Jordan Peterson: "The Psychology of Self Transformation"

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Humanism, existentialism, and phenomenology, they're all kind of clumped together.

[00:00:07]Brilliant theorists, I think. A lot of this came out in the 1950s.

[00:00:11]You might as well You could think about it in some sense as the precursor to positive psychology, except that except that positive psychology has no grounding either in psychology or philosophy, whereas existentialism has good grounding in both. It's not naive.

[00:00:28]You know, the existentialists believed that Well, they I'll clump them together for the purpose of this brief exposition. The first thing that this group of thinkers asks you to consider This is a hard thing to do, but if you can do it, it's really worthwhile. Forget about your normal conceptions, your formal conceptions of what constitutes reality, and play this game instead. It's like it's it's an axiom shift. Instead of thinking that reality is the objective world, and you're a like a superfluous subjective observer, a transient subjective observer, imagine that what reality is is what you experience. That's it. So, everything you experience is equally real, although there are different categories of real, right? I mean, a dream is not in the same category as the chair that you're sitting on. But from the phenomenological point of view, a dream and an emotion is just as real a phenomena as the chair is real. Okay, so that's the first axiom. It's It's It's The game is sort of Well, what if we What if we make that assumption?

[00:01:31]So, you make that assumption. The next issue is What are the essential qualities of what you experience?

[00:01:44]And that can be addressed in a variety of ways. One of the most important things that the existentialists are concerned about is fundamental anxiety. So, the this group of thinkers would say well, you're you have you you exist within this domain of experience and one of the phenomena that's most manifest within that domain is the feeling of anxiety or dread. That's a Kierkegaardian idea.

[00:02:10]It's that as in an experience constituted like yours, which is somewhat fragile, which knows its limits, it's localized in time and space, the the fundamental The fundamental negative meaning in some sense is anxiety and dread. And then the question is, given that that's the fundamental reality, what do you do about it?

[00:02:36]And so the existentialist idea in sense is observe your existence, find those elements of being that support you and pursue them.

[00:02:49]And that will counterbalance the primary feeling of dread and alienation and anxiety and allow you to exist in a a manner that makes existence at least bearable.

[00:03:04]So, if you look at the Freudians, for example, the Freudians sort of think that if there's something wrong with you, there's a reason. So, if if you were just a normal person, you'd be okay. And since you're not a normal person, something went wrong. Whereas the existentialists, they take the opposite idea. They say, "Look, you're screwed from from day one. That's just how it is because like look at you, you're you're flawed, you're finite, and there's a thousand things, a million things that you don't know, and and all sorts of things that are conspiring to do you in."

[00:03:37]It's like with a problem like that, you don't need more problems to be unstable, you're just unstable to begin with. So, they they conceive of negative emotion-related pathology as an integral part of being. And then the question is, okay, given that, it's like the Buddhist idea that life is suffering. It's the same idea. It's like don't be wondering why you're pathological. It's obvious why you're pathological.

[00:04:02]How could you help but be pathological?

[00:04:05]The question is, given that, what should you do about it? Or even is there anything you can do about it? And that's the the question that we'll try to unfold in this section of the course.

[00:04:19]Now, the other thing that's really interesting about this group of thinkers, I think, is that especially the later ones, like well, I include Solzhenitsyn as a personality theorist for for reasons that I won't talk to you about now. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian author and he wrote a book called The Gulag Archipelago, which was published in the 1970s, and it was one of the things that knocked over the Soviet Union because it revealed for the first time just how corrupt and murderous the Soviet system was. Now, the thing that's interesting about Solzhenitsyn and and also about Frankl, Victor Frankl, who was a psychiatrist who'd been put in the Nazi death camps, is that they were very integrally concerned with the idea of the intrinsic meaningfulness and meaninglessness of human life, one thing. So, that's the personal element.

[00:05:04]But the second thing they were concerned about, and this sort of made them logical followers of Nietzsche, was what effect does your decision about the meaning of your life have on the broader social community?

[00:05:18]So, let's say that you're nihilistic or you're totalitarian.

[00:05:22]So, what does that mean? Like, you're not an isolated unit, you're interacting with people all the time. You have a tremendous network of connections. You know, you can think of it this way. You know a thousand people.

[00:05:33]Each of those thousand people knows a thousand people. That means you're one person from a million and two from a billion.

[00:05:39]So, instead of being some little localized dot in an random array of dots, seven billion of them, you're the center of a connected network. And so if there's something that's gone astray with your psychic functioning, your psychological functioning, what exactly does that do to the broader social community? And Solzhenitsyn's idea, and Frankl's as well, it's quite straightforward, is the two the the reason that society has become pathological, deeply, murderously pathological, is because individuals within the society have become deeply and murderously pathological.

[00:06:11]So instead of society in, which is something that the Marxists would think for example, you know, that you're the pawn of social forces, the existentialists would say, "Uh-uh, don't be so sure about that.

[00:06:22]It's the quality of the individual decisions that you make on a personal level day to day that spread out into the broader community and either improve it or pathologize it." And so I'm going to have you read both Frankl and Solzhenitsyn because I think they make viciously powerful arguments that that is in fact the case. And it's actually quite a useful It's a funny thing, eh?

[00:06:42]Cuz often, this is sort of associated with the idea of facing dragons.

[00:06:47]Often you learn the things that are most vital to your being by considering the worst possible phenomena. So I might say, "Well, just think about this." It's like the idea that Frankl and Solzhenitsyn, and others, by the way, have been propagating is that whatever decisions you make that are moral on a day-to-day basis aren't isolated to you.

[00:07:05]They spread out into the community very rapidly. And so the fate of the community is dependent in some sense on your personal morality.

[00:07:15]So then, well, that's a terrible thing.

[00:07:17]I mean, it's a terrible weight. But it certainly provides an answer to, well, "Why should I do what I do?" It's like, do good things? Great, they propagate.

[00:07:26]Do bad things? Fine, they propagate, too. And one of the really interesting things about the existentialists is they took a look at what happened in the 20th century with its ungodly murderous political systems and said, "All right, just exactly what responsibility does the individual bear for bringing those conditions about?

[00:07:47]It's like it's a question well worth thinking about and it certainly hasn't lost its relevance. In fact, I think it's well, it's as relevant as ever. So, that's great. That's that's really an interesting thing to do.

[00:07:59]So, this is the personified representation. So, mother nature, father culture, and the individual.

[00:08:04]Okay, so now imagine that that's sort of your primary as a primate who's striving towards linguistic representation.

[00:08:11]That's kind of what you've got to work with. As far as you're concerned, that's the primal structure of the cosmos. So, there's you, that's the individual, there's your mother and nature, there's your father and culture, and wherever you are, that's what there is and that's what you've got to work with to begin with. Okay, now you know what? Evolution is a conservative process. And so, what that means is that it's not a radical renovator. Usually, what evolution does is cobble something new onto something old. Well, the old is conserved. So, for example, you have mechanisms way down in your in your neurological systems that enable you to do things like detect snakes with an incredible rapidity and jump out of the way. Those are reflexes.

[00:08:50]And same reflexes, similar reflexes that are operative say when you put your hand in a hot stove and jerk it away before you even know it's hot. So, and the reason you have the reason you can do that is because your body has conserved incredibly primitive neurological loops say when you jerk your hand away [clears throat] from a stove that only run from your hand to your spinal cord and back. So, they're super fast, but you know, they can't do much. They can jerk your hand away, WHICH WHICH IS ENOUGH IF IT'S BURNING. It's like it's a good thing to have conserved. So, human beings as they evolved cognitively started out with this social cognitive architecture that that they interpreted the world through. And you can see why this would be partly cuz well, we do live in in an intensely social environment. There's always been mothers, there's always been fathers, and then you add to that the human fact that we have this unbelievably long developmental period where we're um incapable, fundamentally incapable of taking care of ourselves, right? So, you know, when something like a a moose calf is born, it's like 3 minutes later it's wandering around, and if a wolf shows up, it can you know, it can run beside its mother. It's like human baby just lays there for like a year, you know?

[00:10:01]And part of that is because you may not know this, but for a mammal of our size, we should have a gestation period of 2 years.

[00:10:08]So, when those of you who are women have children in the future, and you know, at 9 months you're pretty damn sick of this, you might well thank the structure of the cosmos that you don't have, you know, 15 more months to go, because that's how long the baby should remain in utero. The reason it doesn't is cuz its head grows too fast, cuz we have this big brain, and so there's this weird evolutionary arms race between the mother's body and the pelvic girdle and the head size of the infant, and the way that's all sorted itself out is women's hips are still narrow enough so they can run, cuz if they were any wider, they'd have a hard time running, and the baby is born ni- at 9 months instead of 24 with the compressible head. Because babies' skull bones aren't put together, and so when they pass through the birth canal, their head can be crushed in quite a lot so that, you know, hopefully they live.

[00:10:59]So, anyways, we have this incredible period of dependency. After that, it's abject dependency for the first while, but then you're really not, I don't know how long it takes people to really get up and going. It's like, well, 18 we'll say, but of course that's complete rubbish. It's more like 30. So, there's a very long dependency period. And so, that's all the more reason why we would tend to view the world as, you know, mother, father, and then expand that onto into our conception of the cosmos.

[00:11:28]And here here seems to be how people did it. So, it's a complicated association to manage, but I think the best way of managing it is to think of the figure of Mother Nature. And that that would be Mary here with the Isis there. Now, nature is a funny thing because I don't want you to think about nature the way that modern people think about nature. I want you to think about nature as that which lurks outside of culture.

[00:11:53]So, imagine in the typical tribal scene or let's say in the typical rather primeval uh village or gathering, there's a domain that people inhabit that that they're sort of comfortable with. That's where all the people are. That's where the dominance hierarchy is. And then that's sort of surrounded by God only knows what. Like the outside world, the barbarians, the the darkness that eats the sun when it goes down at night, all the things that are foreign and uncomfortable are outside of that circle. And that's nature. What's outside of culture is nature. And so, nature is the unknown.

[00:12:29]And then what's inside is culture.

[00:12:31]That's the known. And that's actually turns out to be weirdly enough, even though it's a worldview that's predicated on its underlying social cognitive structure, it turns out to be an a worldview that's unbelievably useful because it happens to map onto the structure of subjective experience extremely well in that wherever you go you're viewing the world through a cultural lens and you're usually encapsulated in a culture as well.

[00:12:59]You virtually it's virtually impossible now to go anywhere where culture isn't with you and around you. I mean, you can do it from time to time. But even if you manage that, it's still inside you. In in in it's it's it's it's coded in the way that you behave and it's structured the way you perceive things and think about them. So, even if the outside world is devoid of cultural artifacts, doesn't matter cuz you're a cultural artifact right to your core.

[00:13:24]Despite that and and and it's the incorporation of the culture that allows you to maneuver and live and act and and do that somewhat successfully.

[00:13:32]Despite that, despite that you're enculturated and embedded in culture, nature can pop out and disturb you pretty much at any moment. And that happens when whatever it is that you're doing doesn't work.

[00:13:47]And so, the way that that humanity naturally perceives the world and symbolizes the world is as a place that's basically composed of culture.

[00:13:56]And culture is where you are when things are going according to how you want them to go.

[00:14:02]That's sort of the definition of knowing.

[00:14:04]Right? It's It's not knowing A SET OF FACTS. It's It's knowing how to behave so that the ends that you're pursuing get acquired. And that's more important in many ways than knowing facts.

[00:14:15]Facts may help you do that, but they they may not, too.

[00:14:19]So, there's there's there's the place you are when you know what you're doing and you get what you want. And then there's that other place that pops up all the time where you haven't got a clue about what to do.

[00:14:29]And that's the place that It's like a transcendent place, and that's nature.

[00:14:33]And the transcendent place is where all the mysteries of life come from, the things that you cannot handle, the diseases, the illnesses, death, disappointments, frustrations, all the things that knock you for a loop and make you tumble underground. And that's nature, nature like a predator.

[00:14:50]And it It's a strange place, nature, because on the one hand, it gives because nature is the source of all things, given that it's the source of all new things. But on the other hand, it takes away because because it surrounds you and because it transcends your knowledge, it's eventually what what kills you.

[00:15:06]So, people have a very ambivalent relationship with nature and and and with nature because of its but because of its bifurcated and paradoxical um existence. Culture's the same way. I mean, in formal logic, a thing can't be one thing and its opposite at the same time. In these mythological categories that are derivatives of social cognition, things are what they are and their opposites at the same time, just as you're a beneficiary and a victim of culture and a beneficiary and a victim of nature.

[00:15:39]So, now, the reason part of the reason I'm telling you this is because it's it's it's very complicated to grasp, but what's what's happened with you neurologically in part is that the part of your brain that that evolved to deal with things like predators and dangers, you know, things that are emanating from nature that would directly threaten you, once those things became abstracted so that they could handle became sophisticated enough so that they could handle abstractions, instead of dealing with things like predator A or predator B or predator C or dangerous situation A, they got sophisticated enough to deal with the class of those things. And so, human beings, instead of perceiving a dangerous animal or a dangerous place, started to be able to perceive danger as such and to conceptualize danger as a class of events. But the same circuits that were originate that originated to do things like take care of, you know, to make sure that you knew where the snakes were coming from, are also the circuits that now enable you to conceptualize danger in the abstract and to, you know, to deal with it one way or another. Potential future danger, danger now, the fact of danger as an existential reality. All of that. Only human beings can conceptualize the class of all dangerous things. And part of that's associated with nature.

[00:17:00]So, there's a domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things. Now, most [clears throat] of what the psychologists have dealt with, who are clinical psychologists, is actually the domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things. And it's actually because as far as you're concerned in your life as a as a human being, you live inside a network of meanings of things, right? So, for example, when you look at your mother, you're not looking at her at her as an object and then attributing all sorts of meanings to her. You see the meaning of your mother right away, and that meaning is multi-dimensional. It has a very long history, and it affects you directly on a physiological level. Maybe you hate her. And so, the sight of your mother makes your heart race and your and your brain produce cortisol because she's categorized as unpredictable and chronic threat.

[00:17:55]That's a standard Freudian situation, right?

[00:18:00]Yeah. No one would laugh if there wasn't sometimes that was true. So, >> [laughter] >> those are Freudian slips, by the way, when you discuss something like that and people [snorts] laugh, then that's an admission on their part, like a an deep the unconscious admission on their part that there is [snorts] truth to the statement, and it's also a truth that is somewhat painful to admit.

[00:18:22]So, you can tell that You can tell that when you're listening to comedians. They do that all the time, right? They tell you something that's absolutely brutally evident that no one will admit, and everyone laughs. That is a Freudian slip, technically, because Freud often listened to the sorts of things that would make his patients laugh or make an audience that he was speaking to laugh because that would give him some insights into what they were repressing, so to speak, and what they would allow to come to light. So, and and jokes are often about things that are taboo, right? I mean, it's hard to make a joke about something that isn't taboo. So, all right. So, I've I made a a classification structure of these two different ways of looking at things.

[00:19:01]There's a meaning-centered way of looking at things, and the meaning is then the implication of the thing for action on your part. And there's a more materialistic centered thing, which is sort of like the world as it exists if you weren't here, right? That's a that's the fundamental hypothesis of science is that we're there's something around that would be here and look the way it does look now if none of you were around. And you know, it's possible that that's true and um and it's also possible that it's it's possible that it's true, it's possible that it's not true, but most possible is the fact that it's true in a way that we really don't understand because the existence of things the way we perceive them is clearly dependent on our existence as a perceiver. And so, what the nature of the world would be with there was no one around at all to perceive it if there was no such thing as consciousness is like that is a completely unsolved problem.

[00:19:56]So, maybe it would be like a field of quantum potential or something like that. But but it isn't even possible to really understand what that means.

[00:20:04]So, So, now having established that having established I'll I'll give you another example of it before we move on. So, I said for example that when you interact with objects around you, you're not really interacting with objects.

[00:20:20]It's more like you're interacting with tools cuz your primary concern is, "Well, what the what's the world in relationship to me?

[00:20:28]What do I have to avoid, you know, if I want to get to where I'm going? And what can I use to further my pursuits?" And so, you're like that deeply. That's why human beings are tool-using creatures, right? We have hands and manipulate the world and those hands are they're they're built into our cognitive architecture. Like it's not like our brain is separate from our hands. Far far it's it's it's it's very opposite to that. We wouldn't have the brains we have if we didn't have the hands we have. That's why things like octopuses, by the way, or octopi are very intelligent. They are even though they're invertebrates, they only live a couple of years, so they can't learn that much, but they're extraordinarily intelligent and it's partly because they're tentacled and because they're tentacled, they can grab things and manipulate them. And so, you know, they've developed an intelligence that's identifiable to us because we have little tentacles on the ends of our hands, and you know, we're using them to fiddle around with the world all the time.

[00:21:21]So, now, there's the perceptual reality, which is the that we know about already, that when you look at something, and we track the way that you're interacting with, we know that one of the first things that happen happens is the the relationship between the perceived object and your body is established very rapidly, okay? Because you want to map the object onto your body, so you know what the hell to do, how to orient yourself so that you're safe and productive at the same time.

[00:21:54]There's a guy named Visual JJ Gibson, Gibson, who who was a psychologist psychologist of perception who operated in the late '70s. People thought his theories were they weren't behavioral, that's for sure. They were of a different classification or category. And Gibson also made the first sort of claim that what you saw in the world were things like tools. He called them affordances.

[00:22:21]And so, for example, when you approach what you would call from an objective perspective a cliff, Gibson would say, you don't see a cliff, you see a falling-off place.

[00:22:32]And you might infer a cliff, but you see falling-off place. And if you think about it again from a Darwinian perspective, of course you see falling-off place. That's why, you know, you you might shrink from from a precipice is your your whole being perceives that as a place that would instantly make you extinct. It's not a secondary derivation from your analysis of a set of objective facts. It's a primary perception. And it has to be because you better move quick if you're too near a cliff. You don't have any time to think. The same thing occurs when maybe you're being, you know, potentially struck by a snake. You have circuits in your brain that will see that snake and make you jump way before you know it's a snake because sitting around, standing around waiting for the image of snake to form in your consciousness means that you've been bitten five or six times already because you're just not fast enough to see and then move.

[00:23:25]You see, move, and then perceive.

[00:23:27]And that's what keeps you safe.

[00:23:29]And so a lot of a lot of what you perceive in the world are the meanings that you map onto your body. If you're going to be a good person, you can decompose being a good person into sub parts of being a good person, and you can decode so being a good person is an abstract ideal, but as you move closer and closer to the point where the goodness is manifested in action, you move closer and closer to actual movements in the world. And so the abstract category good person is actually made out of you could think about it as a very complex melody of motor motor actions and perceptions.

[00:24:05]Perception is very tightly linked to motor action because whenever you perceive anything, you're doing it in part by actively investigating world.

[00:24:12]It's partly why your eyes are moving around all the time and if if you're listening, you move your head and you know, to to touch something you have to actively investigate it. So it's always an activity of exploration.

[00:24:22]Now, in some ways, when you think about the child piecing its its being together from the bottom up, you can think about that as a biological process unfolding.

[00:24:36]You know, and you can think of the child as crawling and then learning to walk as a biological process unfolding, but that's an oversimplification because human beings exist from day one in a very, very social world. And so what that means is the way that those behaviors or sub micro personalities start to organize themselves is always under the influence of of the society in which they're embedded.

[00:25:04]And so, you know, Piaget talked about the child as as as being uh as as having reflex basic built-in reflexes at birth.

[00:25:18]And that that those reflexes are then elaborated up into more and more complex structures, but you can think that even the elaboration of those basic reflexes, even right from the beginning, like there's a rooting and sucking reflex, which you can you can elicit from a child by tapping on the side of its cheek when it's very new newly born, and it'll search to try to put what's tapping in its mouth. And that's that's uh that's part of the reflexive process, the built-in perceptual motor unit that allows the child to begin to suckle.

[00:25:47]Now, the thing is though, what it's suckling isn't a static and objective entity. It's a person.

[00:25:53]And part of breastfeeding is the establishment of a relationship, a complex relationship, because it's also not only a feeding relationship, it's a caring relationship, it's a relationship that's based on tactile interaction.

[00:26:05]There can be nervousness associated with it, uh and and often is, especially for a new mother. It's it's a very complex dynamic social act. And so, what that means is that right from the beginning, in order for the baby to engage in that process properly, it has to allow its initial reflexive movements to be modified by social necessity immediately. So, for example, if a baby is breastfeeding, it can't bite.

[00:26:36]And you know, it doesn't have any teeth, so being bitten isn't necessarily a catastrophe, but it's not pleasant. And so, what will happen if the baby bites the mother is that the mother will pull away and startle the baby, and then the baby will cry, and you know, the mother will be at least startled by the by the error and so the baby has to learn to it has to learn to be civilized in some sense right off the bat. Now, you know, when Freud was talking about the process of socialization, he tended to concentrate more on toilet training.

[00:27:07]Now, because he thought of that as the first place where the the first major place where the id of the child, which which or which Rogers would regard as an organismic as the organismic uh experiential domain is brought under control of the superego.

[00:27:25]Right? Because the baby obviously its fundamental biological function is to relieve itself, but that has to come under very very strict social control and it's a it's a complex form of learning, you know, it's basically the acquisition of voluntary control over what was heretofore an involuntary reflex essentially. And so that can go well or it can go badly and it can very go go very badly. So I knew a family had a daughter at one point and that daughter would only defecate in her diaper when she was three. So that meant she had full voluntary control of her bowel function, but there was no way she was going to participate in the social ritual that surrounded proper toileting. There was a war going on like a serious war and that sort of thing happens well not infrequently and of course you remember in the Crumb movie the mother uh the boys accusing the mother of giving them enemas and her of course denying that any such thing happened, which was something that made both of them roll their eyes. You know, and they all laughed, but it's really not particularly amusing. So anyways, my point is is that even at the micro level the manifestation of what we'll call micro personalities expands and organizes into a an environment that's conditioned by social expectation.

[00:28:46]Okay, so then then, and this is something we haven't talked about before.

[00:28:52]One thing you might ask is, okay, where does the social expectation come from?

[00:28:58]Now, that's a very complex question because in some sense that's the same question as as where does culture come from? And that's partly a complex question because you have to take into account evolutionary history, which provides the substrata for the development of culture, so that would be human biology.

[00:29:16]You have to take that into account. And then you have to take human history into account. And and where what you don't have to take into account is not clear.

[00:29:24]Right? Because it's very difficult to to track the origins of the social routines that make up the fundamental social contract. You know, we know how to behave properly, roughly speaking. We have a set of expectations and a set of wants for about the way that other people are going to behave with regards to us, and and they return the favor. And everyone is participating in this, and everybody basically knows it unless they're very poorly socialized, and you can usually tell that right away. You know, kids can tell that because if a three-year-old is playing with another three-year-old, and one of them is poorly socialized, and so maybe has the behavioral repertoire of a fairly badly behaved two-year-old, the other three-year-old, being socially sophisticated, will say, "Will not play with the first one."

[00:30:09]So, even though they might be perfectly happy to play for a time with an actual two-year-old. So, it it doesn't take very long.

[00:30:17]It's really at about the age of three that children are already sophisticated enough to have embodied the rules that constitute appropriate cultural behavior.