assumptions. And, you know, the only problem I have with the word naive, and even though it's, I think, sort of accurate, is there is a kind of almost person blaming, victim blaming about, you know, naive tay feels like sort of pejorative. Do you know what I'm saying?

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
As opposed to, if we use the cognitive word overgeneralization instead, it doesn't feel quite so negative. But. But, yes, in terms of. But as a descriptor, I think you're right. It's naive.

That's right. You know? Okay, well, so that's. That's interesting, too, because there. This is an ancient argument, right, that the difference between, let's say, ignorance and willful blindness.

Right, right. And you can imagine that someone. Okay, so let God. Let me. Let me tell you a story about that.

So, okay, but we will. We will right away. Right away. We need to know what you want, what you think about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jordan Peterson
We'll do that. We'll do that. We'll do that right away. Maybe we'll just close with this. This part.

With this. Freud talked a lot about the oedipal relationship that was characterized by an overbearing maternal presence and too much dependence. Right. Now, we know that people with dependent personality are more likely to be traumatized now, but let me elaborate on that. I'm not sure that's true, but.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Okay. We'd have to deal with. That's a whole different discussion. Because you're traumatized if you experience basically sort of unusual, out of ordinary events. Right.

Super challenge you. But people who have the most people that already have negative assumptions actually often traumatize less. I don't think the negative. Right. I don't think the negative assumptions are a sign of a more differentiated worldview.

Jordan Peterson
Right. I'm not a fan of the. No, it could be part. It also could be part of dependence, you know, dependent people. But, um.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
But anyway, go ahead. I'm sorry. I apologize for interrupting. Well, well, that. Well, lets see if I can lay this out properly.

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Jordan Peterson
Today, people maintain, maintain, people maintain their undifferentiated viewpoints longer than they might, because when they're faced with minor incidences of, of disconfirming evidence, they turn away. They don't process it. Right. That's. Well, but here's.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
No, I'm not sure. It's wilful moments. Let's say that is cognitive conservatism. If we changed our cognitive schemas every time there was something that didn't fit, it would be a problem. Right.

I mean, things have to build up to change. And that's what, like, you know, look at scientific revolutions, look at cuny and stuff, you know, the notion that we're not going to make a change every second based on one disconfirming stuff. I mean, I actually love cul popper. You know, the notion is we should be cognitively conservative when it comes to our schemas or our theories. It should take a lot to turn them around.

But we should ultimately. But we should ultimately be willing to turn them, right? That would be dependent on the degree of their axiomatic fundamental. Fundamental, yes, exactly. So the notion should be that the deeper you go into the axiomatic structure, the farther down you go, the more absolutely overwhelming the evidence has to be in order to move that assumption.

Yes, absolutely. We totally agree to. Okay. Okay. And so I think the cognitive conservatism, that's something like the, that's the stake in the ground, right?

Jordan Peterson
That's the bedrock of something like tradition or, or cumulative experience. Yeah. You can't let one deviation at the periphery destroy the center, right. That's a catastrophic mistake.

But it isn't only that people are unwilling to change their central beliefs because they're cognitively conservative, they're also prone to turning a blind eye, even to repetitive information that indicates that there's an axiomatic error. Right. No, that's true. Okay. I mean.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
I mean, we could talk about politics now, how we turn our. No, I was gonna say just segueing the confirmation bias. The. You know, we only want to listen to things on our side. We don't want to actually be exposed to the other.

We kind of live in our silos. We confirm what we believe. I mean, this is part of. Part of how we live our lives, unfortunately. Right.

Yes, I totally agree. You know, the fact that we want to confirm what we already believe and expose ourselves to stuff that will confirm it is a very major part of how we construct and live our lives. Right, right. And that's not. That's not.

Jordan Peterson
While you tell me what you think about this, that's not merely cognitive conservatism. That's also active, also motivational. Okay. Right. That's back to what you were saying earlier.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
That's motivational. Right. Right. That's part of the desire. Right.

Jordan Peterson
Well, why, first of all, you know, if we've organized ourselves politically, we have somewhere convenient to put malevolence, and it's not within us. It's in the opposite of our ideological belief. So that's a lovely thing to have. Plus, we've organized the world in a relatively, what would you call it? Oversimplified manner.

And that means we don't have to think and that we're on the side of virtue. So, you know, that's pretty convenient as well. Let's talk about the political landscape, then. So that takes us to your other major book. Yeah, and actually, that's the one that was recently published.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
That's within the last few months as opposed to 30 years ago. Right. That's the two. Morales. Well, start.

Jordan Peterson
Why don't you lay that out first? Lay out your thesis, and then we'll. Discuss that and jump in when I overstate this or go on too long. So I do think that moral psychology is a very helpful lens, an invaluable lens, for understanding our political differences. So let's start with motivation.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
When the fundamental motivational distinction for people, for humans, is, or for any animal, is approach and avoidance. Very simply, pain, pleasure. We approach the good. We want to avoid the bad. Okay.

I actually ended up using these two ways. I first have to talk a little bit about morality and my understanding of the moral map a little to move on to politics. Have at or have atom. Have atom. Okay.

So if you think about approach and avoidance, I sort of make a distinction in morality between two kinds of morality. One is prescriptive and one is proscriptive. Prescriptive is based in avoidance. These are the things we shouldn't do. You shouldn't lie, you shouldn't steal, you shouldn't cheat.

Right? We all know that. Right? Is that the same as conscience? That's proscriptive morality.

Well, conscience is sort of a. Is a sort of internal mechanism that allows us to know the rules and the norms and pushes us in the right direction. Yes, but proscriptive morality is about not doing the wrong thing. It's based on inhibition, constraint, and so forth. Prescriptive morality is doing the right thing.

It's a difference between not harming and helping. Right. And our default moralities based on interpersonal interactions, who we're interacting with. Don't harm. That is, don't steal, don't lie, don't cheat and help.

Right? Be kind, respect others, you know, help. Right. Now, that difference. And by the way, motivationally, they're not harming and helping are not the same thing.

They're not just opposite sides of the same coin. They're opposite in many ways. The child who doesn't, you know, is told not to take somebody else's toys and doesn't take the toys, isn't necessarily good at sharing his or her own right. So. So the prescriptive and the proscript are really quite different.

And in fact, children learn proscript morality, the do nots much more readily, quicker than. More quickly than the do's. Okay? I've mapped the moral domain based on that, and I'm not going to go through the personal and interpersonal domain. What I want to move to is the group domain.

So group based moralities that are proscriptive or prescriptive. Proscriptive morality. The shorthand for that is protect, protect from harm. Okay. The morality of protecting from harm versus providing for well being.

Okay. Instead of proscriptive and prescriptive, they're very wordy words, right? So let's think about morality as rules and norms that facilitate group living. In part, they're based on protecting from harm. The group, protecting the group from harm in this case, and providing for the group.

Those are the two basic tasks for group living, right? Defending and providing. And when I've looked at this, these two moralities, which, by the way, I should also argue motivationally, what is the.

What is the most difficult part of do not if your temptation has to be inhibited. In the case of the proscriptive or the protect the enemy of free script morality, the provider is not having to tamp something down. It's not temptation. It's apathy. It's not caring.

Right? So what I have, if you look at liberals and conservatives, they don't differ in terms of how much they think you should be helping, or they may say you should help different people, but both groups believe you shouldn't harm and you shouldn't steal and lie and cheat, and you should help your neighbor and you should be kind and respect other people. Where you start seeing huge differences is the group based morality, which in the case of a proscriptive group, Gates morality, the protective, protecting the group looks like social order. What people are after is social order, stability and security of the group. And in the case of a prescriptive, it looks like social justice providing for the group so everybody is cared for, a shared communal responsibility.

So we have this social order and social justice, which are quite different. But it turns out those are not correlated. They're negatively correlated. Every other area of morality, protecting and providing are highly correlated. Okay, so I want to move to this.

Jordan Peterson
How did you determine that they weren't correlated? Well, because we took large samples of self described liberals and conservatives. Okay. And you can see what their support for these various beliefs, belief systems, social order. We have, there are constructs that underlie that.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
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Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
I actually believe that both liberalism and conservatism are morally based. Now, I'm on the left, so, but I believe very strongly that liberals and conservatives have to work together to preserve our system. I do. Why? You said why?

Jordan Peterson
In some sense, right? Because you need order and you need provision. You need order and in many ways you cannot. We're not going to preserve a democracy with just half the country opting for it. Right?

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
I mean, if you look at any presidential election, about half the country votes Democrat and half a Republican. Now I do want to put a disclaimer here. You know, I do think that the people that wield these ideologies are not necessarily moral. And I want to say that, you know, if you are a MAGa conservative where the core of your political belief now is based in a big lie, I'm not opting for I'm not saying that these are moral. I'm already precluding morale morality there.

Okay. But I think there are huge numbers of conservatives in our country. That and your country as well. Right? Are you canadian?

Correct. I'm canadian. Canadian. Right. Use lots of conservatives that I disagree with, probably in terms of policy, but I'd be happy to sit down and talk about it.

We'd find out there are lots of things that we'd agree about. Okay. We'd find out that we both care about family. We care about community. Liz Cheney's a great example of this.

Everybody I know on the left says, I'd be happy to sit down with Liz Kitchen. She has integrity. I don't agree with her about any policy, but she has proven that she is a person that's moral. Okay. So I want to take.

I do want to say, I'm not talking about the MAgA conservatives right now.

We only have to go to the global party system. Global party survey of 2000 international with 2000 experts on parties and elections who now have claimed that our republican party in the US is an alt right party. It is no longer considered a mainstream republican party. The Democrats are considered a mainstream liberal party. So we're now talking about a party that isn't even really a mainstream conservative party.

But let's put all of that aside, all right? There is a reason to believe that half the world, half the US, half of Canadians probably, or tend towards a conservative half, tend toward a liberal. These are not, I don't believe, as hibbing and his colleagues do, that politics is inherited. I do think there are some temperamental differences early on that can lead people to one direction, another. You know, all the literature on threat sensitivity for conservatives, threat sensitivity, we talk about that as if that's necessarily a bad thing.

That's not necessarily bad. Somebody has to be sort of alert for threat. Right? We know when you look at eye tracking, for example, studies, conservatives are more likely to look at the negative, et cetera. Liberals are more likely to look at the positive, or at least don't differentiate.

Liberals are more. The psychological attribute that defines liberals is openness. So you have openness versus a sensitivity to threat. These do lead to very different kinds of policies and concerns. Okay?

There's no question. Unfortunately, I think a lot of social order could. In fact, if you have an interest in social order, you could actually believe in working towards greater equality, which basically really would help social order a great deal. But in fact, what most can sort of move towards instead are abortion, social issues, abortion and same sex marriage and, you know, doctors and suicide and prohibitions. These are based on constraint and they are based on prohibition.

That's exactly right. Which is proscriptive. Yeah. I'm sorry. So, yes, well, so that while that's, I want to make sure that I'm, I've got the argument exactly right here.

Jordan Peterson
And so let me lay out what you said and tell me if I've got it correct. The best evidence that I know of for distinguishing between conservatives and liberals is temperamental. Right? The liberal types, the progressive types, are higher in openness and lower in conscientiousness, especially orderliness. Right?

And then the conservatives are the reverse of that, low in openness and high in conscientiousness, especially orderliness. And so they see less possibility in potential compared to the liberals, which is why the liberals tend to be open border types, because they see beyond the constraints, something like potential that can be creatively engaged with, whereas the conservatives are more likely to think, no, that's a place where all help can break loose. And the problem is. Yeah, well, the problem is they're both right. Because what's beyond you can be very promising and engaging, and what's beyond you can do you in so.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Well. Yeah, well, let's think about what, what would be the attributes that conservative will be looking for? Strength and power. Okay. You're talking about threat, you know, trying to protect, protect from the group, right?

Strength and power, socially defined roles. Everybody knows what, where they fit, you know, for stability. Tradition is looked at and culture, you know, as markers to fight self interest, et cetera, et cetera. Liberalism doesn't really, that's not what liberalism is about at all. Liberalism is about equality, greater equality for groups, you know, providing resources for groups, very different kinds of interests here.

Liberalism wants regulation. Liberals want regulation in the economic domain, right? We want people to have, we believe in sort of entitlements that help people, you know, Social Security and welfare if you need food, and believe in trying to establish greater equality, right? That's the economic domain. Conservatives actually really are more interested in unfettered capitalism, right?

The unfettered economy. They want autonomy in the economic domain. Conservatives, given the interest in socially defined roles, cultured tradition and so forth, they focus on norm adherence, strong norm adherence. Norm adherence and strict rules really is a social domain. They want regulation around things like abortion and same sex marriage and things of this sort.

And they want autonomy. We have policies that are completely mirror image. One group wants regulation in economics, liberals, and the other wants autonomy there. And conservative regulation in social domain. And liberals want autonomy there.

So you get this crazy thing, which is why people have always said, why is it that conservatives really, you know, they want to be so strict about abortion, but, you know, don't touch the economy? Well, it's because it's not their domain. You see. It's not where the morality, the morality doesn't touch that for them, that it's not a relevant domain. So, okay.

Jordan Peterson
So let me ask, well, that's okay. That's okay. Let me ask you this. I'll put a good word in for the conservatives. I know you have been doing that as well with regards to the necessity of maintenance of social order.

But there's also another difference that seems to me striking. And I don't think the conservatives are very good at playing this out. The reason that the conservatives with integrity want autonomy in economic matters is so that individuals rather than the state can bear the responsibility for provisions. Right. Well, why is, but why is that, okay, I understand the argument, but why is that better people, here's the thing.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
The conservative mantra is equal opportunity. Equal opportunity. I get so very tired of hearing that because you never have equal opportunity if people are not starting at the same place. Right. What's equal opportunity?

If somebody has a lot of money they've inherited from their parents and somebody has nothing, you say there's equal opportunity. There's not. It's like running a race with some people starting, you know, a lap ahead, you know, so even this notion of individuals should be responsible. It's not that liberals don't think, well, it's not that it matters. It's not just individuals.

Jordan Peterson
It's not just individuals. Don't believe that. I mean, you're right. People are also responsible. But, you know, you, it's a, I love, you know, the notion that picking people up by their own bootstraps and how important that is.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
And you go back to Martin Luther King and he says, well, you know, some people don't even have boots. You know, it's important to remember that we just, you know, we are, we start in very different places based on social policies in the past. Right. So it's not as if people who work hard shouldn't also do well. It's that lots of people who work very hard still can't get ahead.

So, you know, it's this notion of individuals should be responsible for those who can make it without the help. Great. But you want, I think, I believe in sharing and sharing communal responsibility. I believe in that. Maybe that is a liberal belief that it's not each person for him or herself, and you make or you break.

It's that we have a responsibility to each other. We're in this game together. We go around once in life, you know, help each other. And that includes having a system, government. Right.

That's, that's what we got. Helping those who need it. Right. You know, and I don't think that's inconsistent with people also working hard. Right.

Okay. So this is what I, this is what I would recommend for the time being, I think we should continue this discussion of the political on the daily wire plus side. I'm happy to do that. Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that.

Jordan Peterson
And so, yeah, so that's a reasonable, we covered a lot of material. That's a reasonable place to draw this part of the conversation to an end for everybody watching and listening. Thank you for your time and attention. First of all, on the YouTube side. Yeah, I didn't know it was already ten or six.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman
Thank you. Yeah. Well, there we go. That's the consequence of an engrossing conversation. Okay.

Jordan Peterson
So for everybody watching on YouTube, thank you very much for your time and attention. I'm going to continue this conversation behind the Daily Wire plus platform paywall. And so if you want to join us there, please do, and we'll hash out some more of our discussion with regards to conservatism and liberalism. Thank you very much. Doctor Janoff, is it?

Sorry? Yanoff Bowman. No, it's Ronnie. It is Janoff Bowman. It's Janoff.

Okay. Yes. Okay. And yeah, thank you very much for walking me through your thoughts on shattered assumptions and your political ideas. We're going to continue that.

And thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale for making this possible. And to the Daily wire plus people for putting this all together. And feel free, everyone, to join us. And the film crew here. Yes.

Right. Right. So thank you. And we'll take five and we'll reestablish contact on the daily wire plus side. All right, bye, everybody.

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