Jordan Peterson: "When You Stop Being Who They Expected They Turn Against You"

[00:00:00]For example, you can make your anxiety work against you or for you. And one of the ways I I did a I made a program called the Future Authoring Program that I think helps people do that. Cuz one of the things you see when you're talking to people and they're trying to solve problems is that they're afraid to face the problem.

[00:00:17]And so then their anxiety is working against them and you can think about it as a as antagonistic to rationality.

[00:00:24]But then I could say, "Well, why don't you think for a while about what your life would be like if you didn't face this problem?"

[00:00:31]Because if you think that through, if you have a problem and you really think through what the consequences are going to be in 3 to 5 years of not facing it, then you're going to get more afraid of not facing it than facing it. And that's great because then your anxiety, instead of standing in front of you, instead of you having a dragon that's guarding the path in front of you, you have one chasing you down the path from behind. That's a lot more useful.

[00:00:55]And so, you know, that's just a a minimal example of the utility of getting your emotions and your and your thoughts aligned the same way.

[00:01:05]The same thing happens with aggression.

[00:01:07]You know, one of the most common reasons that people come and seek psychotherapy really is because they're too agreeable.

[00:01:13]But what that means is they're not assertive enough. They haven't integrated their capacity for aggression and so other people can push them around.

[00:01:20]And and they're very conflict avoidant.

[00:01:23]And and so the consequences of that across time is that you don't stand up for yourself well enough and you get taken advantage of and that spirals badly downward. And so, partly what you do when you're doing assertiveness training with people is you find out what they're angry about. And they're usually angry angry if they're not assertive enough because other people are taking advantage of them or you could say because they're not putting their own necessities forward with enough force.

[00:01:52]It's hard to distinguish between those two things.

[00:01:54]But anyways, you you try you get them to talk about what they're angry about. That often makes them cry often many times. And then you get them to kind of envision what they would want to have instead, which they're often afraid to do because people are afraid to think about what they want because that makes it more clear when they're not getting it and that's painful, right? Or maybe they're afraid of hoping, so they won't specify a clear aim. But anyways, you get them to think about what they might want instead. You get them to think about the costs of not pursuing that and then you help them develop strategies for integrating their aggression and with their thinking so that they can come up with a plan to approach the world in a more confident way. So for example, someone might come to me and say I'm being bullied badly at work.

[00:02:41]And so then I'll say, "Well, what are your options?

[00:02:45]You have to put up with it? Well, we'll we'll figure that out cuz maybe you do.

[00:02:48]Maybe you don't have options. But here's how to find out. Get your damn CV together so it's pristine, right? It's it's ready to go. Get over your fear of a new interview because it people are generally afraid of that. Get over your fear of applying for a new job. Start thinking about what it would mean to have a different job. Start thinking about what it would mean would mean to have a better job even because maybe your fear is just making you stuck here.

[00:03:12]But I can tell you one thing, if someone's picking on you at work and you don't have options, you lose.

[00:03:18]So you get the person to start building a strategy. It's like, "Okay, if you're going to tell this person to stop you have to know how to make them stop. And one and the one thing you need for sure is an option. And if you can't if you don't have an option, then maybe we start thinking about the fact that you need some more training or something like that because you cannot negotiate if you don't have any power.

[00:03:40]So because why especially if you're dealing with someone who's really out to get you or really disagreeable, if [snorts] you don't have a leg to stand on, they'll just push you over and maybe they'll jump on you too because that's what they're like and they enjoy it anyway. So, it's no joke.

[00:03:54]So, you put your options behind you and then you start to think about strategy. So, I tell people, "Look, if you're being harassed at work, you document it every time it happens and you write it down.

[00:04:04]So, you've got like 20 stories about it and it's fully documented. And then you go confront the person at some point but with at least three pieces of evidence and you have some sense of what you tell them about what will happen if they don't stop. So, you have to figure out, well, if they don't stop, what are you going to do about it?

[00:04:22]Leave? Not if you can't leave. So, you you you have to be able to, what is it, wield a big stick and speak softly. But you see that way it's That's how you take your aggression, which is an absolutely necessary part of your psyche, and manifest it up into a sophisticated means of dealing with the world. You don't just suppress it. You say, "Well, I should be able to put up with it." Or I wish I wasn't so angry or something. It's like forget that. That's All that'll happen is your blood pressure will stay high and you'll die of a heart attack because anger, for example, is a very toxic emotion.

[00:04:56]And it does cause heart damage over time. It's the only emotion that we really know that's been linked to things like cardiovascular risk. And anger is is toxic because it's like you're driving a car. You've You're stepping on the gas and pushing on the brake at the same time because anger tells you to run away and to attack at the same time cuz you don't know what's going to happen. And so, it it really amps up the physiological demand on your body. And so, if you including your heart and your musculature. So, if you stay like that for like 10 years, you know, you're going to age 20 years.

[00:05:30]And that's a bad plan.

[00:05:32]So, So, you know, you take your underground emotions and you integrate them into a sophisticated reality.

[00:05:41]Now, Jung said, "So, first of all, unite your You you unite your mind, your thinking, let's say, with your emotions. So, that makes one thing instead of two fighting things.

[00:05:55]Okay, that's a good one. And then the next conjunction he talked about was it isn't enough to unite your mind and your emotions. And he thought about that as a male-female pairing symbolically.

[00:06:06]That's how it would manifest itself sometimes in dreams. So, you take the masculine element and the feminine element, the the thinking and the emotion, unite those, and that makes you more like one thing. Okay, now all of a sudden that's represented as symbolically male, that one thing. And it unites with something else that's now represented symbolically feminine female. That's the body.

[00:06:27]So, you take the mind-emotion integration and integrate that in your body. So, what does that mean? You act it out instead of just thinking. So, there's this philosophical idea called a Oh, now I'm going to forget what it's called. It's a contradiction in action.

[00:06:45]There's actually a technical term for it. But that's when you think and believe something, but you're but you don't act it out. And so that means there's a dissociation in you somehow between your abstract representations and what you manifest in action. Well, that's another form of discontinuity that isn't doing you any good. You know, the driver's going one way and the car's going the other, and you won't even be able to understand yourself if you do that. But even more, you're not putting your principles into practice. So, you're a dissociated your being is dissociated. So, once you get your mind and your emotions working together, then the next thing to do is to act that out consistently. So, that was the second conjunction as far as Jung was concerned. And then the third one was This is the tough one, and this is the one that's related to phenomenology.

[00:07:30]You erase the distinction between yourself and the world.

[00:07:34]Okay.

[00:07:36]That's a tough one. So, imagine you're dealing with someone who's hoarding.

[00:07:40]Now, people who are hoarding are often older or neurologically damaged or they have obsessive-compulsive disorder. But then you walk into their house and there's like 10,000 things in their house. There's There's There's There's maybe a hundred boxes and you open up a box and in the box there's some pens and some old passports and some checks and their their collection of silver dollars and some hypodermic needles and some dust and you know, a dead mouse and And And there's boxes and boxes and boxes like that in the house. It's absolute chaos in there. Absolute chaos, not order. Chaos. And then you think, is that their house or is that their being?

[00:08:18]Is that their mind? And the answer is, there's no difference. There's no difference. So, you know, I could say, well, if you want to organize your psyche, you could start by organizing your room. If If that would be easier cuz maybe you're a more concrete person and you need something concrete to do.

[00:08:34]So, you go clean up under your bed and you make your bed and you organize the papers on your desk and you think, well, just exactly what are you organizing?

[00:08:41]Are you organizing the objective world or are you objecting your field or are you organizing your field of being? Like your field of total experience.

[00:08:50]And Jung believed that, and I think this is there's a Buddhist doctrine that's sort of nested in there that at the highest level of psychological integration, there's no difference between you and what you experience.

[00:09:02]Now, you think, well, I can't control everything I experience. But that's no objection because you can't control yourself anyway. So, the mere fact that you can't extend control over everything you experience is no argument against the idea that you should still treat that as an extension of yourself. So, you could say, well, let's say you have a long-standing feud with your brother.

[00:09:23]Well, is that a psychological problem?

[00:09:26]Is that him? Is it a problem in the objective world? Or is Is it a problem in your field of being?

[00:09:32]And it's very useful to think that way because you might ask, what could you do to improve yourself? Well, let's step one step backwards. The first question might be, why should you even bother improving yourself?

[00:09:44]And I think the answer to that is something like so you don't suffer any more stupidly than you have to.

[00:09:50]And maybe so others don't have to either. It's something like that. You know, like there's a real injunction at the bottom of it. It's not some casual self-help doctrine. It's that if you don't organize yourself properly, you'll pay for it and in a big way and so will the people around you. Now, and you could say, well, I don't care about that, but that's actually not true. You actually do care about that because if you're in pain, you will care about it. And so you do care about it even if it's just that negative way, you know, um it's very rare that you can find someone who's in excruciating pain who would ever say, "Well, it would be no better if I was out of this."

[00:10:26]It's sort of pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn't exist along with it.

[00:10:33]It's incontrovertible.

[00:10:35]So, >> [snorts] >> you get your act together so that there isn't any more stupid pain around you than necessary. Well, so then the question might be, well, how would you go about getting your act together? And the answer to that, and this is a phenomenological idea, too. It's something like, look around for something that bothers you and see if you can fix it. Here's some of the examples of other forms of intelligence.

[00:10:58]And so then the question is, well, what does it mean to have a different form of intelligence? Would would form A and form B be completely uncorrelated?

[00:11:07]Like extraversion say and neuroticism, or would they be slightly correlated, or would they be highly correlated? And then you might ask, well, how highly correlated do they have to be before they're the same thing?

[00:11:18]Or how uncorrelated do they have to be before they're different things? And actually the answer to that comes down to something like practical utility.

[00:11:25]It's like imagine I'm trying to figure out how well you'll do in university.

[00:11:29]And I measure one thing and it's correlated at 0.7 with another thing I measure about you. Then I might say, "Well, are those two things the same or different?" They're pretty highly correlated. You're high in one, it means you're going to be high in the other.

[00:11:40]Well, so what is there any utility in measuring both things? And the way you figure that out actually is you do it statistically. So, we take the target, which may might be your performance across university. Then we say, "Well, can we predict your performance across university better by using one variable or two variables?"

[00:12:00]So, we would enter them both into a regression equation. All a regression equation does, it's quite simple. So, you're trying to predict the target. And the regression the regression equation tells you how well you can predict that target if you know another fact.

[00:12:17]Now, then it gets a little complicated because that's a correlation. How well you can predict B with A.

[00:12:22]Well, a regression will say how much you can predict C if you know A and B or A and B and C and D and E because you can use multiple predictors. And you can weight them. So, it might be 2 * A + 1 * B = C. And that's all a regression equation does. It's just multiplication and addition. Very, very straightforward. And so, two variables are sufficiently different functionally if you can use both of them simultaneously to predict something of interest. So, again, it's a tool-like approach. This is how the psychometricians do it. Is something real? Well, it's real if you can measure measure it and it helps you predict.

[00:12:59]That's That's how it's defined. So, then you might say, "Well, are are there these multiple intelligences?"

[00:13:06]Well, the first question would be, "Well, what do you mean by are there?"

[00:13:11]And the answer to that would be, "Well, let's specify the question since we're going to be scientific about it. Let's predict how well people do in university. We'll start with the assumption that intelligence if intelligence isn't associated with university success, then you're probably not talking about intelligence. Now, you could argue that, right? Because you could say, "Well, intelligence has nothing to do with university success."

[00:13:34]But, that's a definitional matter. We'd have to agree to begin with.

[00:13:38]Is it reasonable to start with the presupposition that intelligence and university success share something in common? Well, I think you have to be daft to to deny that initial proposition, although you could.

[00:13:53]Because you could say it was privilege or socio-economic status or or or or any number of sociological phenomena, and and some of those are obviously relevant, social class, for example.

[00:14:03]Because, you know, if you're in a higher social class, and all things being equal, intelligence included, if you're in a higher social class, you're more likely to go to university than you are if you're in a lower social class. So, there's other there's other factors that are going to influence whether or not you do well in university, but we're going to assume that one of them might be intelligence.

[00:14:24]Well, then you would ask, "Well, if you measured social intelligence, so that's What do they call that? Social intelligence. Now, emotional intelligence, which does not exist, by the way.

[00:14:36]Emotional [snorts] intelligence, moral intelligence, linguistic, musical, logical, mathematical, spatial, body kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal, all different forms of intelligence. Okay, so to answer the question of whether they exist, what you do first is pick a target, prediction of university performance. Then you make a measure for each of them, and you test to see if the measure measured the same thing across multiple instances within the same person. That's a reliability test, because what the hell good is your ruler if it stretches when you use it? It has to measure the same thing multiple times. And then you would say, "Okay, we'll take all these different intelligences, measured the way we've decided to measure them. The first thing we'll do is see how highly correlated they are, cuz if they're complete Two of them are completely correlated, then you have one, you don't have two, cuz that's the virtually the definition of one instead of two. You can factor analyze them and see if you can pull out what's common across all of them. That's another thing, because then you might say, "Well, intelligence is what's common across all the measures of these intelligences." It's It's a proposition. It's not a fact. You have to decide if you're going to agree with it. But that If you were going to do that, you'd use a factor analysis. And you'd say, "Well, if someone was more likely to be musical if they were also high in linguistic ability and more likely to be logical and mathematically inclined if they had a high spatial ability, etc." Then you'd be hypothesizing that there was one factor behind all of those manifestations that somehow similar. And maybe there wouldn't be. And then you'd take all your measures and you put them in something like a multiple regression analysis and you'd predict your target, university performance. And then maybe you'd say, "Well, wait a minute. Let's not just use university performance.

[00:16:15]Let's use junior high performance, high school performance, university performance, and job success. And then let's say that only things that predict success across all of those categories and that are the same we're going to define as intelligence." Well, that's basically how you end up with IQ. And so this is the world that you're in.

[00:16:35]You're somewhere cuz you have to be somewhere. Now, you might not know where that is, which means that the somewhere that you are is chaotic, in which case you need to go over your past in great detail and figure out where you are. It's like you're lost, right? You're You're lost and the problem with being lost is when you're lost, you don't know where to go.

[00:16:55]And the problem with not knowing where to go is there's a million places that you could go and a million places is too many places for you to go without dying.

[00:17:03]So, being lost is not good. So, you need to know where you are.

[00:17:07]One of the things that we built online, my partners and I, is this program called Past Authoring that helps people lay out the the the narrative of their past to identify to break their life down into six stages, epochs we call them, and then to identify the emotionally significant moments in each epoch and to write them out. What happened negatively, what happened positively, what the consequences were, what you derived from it, perhaps what you could have done differently, perhaps what you learned from it, all of that, so that you can narrow in, zero in on determining precisely where it is that you are right now. And people are often loath to do that cuz they actually don't want to know cuz they'd rather be spread out in a sort of half-blind manner in the fog, hoping that the place that they're at is better than it really is, and deluding themselves by remaining vague than to figure out I'm right here right now with these specific problems. But it's actually better to to do that because if you have a set of specific problems and you've really narrowed them down and really specified them, then you can probably start fixing them and you can start fixing them in micro micro ways, bit by bit, but there's no way you can do that without knowing where you are. It's impossible. And you can kind of tell if you don't know where you are. It's quite straightforward.

[00:18:30]If you are haunted by reveries of the past for events that are older than approximately 18 months, if they continue to come up in your mind over and over, in your dreams over and over, you haven't extracted the world out from your past experiences. The potential is still trapped in the past. And to confront the potential means to confront the dragon of the past, and of course that's terrifying and it can seriously be terrifying. So, for example, maybe you're vague and ill-formed and ill-defined because you were abused very badly when you were a child, 4 years old, something like that. And maybe you were abused by a family member cuz that's generally who does the abusing.

[00:19:10]And so that just makes it worse. And then, what that means is that you've got a implicit You've had an implicit encounter with malevolent evil.

[00:19:20]That No, you've had a direct encounter with malevolent evil, but you have an implicit hypothesis of malevolent evil that's plaguing you. It's still there.

[00:19:28]It's trapped in the memories, right?

[00:19:30]It's It's trapped in the representational structure. And as an adult, you're now faced with the necessity of articulating that fully before you have any chance whatsoever of freeing yourself from it. And so, that's no joke. Lots of times people have to go into the past. That's what the psychoanalyst do. And they And say, "Look, here is something came along and just bloody well knocked me over. And it isn't even that I repressed it, which which I think was Well, we won't talk about Freud's errors because Freud was a genius, so we'll just leave him alone. But But sometimes it's not repression. It's just that terrible things happen to people at such a young age that there isn't a bloody chance in hell that they can figure out why they happened or what to do with them or what they mean. And then, you can carry that with you. And you carry it with you. It's like Your Your Your body encounters the world in stages. And it happens very rapidly.

[00:20:19]Well, it can extend over years, but the initial stages happen very rapidly. So, for example, if you're walking down the road and you hear a large noise be a loud noise behind you, you'll go like this. That's a predator defense response, by the way. You crouch down.

[00:20:33]And that's to stop something from jumping on your back and getting at your neck too easily. That's like few few hundred milliseconds. It's really fast or even faster than that. And it better be because something like a snake, let We'll say can nail you just right now.

[00:20:46]So, you better be fast. But it's low resolution. It's like danger snake, something like that or danger predatory cat. It's that fast. And then, you can unravel that and categorize it, but that takes time.

[00:21:01]You do that with [snorts] emotion and then you do it with cognition. And you can do that with long-term thinking, you know, because maybe you've encountered someone specifically malevolent and predatory at work. That happens to people a lot who's operating as a as a destructive bully and who seems to have no positive function whatsoever.

[00:21:18]And he's only living that out. And then you you know, you don't know what to do about it. And so you're you're in prey mode. I don't mean this kind of mode, although that would help, too. But I mean you're acting like a prey animal. And then you have this terribly complex thing to decompose, which is what the hell's up with this person?

[00:21:35]Why are they making my life miserable?

[00:21:37]What is it about me that allows them to make my life miserable? That's a nasty little road to walk down. And you're stuck with having to you're stuck with having to decompose it. Maybe you can't.

[00:21:47]Maybe formulating an explicit philosophy of good and evil to deal with something malevolent in your environment actually just happens to be beyond you. And that could easily be. It's certainly the case for people who are young. And it's the case for plenty of adults as well.

[00:22:04]>> You talked about how dangerous it is to tell some young person whose life is messed up that they're just great the way they are, with which I completely agree. But how do you reach a young person who's bought into the notion that life is meaningless?

[00:22:18]>> Well, you the first thing is you tell them why they think that.

[00:22:22]It's like they've got all sorts of reasons to think that. It's like life is hard. It's it's it's a crucifixion.

[00:22:30]That's right.

[00:22:32]And so it's no wonder they think that.

[00:22:34]It's like okay, fine. First of all, we're going to take it seriously. Yeah, you're suffering and adrift and you have your reasons.

[00:22:41]But And then so you take those reasons seriously and you say despite that despite that, there's more to you than you think.

[00:22:51]And you know that, too. Cuz you upbraid yourself for not manifesting it. And you say to people, well, I ask people for example, who do you admire?

[00:23:01]Cuz that's that instinct for admiration is part of the instinct for imitation.

[00:23:06]It's like who do you admire? You admire people who are completely irresponsible?

[00:23:09]You admire people who can't take care of themselves? They can't even take care of themselves. Here's the utmost admirable person.

[00:23:16]Completely useless to themselves, maybe even counterproductive, just a bloody catastrophe for their family and like uh what would you call a social danger?

[00:23:28]Like no one admires that. No one admires that. It's like you start minimally. Can you take care of yourself? At least that.

[00:23:36]That'd be the first thing. And then is there more than that? Is there enough to you so that maybe someone else could rely on you now and then? And maybe maybe a number of people, maybe your family. You could be a You could be the glue that holds them together and and and and mends them. And then maybe there could be more to you than that. Maybe you could be someone for your community and God only knows how far you could go with that.

[00:23:57]Those are the people you admire.

[00:24:00]It's like well, try that out.

[00:24:01]See what happens. Start locally. Young Carl Jung said this is one of my favorite Carl Jung quotes. He said modern man does not see God because he will not look low enough.

[00:24:12]I really like that. And so you know, I've been telling the people that I talk to the same thing. It's like you have a certain amount of potential within your grasp.

[00:24:24]You may find what you have contemptible because you're not in the position of power. This modicum of possibility that's been granted to you is beneath you.

[00:24:34]And so you do nothing with it.

[00:24:36]And so you get nothing from it.

[00:24:38]You take that seriously. You do the small things you can, the humble things that you can to put yourself together in the in those tiny embarrassing ways that are real.

[00:24:52]And if you do that enough, you'll you'll for- you'll fortify yourself. And that will work. And you know, one of the things that's been unbelievably heartening to me It's ridiculous, really.

[00:25:07]Like normally, now, if I go out during the day if I go to any city, I've been to like 150 cities in the last year.

[00:25:18]And if I'm walking around on the street or in an airport, someone will come up to me about every 10 minutes or so.

[00:25:25]And they'll say the same thing. They always say the same thing.

[00:25:28]They first of all apologize for bothering me, and they're very polite.

[00:25:31]So, all my interactions with people, you'd never guess this from like my reputation in the press, but all my interactions with people in public are unbelievably positive.

[00:25:41]And the people will come up and say "You know, I was in this small domain of hell a year ago or 6 months ago, whatever it is. Addiction, alcoholism. I wasn't getting along with my family. I've been living with my girlfriend for 5 years, and we were stuck. I didn't have any direction for my career. I was nihilistic. You know, I was whatever.

[00:26:01]You know all the different ways that people can fall into a pit and and and and be miserable." Said, "I read your books or I watched your lectures, and I decided I was going to I was going to try to put my family together.

[00:26:15]I was going to I was going to make a vision and pursue it. I was going to try telling the truth. I was just going to try one of these things, and things are way better, way better. You know, and sometimes it's a father and a son, or sometimes it's a son and a daughter.

[00:26:30]It's usually It's usually It's not often a daughter and a mother, not so much.

[00:26:35]But I mean, if it's a pair of people.

[00:26:38]But or it's a girlfriend and a and a boyfriend, and the girlfriend's very happy usually because her boyfriend has straightened up substantially, and maybe they're getting married, and like he's half civilized at this point.

[00:26:50]But but but it's but it's it's it's an unbelievably positive thing to see and and it's a real thing, you know, it's like it's it's so interesting to watch the fact that all people have to do is put some of these things into practice and all of a sudden that little modicum of potential that they had because they got humble enough to deal with it properly starts to expand and expand and like I believe and I do believe this and I think this is part of the Christian message fundamentally is that there's actually no limit to that expansion.

[00:27:22]You know, because in some sense like we are this weird combination of finite and infinite. Like we're related to the infinite in some manner, obviously, because the infinite exists and here we are and so we're related to it in some manner and I don't know what manner that is, but I don't know what the limits are. It's like if you were the best person you could be.

[00:27:42]You know, truly, if you decided to live by truth and to aim at the good and you really did that, you put your whole heart and soul into it. Like you were like that's what you were staking your life on cuz you're staking your life on something. Who the hell could you be?

[00:27:59]And no one knows, you know, you know perfectly well you could be far more than you are and you don't know what the upper limit of that is and we certainly don't know what the upper limit would be if there were lots of people doing that.

[00:28:09]God only knows what problems we could solve. You know, there's lots of suffering and misery in the world, plenty and it's no wonder that people get bitter, but God, as you pointed out before you know, we've got no shortage of ingenuity and possibility and if we were serious about making things less wretched than they are who knows what miracles we could pull off. This is way more important than people think.

[00:28:34]That we are co-creators of of reality.

[00:28:38]Now you think, well, do you believe that?

[00:28:41]Well, let's let's let's let's think about that for a minute or two. It's like You know, the standard scientists, they tend to think of human beings as materialist and deterministic.

[00:28:55]I don't think that works very well for consciousness.

[00:28:58]I don't think there's any evidence that it works as an explanation for consciousness at all.

[00:29:04]And I think so I think consciousness is self-evident. I mean, we certainly act as if it's self-evident. You act like you're conscious. You act like all the people around you are conscious. They're not happy if you don't act like they're conscious. That's for sure. You're not going to get along with yourself or your family members or society at large if you don't treat people like they're conscious. You're also not going to get along with any of them unless you treat them like they are active agents that have some role in determining their own destiny, right? I mean, God, you see that in 2-year-olds, you know, when they're already pushing for autonomy. And so we make these assumptions that while we have this capacity for autonomous choice, and and I'm going to split an argument into two parts here.

[00:29:48]The first thing is I don't think that we can be deterministic because it looks like neurobiologically that if you want to run deterministically like on habit, which would be what deterministically would be, you have to practice and practice and practice and practice and practice and build all the machinery that allows you to act deterministically. And then there'll be a stimulus and the whole deterministic process will lay itself out, but that doesn't happen unless you've built the machinery. So like if you're a tennis pro, you know, you're acting deterministically all the time because you don't have enough time to consciously decide what you're going to do when a ball is coming at you so fast you can't actually see it properly.

[00:30:28]It's all reflex, but it's really complicated chains of reflexes and you spent like $10,000 building them. And so fine, and when you're driving your car, you're walking, you're doing these things that you've practiced so well, well, you're deterministic. But when you encounter the chaos of the day, that's a whole different story.

[00:30:46]And so, what consciousness seems to do actually is to act when deterministic processes aren't at hand.

[00:30:58]So, and so what we could walk through that. We could say, "Look Look here to here here's one way of thinking about yourself. You're You're a clock and you're wound up and you wind down mechanistically.

[00:31:12]But, the clock mechanism has to be there for you to wind down mechanistically.

[00:31:15]And unless you've practiced something a long time, it's not there. So, I don't see how determinism can account for that. So, here's an alternative and you can tell me if this is in keeping with your experience. So, you wake up in the morning.

[00:31:28]Your consciousness re-emerges from the darkness in which it's been embedded, like the sun coming up, right? Just like consciousness has always been associated with the sun.

[00:31:37]We're We're daytime creatures and we and we're We're We're creatures of vision.

[00:31:41]And so, we identify consciousness within with the light with illumination with enlightenment.

[00:31:46]>> [snorts] >> You wake up in the morning and what do you have in front of you?

[00:31:52]Well, it depends whether you're excited or worried, but it doesn't it doesn't really matter cuz it's the same thing.

[00:31:56]What you have in front of you, this is as far as I can tell is that you have a field of possibility. You have a field of potential. You might wake up and worry. You think, "Well, I have to do this or you know, this series of negative consequences might emerge and I have these obligations that need to be taken care of for the same reason.

[00:32:15]Duties, you know, tax bills that have to be opened before they turn into some sort of terrible monster or um work work requirements that need to be done for the same reason to keep to keep chaos at bay.

[00:32:30]And that'll run through your mind and if it's overwhelming, if there's too much chaos in your life, you might wake up in the middle of the night and have all that running through your head. You have all these this potential of what could be manifesting itself in front of you. And that that's that that can be very stressful. It can also be very exciting, right? Because the flip side of that obligation is opportunity, and so you see in front of you this field of potential that's opportunity. But what what what you see, as far as I can tell, with your consciousness is the potential that could be.

[00:33:03]Right? You see a sequence of worlds that you have some causal ability to bring into being.

[00:33:16]And and you act like that. You think, well, I have to do this because then this will happen, or if I don't do this, then this will happen. And hopefully, if you're not too skewed, most of the decisions you make are positive ones because you want to take the potential that's in front of you, the chaos, and you want to turn it into a reality that's good.

[00:33:38]And most of the time, you're going to assume, although you may be tempted not to from time to time, that the best way to do that is to confront that potential forthrightly, and to deal with it in a positive and truthful manner, and that the hopeful consequence of that will be that well, even if you don't produce something good, it will be less hellish than it might have been. Right? But maybe you'll Maybe you'll get lucky because you're focused, and you're doing your best, and you're confronting what's there as potential, and you turn it into something good.

[00:34:16]And then you can live with yourself properly, and you don't wake up in the middle of the night and bemoan your lost opportunities and your lost possibilities.

[00:34:25]And so I think that what we are as individuals are spirits that confront the potential of reality and transform it into the actuality of reality as a consequence of our ethical decisions.

[00:34:42]That's what it looks like. I was trying to understand why people did terrible things.

[00:34:49]And I was really concentrating on the terrible, terrible things that people do. And I was interested in Auschwitz, for example. And And not in Not Not as a political phenomenon, but as a as a psychological phenomenon. I was curious about how you could be an Auschwitz guard. And I wasn't really cur- curious about how you could be one, because, well, you could be one. Uh Of course. I was more curious about how I could be one, being such a good person as I thought I was. And But I also knew that people many people did many terrible things during the 20th century. And the idea that I was somehow better than them, or that I should assume a priori that I was better than them, and that I wouldn't have made the same choices or worse had I been in the same situation, was a very, very, very dangerous supposition. And in fact, a sufficiently dangerous supposition to bring about the very danger that I assumed was worth avoiding. I I had this idea, you know, that what had happened, especially in Nazi Germany, but also in in the Soviet Union, shouldn't happen again.

[00:36:00]That what we needed to do, because of what happened in the 20th century, especially because we also managed to create hydrogen bombs, that it was in that And that we had become so technologically powerful that it would There wasn't time for that anymore. That time for that was over. And that we really needed to understand why it happened.

[00:36:21]And that perhaps we could go deep enough in that understanding, which is I think what happens when you go deep in understanding so that you could stop it.

[00:36:32]Cuz if you if you understand the problem, maybe you can solve it.

[00:36:36]You know, and and at least in part, I came to believe that the problem was as Solzhenitsyn said, that the problem is is that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart.

[00:36:51]And I was was reading Jung at the same time, you know, and he believed that the human soul was a tree whose roots grew all the way to hell.

[00:36:59]And believed also that in the full investigation of the shadow, which was the dark side of the human psyche, was that the it was bottomless essentially, that that that it was like an experience of hell. And that also struck me as true.

[00:37:15]And that the way to stop those sorts of things from happening was to stop yourself from being the sort of person who would do it.

[00:37:27]Who would even start to do it. Because the other thing you learn when you learn about atrocities of that sort, you could read Ordinary Men, by the way, which is an unbelievably great study of exactly this sort of phenomenon. It's on my book list on my website.

[00:37:41]It's [snorts] about a group of German policemen who were turned into brutal murderers over a period of months when they went behind when they went into Poland after the Germans had marched through. And they were just ordinary middle class men and they weren't forced into this by their leadership, by the way, either, which was one of the things that makes the book so interesting. So, do for me it was a matter of understanding that if we want this sort of thing to not happen anymore, then we have to start to become the sort of people who wouldn't do it. Which seems rather self-evident all things considered unless, you know, you believe that we're the pawns of social forces, for example, like the Marxists do.

[00:38:20]Um and I don't believe that because we're also the creator of social forces.

[00:38:25]Um, and we're also capable of standing up to social forces because I would say the individual is more powerful than the social force all things considered, interestingly enough. That the way to stop such things to from happening, the way to remember properly is to understand that that you could do it.

[00:38:51]That you could do those terrible things.

[00:38:55]Because the people who did them were like you.

[00:38:59]And that the way out of that is to stop being like that.

[00:39:05]And the way you stop being like that is well, at least in part, by stop by ceasing to tell yourself lies that you don't believe in.

[00:39:19]And that you know you shouldn't act out.

[00:39:21]Terry Butler, who's was a labor is a labor front bencher, said, "I'm agnostic. People are inherently valuable because they are people."

[00:39:32]And no, that doesn't work out very It's It's It's a It's one of those one-minute answers, except it's actually only 10 seconds. Because you can you you can make the opposite argument, and people do all the time, you know, like the Club of Rome, for example, um, which which was an organization in Rome, um, logically enough, um, formed in the '60s, was very much concerned about the terribly detrimental effect that human beings were having on the planet, and I I believe it was one of the Club of Rome members who coined the idea, and and if it wasn't, it was someone who was thinking exactly the same way. So, works out either way. That human beings were something approximating a cancer on the planet, you know, because of all the terrible things we were doing ecologically and so forth. That was back when people believed we were going to overpopulate um the planet to such a degree by the year 2000 that there would be widespread privation and starvation, which by the way if you haven't noticed there isn't. Um And and you know, if you look at the terrible things that people do apart from the despoiling of the natural environment, let's say, there's all the you know, malevolence that's associated with human interactions and also human social systems and um it isn't so obvious as a consequence of that that you can make a straightforward case that human beings are inherently valuable merely because they're human beings because you can equally logical case from first principles that they're inherently well, destructive or that they should be um perhaps limited in their ability to procreate or that they are a catastrophe for the planet as a whole or that our entire history is nothing but a sequence of un- what would you call unrequited malevolence and that people generally can't be trusted. So, I don't find that answer particularly satisfying. I think it's a it's a it's it's just self-referential. People are inherently valuable because they are people. It's like, well you don't really get anywhere with an answer like that.

[00:41:49]So, so she's agnostic and and then but then she has this idea despite her agnosticism that you can make the case a priori with nothing buttressing it that people are somehow inherently valuable and seems to me that that requires a little more depth and a little more explanation for it to actually be convincing. You know, it's like it's not obvious to me that people themselves think that they're valuable all the time. Often they don't think that at all. They don't certainly don't think that often when they're depressed. They certainly don't think that when they're suicidal. They don't really think that when they're ashamed or guilty or frustrated or disappointed or angry or waking up at 3:00 in the morning and tormenting themselves with their consciences. They don't necessarily think that when they're fighting with their family or when they're upset at work or you know, when things go wrong in life. And so it's not so bloody obvious that people are inherently valuable. And and then you might also notice that it's kind of easy to think that some people are more valuable than others. Sort of like an animal farm, you know, where the animals were all equal except that some animals were more equal than others.

[00:42:58]Um but it's very easy for human beings to think that about other human beings because no matter where you look in human societies, there are rank orders of value, right? In in any hierarchy that we produce that's associated with some ability, we find that some people are so much better at whatever it is that they're doing that it's an absolute miracle and most people are absolutely dreadful at it. And so, you know, if you were thinking about inherent value as something associated with so with with um an approximation of skill or competence, then it wouldn't be obvious from the structure of the world that people were inherently valuable in that manner either because there's such a rank order difference in our ability to do things. You know, you might say, "Well, that kind of averages out across things." But I don't think that's a very strong argument either. So So it's not It's bloody well not obvious, I'll tell you. It's not obvious where this idea that people are inherently valuable came from. That's a tough one.

[00:43:58]You know, and and and in and in and and in aristocratic states or or tyrannical states, it's certainly not obvious at all that there's any acceptance of the notion that people are inherently valuable. It's like there's no necessary presumption of innocence, for example, and you don't have any sovereign right to your own destiny. Like you're not granted the rights not granted cuz that's the wrong way of thinking about it.

[00:44:27]Your rights as a sovereign individual who has the responsibility and the capability to determine the destiny of the state itself don't exist. That doesn't exist as a concept, and so I don't see that there's anything there that speaks of inherent value, either.

[00:44:44]So, it's by no means an obvious concept.

[00:44:47]In fact, I think it's one of the least obvious concepts that human beings have ever come up with that each of us in some strange manner is is uh is to be attributed some divine spark, let's say, that makes us equal in some fundamental way before God, you know, before the reality of the universe itself, even in relationship to our own laws. I mean, I if you want a miracle for an idea, that's that's I can't think of one that's that's more unlikely than that. So, I've been puzzling over that for a very long time because I cannot understand why in the world that idea ever came to be or how in the world we ever agreed to act as if it was true. It's really something, and we should let that go with We let that idea go to our great peril. It's a fundamental, remarkable, fundamental idea. And what's so interesting about it, too, is that once you have that idea, weird as it is and improbable as it is, and you start to organize your social relationships in accordance with it, well, then they work.

[00:45:59]You know, so in my rule two is treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping and it's sort of predicated on the idea that regardless of your inadequacies and your malevolence, which you know, I'm sure you have many inadequacies and no shortage of malevolence just like everyone else. Regardless of that, you have a moral obligation, so that would be a responsibility, to assume that despite all evidence that there's actually something of intrinsic worth about you and that as a consequence you're duty bound to treat yourself like that is true.