Meaning, Depression, & the Weight of the World

Jordan B. Peterson
Please enjoy today's episode of the Doctor Jordan B. Peterson podcast, a special presentation from the beyond order tour shot on location in Dublin, Ireland.

And now, please welcome Tammy Peterson.

Tammy Peterson
Hello Dublin.

My grandfather was from Belfast, so when I come here I kind of. Yeah, right on. So Doctor Peterson's going to come out here tonight. I'm sure you're very much looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to it.

And with that I won't let you wait any longer. I'll invite Doctor Jordan B. Peterson out on stage.

Jordan B. Peterson
You Irishmen are such an excitable bunch. It's always fun to come to Dublin. I think it's probably too much fun to come to Dublin, actually. Yeah. So it's really remarkable to see you all here and appreciate, as I always do appreciate the fact that you've all taken the time and expended the effort to come and see this.

I thought I would wander through the 24 rules and I don't know how many I'll address, but we'll see how it goes. So maybe we'll start with a rule from the first book, twelve rules. Treat yourself. This is rule number two. Treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping.

That's a hard one. There's an injunction, a moral injunction that you should treat other people like you would like to be treated yourself. The golden rule, let's say, rather than he who has the gold makes the rules. Right?

That's not an injunction to sacrifice yourself in some unending way for the benefit of other people, which is often how it's interpreted. And it's not that.

It's advice in relationship to reciprocity. And this is something really worth knowing. I've been thinking about this for a long time because I got interested in the nature of malevolence and motivation for atrocity. I got interested in the nature of evil. And certainly as a consequence of studying atrocious behavior at the clinical level, and then also at the political and economic and sociological level, I definitely became convinced that it's a very naive person indeed who doubts the existence of evil.

I think it's easier to become convinced of the reality of evil than it is to become convinced of the reality of good. It's easier to define evil than it is to define good. But if you can specify the nature of evil, you help yourself infer the existence of good, because you can say to yourself, you can conclude that whatever good is, difficult though it may be to put your finger on it, it's the opposite of evil. I did have this inkling you know, way years ago, when I taught at Harvard, I was teaching about very dark things, about individual motivation for the sort of acts that characterize, say, the worst atrocities of the Holocaust and catastrophic situation with regards to stalinist Russia. Those were the two places I focused on the most.

And I had this voice in the back of my head always, when I was lecturing very serious lectures, that if I could really manage those lectures properly, I would do it with a sense of humor. And I thought, that just cannot be right. How in the world can you deal with a topic that dark in a manner that's playful? I thought that's. But the voice wouldn't go away.

And I knew there was something to it. I knew there was something to it. And so I've been trying to think about, how do you concisely conceptualize the opposite of evil? How can you tell when things are going in the opposite direction? If there's a malevolent spirit that might inhabit you if you walk down the darkest possible road?

What would be the opposite of that spirit, if it is inhabiting you, so to speak, if you were walking down the most positive of roads? And I would say, I do believe this to be the case, that that's play. So, you know, children play. And it says that there's a gospel statement that unless you become as little children, you'll never enter the kingdom of heaven. That's a very complicated statement.

It means, in part, to regain the pristine perceptions of wonder that you had as a gift, in some sense, when you were a child. If you have children, young children, you get to partake in that, if your eyes are the least bit open. Because one of the things that's absolutely wonderful about young children and having them around and the way, in some sense, they pay you for the painstaking care that you need to exercise when you're caring for them is that they enable you to see the world through fresh eyes and to see things in their untrammeled by cynicism glory. And it's hard to open yourself up to that, especially if you're an adult who's built layers of shells around yourself for any number of reasons. But children offer you that opportunity.

One of the reasons that you should become as a little child is so that you can see miracles when they unfold in front of you, instead of being blinded by your own defense of cynicism. And children can definitely help with that. But also children play. And, you know, we sort of stop playing as we grow older and we think we mature out of it. But that's not right.

What happens is that we can no longer do it. And a lot of that, I think, is associated with the shock of puberty, you know, because you have to integrate sexuality into play. And that's really hard. It's really challenging for people, partly because you're more likely to be rejected on the sexual front, for example. And that's very hard on people.

And then also it's a more dangerous game, that's for sure. And so it's a big challenge. And a lot of people stop playing when they're teenagers. One of the reasons I think that we've had somewhat of an explosion of unhappiness and mental illness, particularly among women, by the way, over the last 30 years is because a lot of what we've done inadvertently has interfered with children's ability to play. And so, for example, it's very hard for boys to play in school because almost everything they're required to do is antithetical to the rough and tumble ethos of masculine play.

That's really hard on young boys and with young girls. Oh, I was talking, I believe it was to Jonathan Haidt, recently a famous psychologist in the United States. And he said that girls have almost stopped doing patty cake and skipping and that sort of thing, you know? And these are deeply embodied forms of play that might be something like the female equivalent of rough and tumble play among males. And that rough and tumble play is a form of embodied dance, you know, because if you're wrestling and fathers really like to do this with their kids, and kids really like it and they really need it, it teaches you the extent of your body, you know, it teaches you how to twist your body and to push it to its limits and to expose yourself to fear.

You know, maybe your father throws you up in the air and catches. You can imagine doing someone doing that to you as an adult, twelve foot high person just tosses you in the air and catches you. It's no wonder children sort of scream with terror and delight, but. But they do. And they really, you just can't believe how much they need that to engage in that play because they also learn what hurts them and what doesn't.

Because the most fun, direct, physical play with kids pushes them right to the ragged edge of disaster. Right. It's like it's right where it almost hurts, that it's most exciting. And partly what you're doing when you're playing is calibrating it to make sure that it's as exciting as possible, but not too exciting. The rough and tumble play is deeply embodied.

It's not just abstract, right? It involves pain and anxiety and excitement and frustration and turn taking and attention. It's very sophisticated. And that's just on the rough and tumble front. And then later, you know, as kids develop, they start to engage in pretend play.

And there's no difference between pretend play and thinking they are the same thing. You know, when children envision who they might be, they construct a fictional character, a father or mother playing house, let's say. That's very common form of pretend play. And then they act it out. And in doing so, they inhabit the roles that they're going to take on as they're adults.

And if they don't do that, they don't know how to do it. You know, one of the things I was worried about to some degree, when my son was little, he had an older. His older sister about a year and a half older. He was often surrounded by her friends, and they used to dress him up like, as a princess or a fairy. And I was always looking kind of askance at that.

So I didn't want it to go too far, you know, whatever that meant. But then I realized when I was watching, he was having fun, and so were they. And I was watching it very carefully to see what was going on. And I thought, oh, I got to leave this completely alone because what he's doing is acting out what it's like to be a girl. And how in the world are you going to understand that if you can't act it out?

And then if you forbid it, say you can't do that? Well, what's the message? It's like, you can't understand females. Well, of course you can't, but you shouldn't stop your.

You shouldn't stop your son from trying, that's for sure. And so. And that should be done in a spirit of play. And, you know, if you're. If you have a good marriage, good partnership with anyone, I don't care who it is, but let's say a marriage, the more that you can elevate what you're doing to play, the better off you are in every possible way.

You know, there are preconditions for play among children. One precondition is the person that you would like to play with has to want to play with you. Right? It has to 100% be voluntary. It cannot emerge.

Even. We know this, even psychobiologically. There's a fair bit known now about the, say, the underlying neurological circuitry that's involved in play because there's a specialized neurological apparatus in mammals for play. And it's not merely a decoration on top of something more fundamental. This is a very, very deep and fundamental part of the human psyche and the psyche of any animal that has to engage in reciprocal, repeated social interaction.

Because you might ask yourself, how do you know if you're interacting with another person properly? Well, you might ask, well, what does properly mean? Well, it might mean they want to interact with you. It might mean they want to interact with you in a way that could repeat many, many times and maybe improve as it's repeating. No, you want to get along with people and you want it to work now, but you want it to work now in a way that gets better across time.

And then you might think if that's the right way to act, whatever that means, and it's a stable right way to act, because it emerges out of iterated social interactions that you might have an instinct to mark when that's happening. And that's what happens when you play. And people find that absolutely delightful. If you're sitting around with your friends in a bar, generally you're joking around. And, you know, that can get kind of rough, but it doesn't have to, but it could edge towards rough because that's kind of fun.

And it's a bit proddy, you know, to see where you can find the edge. And that can be riotously entertaining. And that's all done in the spirit of play. And so you could say that a proper friendship is actually predicated, has its basis in the spirit of play. And then with regards to the atrocity and evil that I was discussing earlier, say, well, if it's power and compulsion and pride, let's say self centeredness, a kind of narrow self centeredness and a narcissism, hatred, a bitterness, all of that mangled together, resentment, vengefulness, that all constitutes the central spirit that inhabits you if you're acting in a malevolent manner, what might be the opposite of that?

And I do think it's the spirit of voluntary play. You know, I had a vision of heaven at one point. Heaven was a place where people were eternally playing, and it was a place where everything was good, but everyone was playing to make it better yet. So it was a combination of what was really good, but that wasn't the end of it. And maybe that's because being itself is not good enough.

You want becoming as well, right? You don't want things to be static and perfect. You want them to be as good as they can be, but dynamic so there's still something to do. And so you could play at making things better and better. And that would be lovely if that was true, right?

If you could have what you wanted, if you really think it through, you might think, well, it would be lovely if everyone could play a voluntary game that everyone wanted to play that was aimed at making things good. But even when they're good, the aim was to make them even better. And then it would even be better if when you were doing that, it was marked by a sense of, what would you say? A profound sense of positive engagement and the cessation of negative emotion. And one of the other things we do know about play is that it's quite disruptible by other motivational states.

So it's not that easy for children to play if they're hungry or tired or anxious or upset or hurt. If your children are playing spontaneously, it's actually a mark that what you've created around them is a walled garden, right? The walls protect them, so there's not too much chaos and uncertainty. And the garden is this place where things can flourish. A playground is a walled garden in any real sense.

Walled garden paradise. Paradise means walled garden, by the way. It's a balance between culture and nature, or between structure and possibility. You could also think about a walled garden as a game. Because a game isn't.

You can do anything you want. A game is. Here's some principles. Rules, you might say. Here's some principles by which you can govern your behavior within that set of principles.

Here's some play, right? Some freedom to maneuver. Not so much that you drown and no one knows what they're doing. Just exactly the right amount so that it's playful. That's how it looks.

Clorox Representative
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Hey, Janice. I am so sorry. I thought I was on mute. No, we don't need to reschedule. I'll just stay off camera.

Oh, yeah, that happens. So start clean with Clorox.

Use Clorox products as directed and so back. To treat yourself like you are someone you're responsible for helping. Well, you want to approach other people in the spirit of play, but I would say, even though you probably shouldn't teach people to play with themselves, so to speak, it's the right attitude to bring to bear on yourself, too. And that's a hard thing to do, you know, like, we tend to think that most people, if we're cynical, we think, well, people are rather selfish, they're self centered, they only want what's good for themselves. It's like, first of all, that's actually not true.

Jordan B. Peterson
There are some people who will routinely take advantage of other people to get what they want in the moment. But that's pretty rare in its extreme forms, which would be psychopathy, let's say it's extreme forms. It's never more than about 3% of people. And then around the psychopaths, there might be another kind of cloud of narcissists who are inclining in the same direction but haven't got quite so far. And maybe you could add another 5% on that, you know, depending on the severity.

But that's. It's just not the case for most people. Most people have the reverse problem. They treat themselves worse than they treat other people. And why?

Well, why would you do that? Well, you know, maybe you treat other people not so well because you think they deserve it. And why would you think that? Well, because you know, things about them aren't as good as they could be. And you know that they've made mistakes, they've walked off the pathway, they've done things they shouldn't have done.

And so you don't treat them as well as you might otherwise. But then you know that about yourself more than you know that about anyone else, right? You have privileged access if you want it, and even if you don't, you sort of have privileged access to the entire panoply of sins that you're responsible for. And that's a lot, you know, and most people bear a pretty damn heavy burden of existential guilt, and some of that isn't warranted. You know, lots of times you see people in the freudian sense, who have a superego that's yelling at them too vociferously.

You know, one of the things you do in therapy for people who are hyper conscientious to the point where their own internal voice is a tyrant is you try to moderate that. And so people can call themselves out on their misbehavior too much. But even if you don't do that, generally you have quite a lot of misbehavior. And as a consequence of that, you're ashamed and uncertain about your own value. And so then you don't think you really need deserve to be treated very well, and so then you don't.

And one of the things you do as a psychotherapist is, well, a lot of what I did. For example, people sometimes would fall into a situation where they were being terribly accused of some misbehavior by maybe in a divorce case or maybe at work, and I would help them mount a defense for themselves. It's like, you know, we have the presumption of innocence, right? Which is a complete bloody miracle, that presumption. It's such a miracle that our legal system actually starts from that perspective, because it'd be so much easier just to say you're accused of something.

Hell, there's 20 million people in the vicinity. We don't need you. Maybe you're guilty. Off with your head. That's way simpler than despite the fact that 40 people are coming after you with accusations, we have to assume you're innocent.

God. And it's very hard to do that for yourself, you know, to mount a defense. And one of the things I used to have my clients do, if they're in such a situation is write out a defense. It's like, treat yourself like you're innocent just for the sake of argument. We can also do the same thing on the guilt front.

You know, maybe you should make a case when you're in trouble about why you're guilty as well as why you're innocent, to lay out the whole territory, but at least you should defend yourself. And then we might say, also, if you think other people are worth taking care of, if you think that other people have value, well, there are individuals like you, and it doesn't seem all that plausible that they could have value and that you don't, unless you're the worst person around, and you're probably not. I mean, you're bad enough, but on average, you're no worse than everybody else. Maybe in your worst moments, you know, you managed to climb to a new pinnacle. But generally speaking, you know, other people are carrying a fair way to guilt around on their shoulders, too.

And so if anyone has value, then you do. So what would happen if you treated yourself that way? And this is a dead serious question, and it isn't a matter of thought, you know, there's a gospel statement which is very mysterious. Knock and the door will open. Ask and you will receive.

Seek and you'll find. And that, on the face of it, seems utterly preposterous, because could the world possibly be laid out in that manner? That seems too good to be true. And you've asked plenty and haven't received. It's like, yeah, maybe not you know, because you got to ask yourself what ask would mean.

That might mean something like, well, first of all, you have your head screwed on straight about who you are. It's like are you willing to act in your own best interest? And that doesn't mean are you willing to give rein to your impulsive hedonism. You know, the problem with impulsive hedonism, and that's sort of at the core of what we tend to describe as selfishness, because a selfish person is an impulsive hedonist who will sacrifice other people to that impulsive hedonism. And the reason I say impulsive hedonism is because it's impulsive because you want what you want right now and you want it regardless of its future costs.

And that might be future costs even for you, you know, you know, when you act impulsively, you go and you party too much, let's say you have too much fun and you know, you're burning tomorrow, in the next couple of days to exaggerate the intensity of what you have right now. And you know that everyone knows or you learn soon that that's just not sustainable. You know, you have to treat yourself in the moment in a way that doesn't interfere with how you're going to function tomorrow and next week and a month from now and next year and five years down the road. You can't sacrifice the future for the present. If you're an impulsive hedonist, you're not exactly selfish.

You're selfish and immature and you're selfish because it's about you, but you're stupidly selfish because it's about you now. And that's just unwise in every sense of the word. You know, the younger you are, and I mean chronologically, the more impulsive and hedonic, hedonically oriented in some deep sense, you are. Two year olds are very impulsive. And that's why we don't let them set up colonies and live independently.

They can't govern their behavior with regards to future consequences. They're not mature and wise enough to have that breadth of view. And hopefully as you mature, you become capable of regulating your behavior in the present so that your own path goes, at least stays steady, but hopefully even goes uphill. And so that's back to this rule is treat yourself like you're someone you are responsible for helping, is that I think in some real sense you want to enter into the kind of relationship with yourself that's also marked in its highest manner by the spirit of play. And we know this, too.

We look for experiences like this all the time to put us in that place, although we don't necessarily notice that. That that's what we're doing. When you go to a concert, you go to hear musicians play, and when you go to a dramatic production, a movie, you see people playing a part, and the playing part of that isn't trivial, and you go there to participate in the play, and you do the same thing when you go to a sports event, you know, and you. And you do it in an embodied way. And it's so interesting to watch, you know, if you're watching a football game and some remarkable player makes a remarkable shot, you'll jump up to your feet and throw your arms in the air before you even notice, right?

It's completely spontaneous. It's completely bottom up. It's not that much different than what you do when you're at a comedy show and you spontaneously laugh. You don't hear think, that's a funny joke. I should laugh.

There's no thought between the joke and the catching of the punchline and the spontaneous reaction. And you do that because you want to experience that sense of play. And we'll pay for the privilege of being in a place that's setting that up, is facilitating it. And we all regard that, especially when it's going well, you know, when you maybe you're going to listen to a great band, it's a genre that really speaks to you, and the band just gets cooking, you know, and everyone knows what that means. And means they're playing off each other.

That often happens when they're good at improvising, you know, so they're not just doing it note for note, although that can be great. But it's even better when they could do it note for note, but then start to play, and they just get into a rhythm that's something else. And if it's really working well, then everyone in the whole place is in the same rhythm, and it's all pulsing with the same beat, let's say. And everyone's just thrilled out of their mind, which is why there's, like 50,000 people doing it. And it's useful to know, what are you doing there?

And the answer seems to be, you're playing along with your favorite band. That's a pretty good deal, because you've got these highly skilled, creative people up front doing their best, allowing you to mimic that in some real sense as part of the experience. People will sing along and they'll dance. That's all mimicry. You can't help but dance.

That's all part of the spirit of play.

You treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. It's a serious injunction, even though its aim is play. And this is part of asking, too, before you receive, it's like, okay, give yourself the benefit of the doubt, even though it's hard, given your appalling, pathetic, ignorant, lazy nature, you know, and all the things you could be that you aren't, you aren't. It's hard to give yourself the benefit of the doubt. But you could say, well, would it really be so terrible if my life wasn't miserable?

Would it be so terrible if I got what I wanted and needed, especially if I was doing that in the best possible way? And that has to be a serious question, right? You can't just tell yourself this. You have to open yourself up to the possibility that that might be true. Then you can say to yourself, well, if I could have what I needed and wanted in a manner that would be best for me, and you can imagine that takes a fair bit of orientation to get that question right, then what would my life look like?

And that's a frightening question. People generally are loath to ask themselves that question because there's a couple of reasons. One is maybe you feel you don't deserve it. Well, another is you don't know that that's what you should do. Because we're so badly taught that this idea is generally not presented to people, which is just absolutely appalling beyond belief, as far as I can tell.

But then there's more impediments, too, because one of the things people do to buttress themselves against failure is to never let themselves really gain clarity about what they need and want. Let's say you try something, but you only do it half heartedly, and then you fail, and you think, well, I didn't really fail because, you know, I held a bunch back in reserve and so I didn't get what I wanted. But maybe had I been all in, I would have. And so you don't have to upbraid yourself too much for the failure now. It's a catastrophic way to live, to sit on the fence and to not commit, because instead of risking the possibility of failure, you engage in what's essentially the absolute certainty of failure.

Because if you want something worthwhile and difficult, which you probably do, if you want to have an adventure and go somewhere, then what's the chance you're going to get it? If you're halfway in, it's like if you can, then you didn't aim high enough, obviously, and that's not going to be exciting or engaging. And so if you're actually pursuing something that would motivate you maximally, you can't be halfway in. But that sort of protects you against failure, because you can tell yourself, well, if I tried, I could have done it. It's like, you know, you tell yourself that 200 times and your life's over.

And so I would seriously not recommend that. And then another problem is that if you let yourself know what you need and want, then you can betray yourself. Right? So do you trust yourself? And the answer is, well, not really.

And the reason is, well, trusted myself before, and I misbehaved terribly, so why would I do that again? And fair enough, you know, that's a solid question. But on the other hand, if you don't let yourself know what you need and want, what's the probability that you're going to do a random walk in the right direction, especially given that there's lots of ways to randomly walk and there are very few pathways to what you really need and want. And so it's an act of faith, and I don't mean the belief in preposterous things. I mean an act of existential courage to ask yourself what you need and want.

Imagine you wanted to live without bitterness. You want to live without cynicism and maybe even more, you wanted to live in something approximating a spirit of play. What would you need and want to make that happen? Well, it's very terrifying to allow yourself to envision that. First of all, because you've made your conditions for failure very clear.

Second, because you've set yourself up to betray yourself in a fundamental way. Start clean with Clorox, because Clorox delivers a powerful clean every time, because messes happen. Because, hey, listen, remember how you told me to toss those takeout containers before we left for vacation? And you were like, I'm serious, if that leaks over the counter, it'll be a slimy abomination by the time I get back. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Janice
Don't worry about it. I won't forget. Well, oh, yeah, that happens. So start clean with Clorox. Use Clorox products as directed.

Clorox Representative
Rinse after use if in contact with food surface. And third, often the apprehension of the distance between you and that goal can also be demoralizing and overwhelming. Now, I think the way you deal with that is you can make a lot of progress incrementally. You know, once you specify a goal. You don't have to leap from where you are to the goal in one fell swoop.

Jordan B. Peterson
If you could, you probably didn't set a difficult enough goal. It's okay to make incremental movement forward. That's why there's another rule here, which is compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. You know, if you get the comparison right, you can say, well, here's where I'm headed, and it's worth going to. You have to ask yourself that, is there a place I could head to that would be worth getting to?

And that's a question, right? Question like you might ask your wife. It's like, okay, if I could give you what you wanted. It's a good thing to ask during an argument, by the way. Really?

Really. It has to be an honest question. It's like you're arguing with me. I don't know who's right. Neither of us, because we're both clueless and confused.

It's like, if you could have what you wanted in this moment and I could deliver it, what would it be? The general answer to that is something like, if you loved me, you'd know. Which is not a helpful. How come you know that answer? It's not a helpful answer.

It's like, no, I'm. I'm too stupid to know what you want, that's for sure. I mean, you don't even know what you want, so how in the world am I going to figure it out? But it's a lovely gift to offer your partner, by the way, the conditions for your satisfaction. But then you have to allow yourself to know what they are and you have to be acting in your own best interest.

And then that exposes you to all these potential calamities that we just described. And that's a big risk, but it's not nearly as big a risk as never getting what you want and need. And that is definitely the alternative. And that's a pathway to bitterness and cynicism and a wasted life and bitterness and cynicism. That's just where that starts.

It gets way worse as it compounds. And so it's very useful to treat yourself like you're someone you're responsible for helping. And it is very useful to compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to someone else's today. There's no way of interacting with someone, including yourself, that's more productive than to give targeted reward where credit is due. To give credit where credit is due.

And you might say, well, how can I treat myself. Well, given that I'm nothing but the embodiment of serpentine, what would you call it? Errors and sins. And the answer is, well, if you're a little better than you were previously, that's something really. And maybe that's what you want to see in your kids, right?

I mean, you don't want to push them too far. You don't want to punish them if they haven't made huge leaps forward developmentally. What you want to see is incremental progress that requires some effort, and that's actually what your kids really love, too. You know, if they're playing hard, they're on the edge. They're pushing themselves to develop their skills.

Maybe they're playing a sport. They're pushing themselves to move incrementally at the optimum rate. That's another thing that play indicates, by the way, and that's so cool to know, too. Play signals that you're pushing yourself forward at the optimal rate because you can't stay static and you can't absorb too much change at once. How do you know when it's right?

Well, it's engaging, it's meaningful, but at the highest level, it's something like play. You know, when kids, when you're. When you're playing a sport, you want to play against someone who's approximately the same level of skill as you, or maybe a little beyond, right. If you're playing a game with someone who's approximately your equal, and you're pushing each other exactly enough to facilitate optimal movement forward. And that's actually a very good conceptual scheme for apprehending the nature of a marriage.

So I found out from Ben Shapiro, interestingly enough, that there's a translation in the King James Bible of God's description of Eve before he makes her says, the King James version says that God says he's going to make adam a helpmeet. And that's an archaic word, right? No, no. You don't call your wife your helpmeet generally, or you're going to get a slap probably, if you do. But my point is, it's an archaic term.

The biblical language means something like beneficial adversary. And that's very nice. You know, it's very nice because a beneficial adversary would be someone that you're pushing against, and that's pushing against you exactly the right amount. And there's this phenomena phenomenon that's known neurologically called opponent processing. And a lot of the manners in which we make difficult and calibrated decisions neurologically involves two systems working in counter position to one another.

So imagine I want to move my hand smoothly, as smoothly as possible. That's pretty smooth, but I'm shaking a little bit and it's a bit jerky because I'm using voluntary systems to move my hand, and they're a little imprecise. If I want to move it perfectly, I go like this, and then I can calibrate it unbelievably, precisely. And that dance that you have with your partner, that's what that's supposed to be, optimized opponent processing. So imagine why it's like it's the same as free speech in some real sense.

It's a manifestation of the logos that optimized adversarial process. Why? Well, think about it this way. Imagine you have a child or you have three children. They're all quite different, because children tend to be quite different even if they're born in the same family.

And so then you might ask yourself, well, how should we treat our children? And the answer is, well, they're different. So is there a rule? And there are some guidelines and principles.

I had one in my book. Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. That's a good rule to turn to. How do you know if you're not being a tyrant? You know, your children act up and they annoy you.

Maybe you're just mean, or maybe they never annoy you, but they annoy everyone else, in which case you're not mean enough. And I mean that definitely, because if your children never annoy you, but they annoy everyone else, then they won't have any friends and then they're in real trouble. But your children are different, so how do you know how to calibrate your response to them? And the answer is, well, you push back and forth against your wife or your husband and, you know, maybe want to use a bit more encouraging and want to use a bit more sheltering. That's often the masculine versus feminine roles, although that can intermingle, you know, but generally those are associated with justice in some sense, an encouragement with masculinity and mercy and tenderness with femininity, probably because women have to care for infants and so they tilt more towards that end.

In any case, you have to calibrate that for each kid. And the only way to do that is to push against each other, right? Because how else are you going to do it? There's no rule, and it's a dynamically changing situation, and you're too clueless and blind on your own to do it. Properly.

But maybe the two of you ironing out each other's kinks in some sense, in this constant dance, oriented as you might be, to the optimal development of your children, who you hypothetically love, maybe you can calibrate a moving target by pushing on each other back and forth. And maybe if you do that optimally, then it manifests itself as something like play. And, you know, that happens because you take your kids out. Hopefully this happens. At least sometimes you take your kids out to the beach or something like that, you have a great day.

And what does that mean? Well, it means you got the balance, right, right. Because there's some freedom and there's some principles. There's some rules. It's a game, and everything comes together in the right place at the right time.

And you think, that was a good day? And you think, yeah, every day. Could, could every day be like that? And maybe that's too much to ask for every day, but it's something to aim for and something to try to foster, and it's something to know consciously, you know, that. That playful engagement, that's a marker of the highest form of being.

So that's three rules. So we could talk a little bit more about do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. That's a tricky one. And people are afraid of their children, especially modern people, because they're afraid that they're going to interfere with the flowering of their creative potential or something like that. And fair enough, you know, because there is something remarkable about the potential that you see in children, but they're also, you know, wild and unconstrained in their activity.

And so that possibility has to be harnessed in some sense. And I think the right way, again, to conceptualize that is not so much that the child is moving outward and trying to be creative and free, and all society does is constrain that in some sort of patriarchal or tyrannical manner. I think that's a suboptimal solution. I think what you do instead is you channel that creative possibility into something like well regulated games. And a game has to operate by principles and has to have a certain degree of predictability, right?

So there's some order there. But if you have your disciplinary routines optimized, then much of what governs the household is something like play. And I can make a technical case for that. So children of two years old, they really can't play with other children. And by the time a child is two, he can, or she can do something like play with a truck, right?

It's a very abstract thing to do because a little toy truck, that's not a truck, right? That's a representation of a truck. And when the child is playing at driving the truck, they're not driving a truck. They're formulating a very complex representation of the world and acting out a potential role. It's very sophisticated.

When a girl plays with a doll, too, she's not playing with a baby, obviously, she's practicing doing that, and that's very sophisticated. But two year olds, they really can't play together. And the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget made much of this. He was a real genius, because Piaget was the first person who really understood that the proper basis of social order is play, and that the reason children play is because they're practicing taking their optimal place in the social order. It's crucially important.

And then any social order that isn't predicated on the spirit of play is suboptimal. And that's also very much worth knowing. You know, if you're a business person, a good one, you pretty much only want to enter into business arrangements with people who can play fundamentally, because otherwise you have to connive or use force or, you know, get paranoid about whether or not they're holding up their end of the bargain. And it's so dull and it's counterproductive. What you really want is you want to have something to offer, something valuable, and you want to go to someone, you say, look, this is what I've got.

They say, well, this is what I've got. And then you say, well, look, if we put the two things we've got together, here's a bunch of things we could do that would really be good and that would be good for both of us. And in a way that we couldn't do a part, that's a pretty good deal. So it's probably worth a bit of time and effort. So back to the two year olds, they can't play together.

So maybe you put two two year olds in a room and maybe they both want to play with the truck, they'll fight. And maybe one wants to play with the truck and one wants to play with a doll, let's say, and then they'll play side by side. And if you're a casual observer, you think the kids are playing together, but they're not. They're just in the same room. They're not playing together until they're playing the same game.

And that really doesn't start to happen till they're about three and when they're about three, and this is where pretend play really starts to dawn. Mutual pretend play, they'll do things, they engage in dramatic play, they'll do things like a boy and a girl, they'll say to each other, do you want to play house? Which is a pretty bloody fundamental question. When it gets right down to it, you're going to be asking women that for the rest of your life, badly or well, and you might not know that that's what you're doing, and in which case you're probably doing it badly, but that is what you're doing. And so kids are practicing that, and the rule is the girl has to want to play.

That's a good rule. You could stamp that on your forehead. The girl needs to want to play. And in any case, at about three, kids start to be capable of negotiating a shared play space. And by the way, just to be clear about that, that's no different than negotiating an identity.

This idea that identity is something you define subjectively and then can impose on other people. That's what two year olds think and that's what the kind of two year old who stays unpopular for the rest of his or her life thinks. And now we're making that law. That's not very wise.

And then the other way that you can tell that's two year old behavior is that if I don't accept the identity that you're imposing me on subjectively, you'll have a tantrum. It's like, yeah, I knew you were too, and now you just proved it. And I'm actually kind of sad about this because one of the things I have noticed as a clinician is that a lot of this emergent identity confusion that particularly characterizes adolescents, and at the moment, particularly adolescent young women, is likely a consequence of stymied childhood play. You know, it's awful and it's causing a lot of trouble, but it's also, there's something about it that's really sad. In any case, at three, a child who's developing along an optimal trajectory is now capable of asking, of inviting someone else to play, someone at about their developmental level and if they're optimally skilled, which means in part that they have parents who haven't paved the pathway for them to misbehave, right, have taught them to some degree about how to take turns and how to be careful with each other, then at three, they're ready to play with other children.

And then what happens if they're optimized play partners is that they make friends, and then the friends socialize them. So parents are not the primary source of socialization after the age of about four. Peers are. That's partly why adolescents are so absolutely obsessed with what their peers think of them. Which is appropriate, even though it can go too far, is because your peers are going to make up your society, right, as you all mature together.

And you have to adapt to the circumstances of your peers. And the parents should pave the road for that adaptation. But you make friends, and then your peers play with you, and they socialize you optimally. And if that doesn't happen by the time you're four, then it never happens. There's a huge psychological literature on this.

If you're alienated from your peers at age four, as far as we know, there's nothing that can be done to fix that. You're permanently alienated, and so you're already in jail in some real sense, and then that just gets worse as you mature. That's one pathway to life. Term criminal. Life long term criminality.

Aggressive two year old male usually doesn't get socialized between the age of two and four because aggressive males are harder to socialize, doesn't make friends. Done. And the reason seems to be that imagine that at four, you need to start making friends. And because you make friends, you start to develop more and more social sophistication. But then imagine you don't make friends.

You're already so far behind that you don't make friends. And now all your peers are skyrocketing forward, and so you just fall farther and farther behind, and you get more alienated and still using two year old aggression to solve your problems. And more bitter and more cynical and more jaded, more isolated. And of course, that's not gonna do wonders for your popularity. And so it's a very bad positive feedback loop, and it starts very early.

Clorox Representative
Start clean with Clorox, because Clorox delivers a powerful clean every time because messes happen. Because, hey, listen, remember how you told me to toss those takeout containers before we left for vacation? And you were like, I'm serious. If that leaks over the counter, it'll be a slimy abomination by the time I get back. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

Janice
Don't worry about it. I won't forget. Well, oh, yeah, that happens. So start clean with Clorox. Use Clorox products as directed.

Clorox Representative
Rinse after use if in contact with food service. In any case, why should you not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them? Well, first of all, let's say you is the wife and the husband together, right? Because if your kid annoys you, well, maybe you're having a bad day, or maybe, you know, your father was too tyrannical to you and you have some of those proclivities, or. Or maybe on the more maternal side, you're willing to let your kids run roughshod all over you and not to stop them, but the two of you together, you might ask each other, hey, honey, that kid's annoying me.

Jordan B. Peterson
Is that kid annoying you? It's like, yeah, as a matter of fact, that kid's annoying me, too. It's like, well, either we're both crazy in the same way. Now you're both crazy, but are you crazy in the same way? The answer, that's probably not.

So if you're both thinking something together, there's a reasonable probability that the two of you are right. And so then you can think, well, if this kid's driving us crazy, given that together we're not out of our minds. Hopefully, if he's driving us crazy, then he's probably not going to be very popular with anyone else, and then that's a good time to think, well, do we want an unpopular and miserable child? And the answer might be yes, because sometimes they won't leave home. And if you have no other purpose in life than to devote yourself entirely to a dependent child, then crippling them socially is a really lovely way to attain that.

And if you don't think that happens, then you're the sort of naive person who will eventually run into someone malevolent and learn just how naive you are. And so, in any case, you know, you have a responsibility with regards to your children to not let them do things that make you dislike them. And if they're doing things that make you dislike them, despite the fact that you love them, you can imagine the effect that's having on other people. And you got to ask yourself, too, like, how do you want your children to be treated when they go out in public? You know, most people will give children the benefit of the doubt.

One of the things that was so lovely, I lived in this. I lived in Montreal when I first had young kids, and I lived in a rough neighborhood. It was very. It was a working class neighborhood. It was quite poor.

Most of the people were uneducated in sort of multi generational way. It was a rough neighborhood. And we had Michaela, my daughter, and we used to zoom around in her stroller. And it was so fun because you'd see these rough guys walking down the street, you know, tough looking guys, you'd give them a bit of a birth on the street, generally speaking, and they just break into a smile and, you know, coochie coo her. And it brings out the best in people.

It's so lovely to see that. It's one of the things that you don't know before you become a parent is that you become a parent. You enter this little club of other parents that you didn't even know existed, but you also get to see the best of people in a way you never did before. And that's lovely. And so people are willing to give your children the benefit of the doubt.

You want to facilitate that by having your child act in a manner that heightens the probability that that's how people are going to act towards them. And then instead, you know, a misbehaving child. I've had plenty of experience with this sort of thing in all sorts of ways. A misbehaving child lives in a world of adult falsity because nobody really wants the child around. And so everywhere they go, there are forced and strained smiles and bare tolerance.

That's a little bit of hell, that is. And the alternative is, well, your child is properly socialized and everyone's happy to have them around. And then wherever they go, everyone's happy to have them around. And then they make friends. And adults are much more likely to interact with them in a positive way.

And that's what you're. You want to give that to your kids? Well, unless you want the other outcome that I described, you know, or maybe you're jealous of your children because you're old, you're bitter, you know, and you see your child flourishing in some way that you didn't get to, and you want to knock that the hell out of them. And that's another pathway to take, too. But, you know, that's a good little trip to hell if you want to embark down that road.

Here's another rule. Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. This is also a great thing to know. I think that's a tricky rule. Expedient might be we're going to have a conversation, and I want something from you.

And a lot of conversations are like that, you know, because you have a goal in mind. This is what I want from this person. And so then you craft your conversation to get what you want, right? You subordinate your words to your. To the ethic of your desire.

And you might say, well, what's wrong with that? Well, what do you know about what you want? Like, haven't you been wrong about that before? Now you might say, well, what's the alternative? Well, is there an alternative?

Well, you have to get, want something from the person to even interact with them. It's like, no, you could want to see what happens. You could want to play, you could tell the truth. That's an interesting thing to do, because you don't know what's going to happen if you tell the truth, that's for sure. You could let go of what you want and just say what you think.

And you could presume, and this is an act of faith too, that the truth does set you free, and that the truth that's spoken properly makes out of possibility the order that is habitable and good. And then you could just tell the truth and you could see what happens. And that would be an adventure. And that's better than expediency. Partly because maybe you're wrong about what you want, you know, and you know that because you're kind of narrow and maybe narrowly self serving from time to time, and your purview of the world isn't as wide as it could be.

And you're a bit bitter, so you tend to be that narrowly selfish because of that. So you want something from a conversation and you bend and twist it to get it. It's like, fine, but maybe you'll get something you don't want, or worse, you'll get something that's positively bad for you. That happens a lot. And so part of the reason there's a deep moral injunction to tell the truth in a religious sense is because there's a hypothesis behind that, which is there isn't anything better that can happen to you than what will happen to you if you tell the truth.

Now that might be hidden from you. Because sometimes if you tell the truth, and I don't mean to blurt everything out carelessly, like this is a sophisticated thing to do, it's not careless. It doesn't mean just say any old thing that pops into your head, you have to be judicious with the truth. But the notion would be, if something emerges as a consequence of engaging truthfully and it doesn't seem to be going your way. Wait, there's more to the story to unfold because, like, how do you know if it goes your way or not?

Like, over what time span are you calculating this? Because sometimes things can go pretty badly initially and then much better as they progress. And lots of times the truth has that effect because, you know, you reveal something that's maybe disturbing or shocking even to yourself and others. And it causes waves, especially if it's a deep truth and that destabilizes everything. It's like, yeah, but maybe that's preferable to a false peace.

You can't find out if it's true without doing it. You're not going to gather the evidence beforehand. So that's the true side of it. Meaning, pursue what's meaningful instead of what's expedient. It's another hint, like the spirit of play about the pathway, the yin and yang symbol.

You know, the famous symbol, it's two serpents, one black, one white, head to tail. Inside the black serpent there's a white dot, and inside the white serpent there's a black dot. And the representation is something like the world of your experience is made up of chaos and order. And order is where you are when things are going according to what you want, and chaos is everything that can come in and disrupt that. And both of those can be positive and negative.

Too much order, tyranny, right? Too much chaos. Nihilistic uncertainty. Optimized balance. So let's think about what the optimized balance would mean.

You have a structure of perception and conception that you inhabit. It's orderly, reasonably orderly, orderly enough so that when you inhabit it, most of the time things are going the way you want them to go.

But things change and shift and you don't know everything you should know. So you can't just stay where you are with a good thing. You have to expand. And as you expand, you move out of the domain of order into the domain of chaos, or out of the domain of actuality into the domain of possibility. And then you might think, well, how do you know when you're doing that optimally?

Well, one marker, as I said before, maybe that you do it in the spirit of play. But another is, and this is so much worth knowing, things get meaningful. You know, people ask, does life have any meaning? It's like, why is anything worth doing if in 4 billion years the sun is going to envelop the earth? And the answer to that question is, that's a stupid question.

And I can prove that in some sense it's like you're a mother and your baby's crying, and so you're going over there to do something about it, and someone comes along and says, why do you care if that baby's crying? You know, in 4 billion years the sun is going to envelop the earth, and what's the right response to that? It's like. It's something like, go away. Are you out of your mind?

And the answer to that question is yes, you are out of your mind. Of course you can find a time frame or a spatial frame of reference that makes everything you do pointless. It's like, what is this going to matter in 20 trillion years? Well, it's like the only proper response to that is that's not a wise timeframe. Imagine you're in a.

You're in a concert, you know, listening to some great music, and it's got you, you know, and someone taps you on the shoulder and you know this is going to come to an end. And what's your response? Like, go away. And that's the right response to that voice in your head that does those things to you which says, you know, you're engaged in something and a nihilistic thought comes out, well, what's the point of this, given, you know, how unbearable the world is in the current political situation and the fact that we're inhabiting some ball of dust on the edge of some fringe part of the cosmos and that everything's dead in material. It's like, get thee behind me, Satan.

Right? Really? It's not a mark of wisdom.

It's not a mark of wisdom to let nihilistic, demonic voices steal your joie de vivre. That is not a mark of wisdom. And you might object. Well, at least it's not naive. It's like, yeah, cynicism might be preferable to naivety, but it doesn't hold a candle to wisdom.

And that's worth knowing too, because once you've been hurt and you're cynical, there's no going back to naive. But there's no point in staying at cynical. And there are degrees of courage way beyond cynicism. And some of that is the regaining of the faith you had as a child despite your current level of wisdom. And that's something to strive for, right?

That's a moral attainment. That's not a burying your head back in the sand. Quite the contrary. And so, well, back to the yin and yang symbol.

Imagine you have an instinct that orients you. Well, you do, as a matter of fact. There's a reflex that's replicated at multiple levels of your nervous system and it's ancient. If you have a nervous system as an animal, you have this reflex. And the reflex is something like surprise.

You know, if I walk across the stage and I hear a loud noise behind me, I might go like this. And that would be automatic because I'm gripped by unconscious systems. And what's happening is some chaos has emerged. And it stops me in my tracks. Because.

Because something unexpected happened. My current plan is incomplete. And then I'll turn and orient towards the place of the disturbance. And that's the beginning of exploratory behavior. Then I might run away, which might make me safe.

Or I might cautiously investigate. In which case I can find out what caused the disturbance. Maybe rectify it. And maybe update my plan. So that that sort of thing doesn't happen again.

That's a better approach. In fact, that's the optimal approach. That's also the meaningful approach. And so here's something to know. If you're engaged in something.

And it's infusing you with a sense of meaning. Then your nervous system is signaling to you that you've optimized the balance between stability and transformation. And that manifests itself in the sense that you're in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. And it's not conceptual, right. It's not abstract.

It's not a theory. It's an embodied sense. And you might say, well, I don't know what that sense is exactly. But it's the sense that you have when you're engrossed in a piece of music. And what's music?

Well, it's principled and somewhat predictable patterning. Spiced with unpredictability, creative unpredictability. And if it's optimized, it grips you. And it's a representation. It's a representation, in some sense, of optimal being.

And it's so interesting that that's the case. Because it does grip us, no matter how nihilistic you are. Something I always liked about punk rock. I was a teenager when the Sex Pistols first emerged on the scene. And they were very interesting to me.

Because their music is so nihilistic. And it's so meaningful. And that's such a weird combination. It's like. Because the overt lyrics are just smash everything to hell and anarchy everywhere.

But, you know, there's a great beat and everybody's dancing away. It's like. And even the skinheads who were anarchic, they would dance. I mean, they'd smash into each other. And there was often blood.

But it was. It was a kind of dance. It was better than nothing, that's for sure. And that's why they went to the concerts. And so to be imbued by that sense of meaning.

Even in their nihilistic anarchism, they were still engaged in that. The sense of meaning that music produces. And it does put you back to the yin and yang symbol. It puts you right in the middle of chaos and order. That's the right pathway.

That's the Tao, by the way, for the Taoists, it's the pathway that runs between chaos and order. And it's signaled to you by the sense of engrossed meaning. And then you could say to yourself, you ought to stake your life on something, eh, one way or another, because you have to move forward in ignorance. So you're always making a decision about what you're going to take on faith. I don't care what you're doing.

You have to make that decision. Well, what if you staked your life on the intrinsic value of sublime meaning? Start clean with Clorox. Because Clorox delivers a powerful clean every time. Because messes happen.

Janice
Because, hey, listen, remember how you told me to toss those takeout containers before we left for vacation? And you were like, I'm serious. If that leaks over the counter, it'll be a slimy abomination by the time I get back. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Don't worry about it.

Jordan B. Peterson
I won't forget. Well, oh, yeah, that happens. So start clean with Clorox. Use Clorox products as directed. Rinse after use.

Clorox Representative
If in contact with food service. How would that be? Well, you'd have to act it out to find out. But you do get hints, you know, if you're gripped by something beautiful, it does that. Something artistic, that's deep.

Jordan B. Peterson
If you're gripped by literature that stretches you, it does that. A movie that engrosses you does that. Almost everything you do that's entertaining does that. When you're at a sports event and you're watching someone stunningly skilled do something incredibly difficult that puts you in the same place, that stretches you out and produces this intimation of meaning. And then you might say, as well, and this would be lovely if it was true.

And I do think it's actually true, which is really quite something, what's the best antidote to pain? And you might say, well, pleasure, it's like, yeah, that's not going to be forthcoming that much when you're in pain. And so. And then pleasure, per se, has its own vices, let's say. That's for sure.

How about meaning as the antidote to pain? How would that be then you might think, well, where do people find meaning? Well, they certainly find it in aesthetic pursuits and artistic pursuits in the domains of literature and art, beauty, all that. But people also find meaning and responsibility, and that's something we've forgotten to a degree that's almost incomprehensible. You know, if you're ever really ill, which you will be.

If you're ever really in pain, which you certainly will be, if you're ever faced with hellish circumstances, which you certainly will be, you might ask yourself, well, what do you have under those circumstances? And maybe if you're fortunate, you have someone to play with, and maybe if you're fortunate, you have the meaning of your responsibilities. And even if you're the sinner who's produced the hell that's around you, and you can say to yourself, yeah, but, you know, I've been a good servant to my wife, and I've been a good father to my children, and my family's been a credit to the community, and I've taken on some community responsibilities to try to set the broader world around me right. And I've shouldered my civic duties, and as far as I've been able to, I've been a good person. Then maybe while you're suffering, you don't have to scourge yourself with all your sins at the same time.

And that's something, man. And maybe in that situation, that's all you're going to have. And that might be the difference not only between life and death, but between hell and life, because there are worse things than death, that's for sure. And so.

And so then imagine if it was the case that you could have what you needed and wanted, and you could say, well, play is the antidote to tyranny. That'd be lovely. And meaning is the antidote to pain and cynicism and bitterness and social discontent and discord. And so then your life could be meaningful. Play, maybe you can come up with a better optimistic proposition than that.

And if you can, good, good for you, really. But that's not a bad vision, you know, and you can test it out. One of the things I used to do with my clients, this is real useful, too, and it's sort of done in the spirit of necessary humility. So imagine your life isn't everything it could be. That's generally not that hard to imagine.

But then also imagine that there's some variation, you know, week to week is that maybe you're pretty damn miserable, but sometimes you're unbelievably miserable, and sometimes you're just sort of miserable, and that's not great, but at least there's some variability. One of the things you might do as a clinician or as a friend or as a partner is, say, well, exactly what are you doing when you're less miserable? And what are you doing when you're more miserable? Don't think about it. Watch like you're watching someone you don't know.

This often happens with depressed people. So one of the problems with depression is it's a positive feedback loop, because you get depressed and then you stop seeing your friends. And even if you're introverted, there's friends you want to see, at least one on one, at least now and then. So now you start to isolate yourself, and then you get more depressed, and then you isolate yourself more, then you get more depressed. It's downhill.

Spiral, you know, it's not good. A lot of forms of mental illness are positive feedback loops that spiral out of control. So one of the things you might do with a depressed person, they come to see you. If you're a therapist, you might say, look, just for the next week or two weeks or so, I want you to just keep a mood record, you know, maybe check in with yourself every hour. Scale from one to ten.

Just write down how depressed you are with ten being suicidal and one being as good as you get, let's say. Or maybe even life is worth living. And maybe the depressed person never gets, you know, below six or something, but six is way better than ten. And then they come back and you look and you think, oh, look, every time you were at six instead of ten, you were. You were with this particular person or this set of people.

Or maybe you're working in your garden, who knows, right? Or maybe if you're artistic, you were doing something artistic despite the fact that you're paralyzed by your depression. But notice your mood improved some. And then, look, ten out of ten depressed, you're alone in your room in bed. It's like eleven in the morning.

It's like, okay, so how about this? Next week, don't be alone in your bed at 11:00 in the morning and spend like 20% more time, or 10% or 2% with your friends or doing something that seems to improve not your mood, but your state of being, and then play with that and see, you know, can you tilt yourself gradually and incrementally comparing yourself to who you were yesterday? Can you tilt yourself in the right direction? And then, well, that's for depressed people. You might say, well, could you do that in your life?

And the answer is yes. So the Egyptians worship this God, Horus, Horus and Horus, you know, Horus, weirdly enough, everyone knows that famous egyptian eye, you know, with the arched eyebrow and, you know, on the back of an american dollar bill, you have an eye that's separated from the pyramid. That's Horus as well. Interestingly enough, that's the gold cap on a pyramid. It's the aluminum cap on the Washington monument.

Aluminum was more precious than gold when they built the Washington monument. The top of a pyramid is the gold cap and the gold cap is the eye. And what's the eye? The eye is the thing that pays attention. And so Horus was the eye and he was the eye that could see evil and rectify it, by the way.

And he was also a falcon. And the reason he was a falcon is because a falcon is a bird of prey that flies above everything and that can see. And birds of prey, they can see better than us. We're very visual animals. We have the second best visual systems of any animal.

Birds of prey see better than we do. They can see clearer and farther. An oak, a falcon. If a falcon was on top of the empire State building, he could see a dime on the pavement below. They're unbelievably sharp eyed.

And the ancient people knew this. They hunted with birds of prey and they watched them. They knew they had spectacular vision. And so they used the falcon as an image of redeeming vision. And they associated redeeming vision with the sun setting and rising, because the sun shines when you can see.

And so that's a solar God and that's the hero that fights the dragon at night and that comes up victorious in the morning. A very old idea that's all associated with vision. And vision pays attention. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't. That doesn't mean everything you don't.

And that might mean hardly anything at all. But maybe you could glean something. And because you're clueless and confused, anything you glean might be useful. And so it's useful to attend, like in a. In a manner that's infused with humility.

Why humility? Because you need to know that what you don't know is more important than what you do know. That's a hard thing to learn because you want to fortify what you know, man, because it feels protective and it's very threatening to move on the periphery of what you know. But there's a lot of what you don't know a lot, and you need to know it. And what do you, what attitude do you need to bring to bear on what you don't know.

It's like, pay attention. There might be something there for you. And so then you attend to yourself. And that ties us back up to the first rule, which is treat yourself like you're someone who you might be responsible for helping. Well, what does that mean?

Like, you don't know who you are because you don't. As if you're someone made in the image of God. Let's say someone, despite your flaws, of divine intrinsic value, who could hypothetically be a light on the hill, hard as that is to believe. And then watch and see when you're where you should be. And maybe you're only a bit of the way there, you know?

And it's. You're kind of. Your life is hell to purgatory. That's it. There's very little glimpse of paradise.

But purgatory beats the hell out of hell. And so maybe you can move from hell into purgatory. That would be something. And maybe when you're there now and then you're getting a little bit beyond that. You think, you know, right at this moment, for whatever reason, I'm not doing something so terrible that I'm in hell.

What is going on? What's the circumstance? What do I allow to happen that made this possible? It's a form of awakening, in the most profound sense, to notice when that happens. Then you think, could I be there more often?

1% more often? That compounds very quickly. You know, if it's 1% a week for a year, you're going to be there like, twice as long in a year as you were before you started. And God only knows how good you could get at that if you didn't do anything other than that. Let's say if you really committed to that, God only knows what your life could be like in five years or ten years.

Maybe you could be in that state all the time. And who knows what effect you'd have on you and your family and the people around you if you were in that state. And that's something worth thinking about, too. And maybe that's a good thing to close. You know, we have this notion develop, not least in your great country, that people have an intrinsic worth, that we're sovereign citizens, that we're all possessed of a voice that redeems the state.

That's why we have an inalienable right to free speech, let's say, because we're necessary, corrective to the blindness and archaic nature of the state. We're the living eyes of the dead king. And maybe that's really true. Then you think, well, if the world isn't everything you want it to be, I set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. If the world isn't everything that you want it to be, maybe you're not acting the way you should, you know, because there's some intimation in our deepest ideas that the weight of the world rests on your shoulders.

Now, that's a terrible thing to think, but maybe it's true, and it's an open question how much of the mess that you see around you would vanish if the mess that you could put straight was put straight. And you know, you know, you know this, too, to some degree, because to the degree that you've not become entirely embittered and cynical and hopeless, you know perfectly well that if you put your mind to it and you make the proper sacrifices, there are things you can set straight. And that if you do that diligently, things actually improve. And so, because otherwise, if you didn't believe that, you wouldn't act at all like, well, maybe you just turn to completely catastrophic, short term, impulsive pleasure, something like that. You have to believe that your action has some redemptive possibility, because why would you do it otherwise?

And you might say, well, I kind of believe that. It's like, well, that's not good enough. You know, you kind of got to throw yourself all into it, and what's the cost anyways? You know, it's not like you're going to get out of this alive. So you're pretty much all in, whether you want to be or not.

And maybe if you were voluntarily all in, things would be a lot better than they are. And that's an exciting thing to try to find out. If you allowed yourself to be guided by the intimation of meaning, and I mean to find on your terms in some real sense, if you swore that you do your best not to use deceit and instrumental manipulation, if you decided that you were going to put things straight, what do you think might happen? And I'll close with one observation. I read something very terrifying by one of the thinkers who've influenced me the most, Carl Jung, the great swiss analytics psychologist.

He said something very interesting at the end of world War two, apprehending the terrible specter of the atom bomb and the unbelievable destructiveness of the second world war. He said two things. One was, we'll be more most threatened in the future, not by natural disasters or even sociological disasters in some sense, but by pathologies of the psyche, by pathologies of the spiritual. Because we become so powerful that our proclivity towards unnecessary insanity in some sense poses the greatest threat to us. Now.

I think that's true. And he also said something that's even more terrifying. He said any unconscious conflict that you don't make conscious and resolve will be played out in the world as fate. Start clean with Clorox. Because Clorox delivers a powerful clean every time.

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Jordan B. Peterson
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Jordan B. Peterson
So let me unpack that for a minute. Imagine you're a man or a woman and you've got something against some. The opposite sex. You know, you're got an animus against women, or you've got a bad attitude towards men. You think the men deserve it.

And when you interact with them, they act in a way that makes it look like they deserve it. Same on them. With regard to women, then maybe you have this experience where you have the same bad experience with, like, five women or five men. It's those men. It's those women.

It's like, well, what's the probability of that? Let's say there's five and you, that's six. It's a one in six probability that it's them. And a five and six probability that it's you. And what is it in you?

I mean, unless all women in some sense, are warped the same way, or all men, if you keep bumping into them the same way, it's possible that you're just bumping into your own blindness. And you better hope that's true, because if it's women and they're giving you a rough time, what are you going to do? There's a lot of women. If it's you, hooray. You might be able to rectify that.

And so you might say, well, you have an unconscious conflict, a complex in relationship to people of the opposite sex. That's true for almost everyone. And if you don't make that conscious, you act it out. You know, maybe get more irritated at certain things than a reasonable person would, and that starts a whole chain reaction. Who knows how it's going to manifest itself if you made it conscious and resolved it, it'd go away.

Okay, so now we're in a situation where things are starting to teeter around us socially, as everyone can feel.

Well, how catastrophic is that going to be? How catastrophic are we willing. We willing to let it be? How catastrophic do we want it to be to teach us what we won't learn voluntarily? I would say, well, we're going to find out.

And here's a question you could ask yourself. If you let enough of an internal catastrophe strip you of all your inadequacies, maybe you don't need an external catastrophe to teach you the lesson.

Thank you very much.

Tammy Peterson
Jordan Peterson's ready to come back on stage. Yep, here he is.

Nice chairs. Hey. Okay, let's see here. What are your views on a united Ireland?

There's more to it. With Brexit and Sin Fein, Sin Sinn Fein gaining influence both north and south, it seems a border pull is inevitable soon. The first thing I would say is that I'm too. I have too low resolution representation of the situation in Ireland to wade into that abyss casually.

Jordan B. Peterson
And I think that dispensing casual advice politically is not. Even though I'm known to do it from time to time on Twitter, it's probably not optimal. Situations like that are extraordinarily complex, and they're very difficult to diagnose and comprehend and mend. It isn't even obvious to me that that can be done in some real sense, from the top down. And to render an opinion on a situation like that is to imply, in some real sense, that it can be accomplished top down.

You know, that there's a solution. And in some real sense, you know, I've had to make a choice between politics and psychology my whole life because I have political interests. But always when push came to shove, I was much more interested in the individual and the psychological than the political. And I think that's where my answers are best focused. You want peace.

We want unity. Why? Well, not at any cost. Because unity enforced is tyranny. And that's not peaceful.

That's subjugation.

But peace requires unity, obviously, because peace is the opposite of conflict. But peace is conflict resolved, not conflict suppressed or conflict ignored. And then the question is, how do you make peace? And I believe that the answer is the age old religious answer, in some sense, that you make peace with yourself, and then you make peace with your wife or your husband, and then you make peace with your children and your parents, and you learn how to do that. And maybe if you get good at that, which is very, very difficult to do.

Then maybe you're the sort of person who can start to make peace in your community. And see, I do believe that in a real sense, that each of us is a center of the world. I mean, the world's a strange place, and God only knows how it's constituted. And you might think, well, I just exist on the periphery. You think that of yourself.

I'm not one of the powerful people. It's like my suspicions are that there's plenty of things right in front of you to put right. And that might even be more the case if you're in relatively straightened circumstances. The problems that are right in front of you are plenty. And if you addressed them, that wouldn't be nothing, not at all.

It might be key. I think it is key. And so, of course, a united Ireland would be wonderful in some abstract sense, given that unity is the precondition for peace. I think the most fundamental battles are they're psychological and spiritual, they're not political. And I don't think that political can stay out of the pathological unless the fundamental victories are psychological and spiritual.

And that's why I don't talk to crowds. You know, I talk to individuals in the crowd, and that works just fine because the crowd's made up of individuals. And I believe that in the most fundamental sense, that redemption is an individual matter. It has to be undertaken with the community in mind. But a piece is something you establish within your own heart.

So.

So I evaded that question successfully.

Tammy Peterson
What's Ronaldo like to meet?

Jordan B. Peterson
Well, I talked to him for about 2 hours. He said he had started listening to my lectures about four months ago when some trouble arose around him. Not of his making, just a tragedy, just. And we talked about his team.

It's like being stuck in a Ted lasso episode. We talked about his team. We talked about what he wants. He wants to end his career. I don't think I'm talking out of school.

He wants to end his career the way that it's always progressed, which is with dignity and grace and at a high level of skill. And he's hoping he has a few more years left in him. He's obviously dedicated himself to a tremendous degree to making sure that he is the best at what he does and being able to maintain that. And he's done that for a very long time. And he's the sort of person, as far as I could tell, that has accomplished that, because he did it.

And so it was. We had a great time, and it was a pleasure to meet him. And it was very forthright of him to post his picture with me, as reprehensible as I am. And so, so it's a great privilege, you know, if you have any sense, when you meet people who are accomplished, you should be thrilled. If you have any sense, you know, because, well, who the hell are you to not be thrilled?

And so I was thrilled. And I've had an opportunity to meet lots of great people. And, and, you know, I take that seriously, and just as I take talking to all of you and watching you and listening to you seriously, so it was great.

Tammy Peterson
There seems to be a growing population of people sick of the woke left, but are instead becoming radicalized in the other direction. What would you say to them? Yeah, well, I am trying to say things to them in some real sense. You know, I spend a lot of time in the United States working with democrats, trying to pull them to the center, let's say, away from the radicals, with some success. And in recent months, I've been talking more to conservatives.

Jordan B. Peterson
And conservatives are very good at implementing, they're very good at managing, they're very good at acting out their traditional duties. Let's say they're not particularly gifted on the visionary front. It's a different temperament. You know, the visionaries are creative people generally, and they tend to be more liberal because being visionary and creative tilts you in liberal direction temperamentally. And so conservatives, they tend to get set back on their heels.

You know, they're not that articulate in some fundamental sense, often because they don't have to be. You know, if you're a traditionalist, you don't have to articulate your tradition. You just act it out. That's kind of the whole point of being a conservative. And then people come along and say, well, that's a stupid traditional, justify it.

And if you're conservative, you think, I don't know. I don't know how to justify it. We've done this for like 50,000 years. I thought we're sort of beyond the justification, you know? Do you know what a woman is?

It's like, I thought. So I thought we'd settle that, like, when sex emerged on the biological front 2 billion years ago. Apparently not.

So the conservatives get gnawed at by the radicals, and then they get irritated. And that's a very, it's a very bad idea to irritate conservatives. It's a very bad idea because they're slow to wake up and they're slow to respond. But once you wake them up, you better look the hell out. So for all of you lefties out in the audience, it's probably like four of you.

Don't wake up the conservatives, you'll be sorry. The conservatives, they get set back on their heels, and then they get reactionary, which is what the left always says. And they start carping about the radicals. And that's not good because then you get the situation we're in now where it's you slap me and I slap you and then I punch you and you punch me, and, like, we're really on the brink of that at the moment, and that's a bad idea. And it's a positive feedback loop, you know, of the kind I talked about earlier, that can tilt us towards a very serious end.

So what's the alternative? I just did a seminar with a bunch of people in Miami. It was really fun. Weirdly enough, 18 hours on the first half of the book, biblical book, Exodus. And we're going to release that November 26 with the Daily Wire.

Plus people, they made it possible, which was very good of them. It wasn't easy to get nine scholars together for a whole week, you know, to pull people out of their lives for a whole week to do something like that. We went through the first half of the story, and I learned a lot. A lot. And one of the things I learned was exodus means ex hodos, and that means the way forward.

And that's what this question is. It's a question about the exodus. How do we get out of this? And I suppose that raises the question of leadership. What do you want in a leader in a time of trouble and in a time of increasing polarization?

And it can't be, and I'm not saying I'm innocent of this. It can't be someone who slaps back. You know, it may be someone who can put up a barrier and who can say no, but it can't be someone who slaps back because you get the tit for tat process going, and that just doesn't seem like a good idea.

So maybe it's someone who can withstand the blows of the polarization, but more importantly, perhaps it's someone who can tell a better story. And so I think if you tell the right story, then people will. They'll be inspired by that. And what we need to all pray for in some sense is that we can come up with a better story. Here's a story I don't like.

You have to be poor and miserable and cold and hungry to save the planet.

We are morally required by the magnitude of the emergency that confronts us, to risk destroying our economies and throwing our social organizations into chaos.

I'm hoping that won't happen this winter, but I think it probably will. What's a better story? Well, we could think about it for a minute.

You and everyone else could have what you needed and wanted. If you did it right, and if we all did it right, it would also serve the proper long term interests of the natural environment.

Think, well, that can't possibly be true. It's like, you got a better idea, and if so, you know, more power to you. If you've got a better idea and you can formulate it as a better story, get out there and do it. But, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I think you can make a very strong case that the fastest way forward to genuine planetary sustainability is to eradicate poverty as rapidly as we can, to give people what they need and want to increase their options for the future, and to presume that if we oriented ourselves properly, there would be enough for everybody to have everything they needed to have. And we could find out.

You know, there's a new book which I would recommend by a man named Marion Tupee, called title of the book is superabundance. And Tupie has tracked the positive relationship between population growth and planetary wealth. You know, because you have the malthusian idea that the more people there are, the poorer we're going to get. It's like, well, it doesn't look like it. There's twice as many people as there were when I was 30, and everyone pretty much is way richer.

So how'd that happen? Tupi, who's a good economist, calculated that every baby born now, given a linear projection of economic growth into the future, which we could easily muck up, but assuming growth in the future is about what it's been, say, for the last 30 years, that every baby born today will produce seven times as many resources as he or she will consume, and that every person born is a net positive on the social and natural front. And you might say, well, how can that be? It's like, well, the conversion of raw resources into human ingenuity is not such bad bargain. And if it wasn't, none of us would be alive.

And so maybe we don't have to be so pessimistic. Maybe we have to try a little harder on the individual front. Maybe we don't have to be so pessimistic. You know, maybe there's enough to go around, or more than enough to go around. If we were all doing what we could be doing, and maybe we could have our cake and eat it, too.

You know? Here's a static people seem to get concerned about the natural environment in their countries once gross domestic product hits about $5,000 a year. So it turns out that if you make people rich, they start to care about the natural world. Now you think, well, why would that be? Well, how about because they're not starving, right?

Or how come? How about because they're not burning dung in their houses or their huts and poisoning their children? You know, 20 million children die a year because of respiratory illnesses as a consequence of burning substandard fuel, often dung, sometimes would 20, 20 million people a year, mostly children.

We're technologically powerful and we're innovative beyond belief, and we've structured our societies in a pretty sophisticated way. Why are we so sure that we couldn't make everything as good as we could imagine?

Why are we so willing to break everything in bits, which seems to be what we're trying to do right now to. To what? To what? To pretend that we're making progress on the environmental front, to look good instead of being good.

Tammy Peterson
In Ireland. That's where we are in Ireland. Alcohol plays a massive role in our culture. For people moving into their thirties who struggle with binge drinking, what advice would you give to them?

Jordan B. Peterson
I really liked to drink. I grew up in this little town in northern Alberta, and my friends and I were hitting the iced vodka pretty hard by the time we were 14. And so it was a pretty isolated town. It was winter for a lot of the year, and it was a heavy drinking culture. Now, I don't know if it was as heavy drinking a culture as Dublin, because I've seen more passed out people here on the street than I've ever seen anywhere else in the world.

And, you know, I really like your city. It's lots of fun. And that's the thing about alcohol is, especially if you like it, alcohol is real fun, but it's a. It's a rough drug, man. You know, alcohol is the only drug we know that actually makes people violent.

And it's pretty obvious that almost all domestic abuse and most cases of sexual assault would just disappear if you took alcohol out of the equation. And I did research in a lab at McGill, and we studied the relationship between aggression and alcohol. And one of the tasks we used was a competitive electric shock task. It was a game, and you could mete out electric shocks to your opponent. They were low level, but you could adjust the intensity and the duration.

Now, you were playing against a fake opponent, so no one got shocked, but you didn't know that. And when we got people drunk, and not that drunk, not Dublin drunk, more like english tea party drunk, they would push the shock button longer and turn up the duration longer. And then we thought, well, maybe it's because they don't know what they're doing, you know, because alcohol, one of the lovely things it does is make you too stupid to care, which is something everyone wants to be. So we had people write down how much shock they were delivering on the assumption that if we made them conscious, it would overcome the alcohol induced stupidity and they would be less violent. And all that happened was that the drunk people who knew what they were doing got even more violent.

And so alcohol is directly responsible for about half of cancers, especially if you smoke. It's a major contributor to heart disease. As I said, it's a major contributor on the domestic violence front. It's really hard on you physiologically because alcohol goes everywhere in the body. It crosses the blood brain barrier with no problem.

And so it's very hard on you neurologically. It's not a great drug. And I say that with trepidation, as someone who really loved to drink, and I say it with trepidation as well, because I really like your city. It's a lot of fun, you know, and the alcohol culture is part of that, but it's a damn difficult devil to keep within bounds and, you know, teetotal. The teetotal attitude and that kind of puritanism, that's the devil, too.

But I stopped drinking when I was 27. When I had kids, I thought, I'm not going to be drunk in front of my kids. And so I just quit. And I quit for 23 years. And then I started to drink again because I thought maybe I'd grown up enough to handle it, and I hadn't.

So I quit again.

What I noticed when I was about 27, that's often when men start to stop drinking, by the way, and it's usually because they start to take on some real responsibility. I was asking myself some of the questions I discussed with you tonight. When is my life going well? And when am I miserable? And one of the things I realized was almost all the times I did stupid things that I regretted I had been drinking.

And then also I found that I was writing a very difficult book at that time, which turned into my book maps of meaning, which turned into the book that you guys are probably familiar with. I couldn't edit and be hungover I would make my writing worse, not better. And so I thought, well, do I want to keep doing stupid things that I'm ashamed of? And do I want to write as well as I can? And then there was the issue with my kids and also my wife.

I thought, no, I'd rather not do things I'm ashamed of. I'd rather be able to concentrate on what I'm doing, and I don't want to compromise my relationship with my kids. So I quit drinking. And here's another thing to know. I also looked at what cures alcoholism and alcoholism.

Treatment centers don't, no matter what they say, no matter how they advertise religious transformation cures alcoholism. That's known among people who are purely atheistic researchers. This has been known for a very long time, and no one really knows how to account for that. But it's an interesting thing to know. But I would also say if all the adventure in your life is coming from drinking, and I'm not being cynical about this, I'm really not.

I'm not being high and mighty about this, but if the great adventure of your life comes from drinking, you're probably not on the edge in the way you should be. Maybe what you need, if you're committed to the bottle is a life so bloody exciting that you don't want to drink and interfere with it. And that does seem to be a pathway to a cure.

Tammy Peterson
That's it. That's it. Yep. That's it.

Jordan B. Peterson
Thank you. Thanks, Tim.

Thank you all. Pleasure to be in your city, to talk to all of you. Thank you very much for coming. It's very good to see you all. You bet.

Good night, everyone.

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Meaning, Depression, & the Weight of the World | Jordan Peterson

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1: Introduction

2: The Nature of Play

3: The Reality of Evil

4: Personal Responsibility and Meaning

5: Confronting Chaos

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