This is the transcript of Jordan B Peterson’s lecture titled ‘Reality and the Sacred’. In this lecture Dr Peterson describes the way the world is portrayed in deep stories, such as myths and religious representations.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Jordan B Peterson – Psychologist
I want to talk to you today about what I think is a relatively new way of looking at your experience, but maybe even more broadly than that, a new way of looking at reality itself.
You all come to university, I suppose, to make your conceptions of reality more sophisticated, and you want to do that because you have to live in the world, and the more sophisticated your conceptions, the less likely you’ll encounter tragic or harmful circumstances that you will be unable to deal with. It really matters if you know what you’re thinking and you know how to think.
Over the last 20 years, I would say, there’s been a revolution in psychology, and the revolution has involved a transformation in the way that we look at the world, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today.
I entitled this talk, Reality and the Sacred. It’s a strange title for a talk to modern people because we don’t really understand what the sacred means unless we live within a worldview that’s essentially, I wouldn’t say archaic, but at least traditional. For modern, free-thinking, fundamentally liberal people, the idea of the sacred is anachronistic, or if not anachronistic, at least incomprehensible.
So I want to start with a story from the Old Testament. There’s a scene in the Old Testament when the ancient Hebrews are moving the Ark of the Covenant, and the Ark of the Covenant is a device that was manufactured in order to contain the Word of God. There was a rule among the ancient Hebrews, which was, you were not to touch the Ark of the Covenant, no matter what.
There’s a story in the Old Testament where the bearers of the Ark of the Covenant, they used to carry it. The bearers of the Ark of the Covenant trip, and a man reaches out to steady it, and when he touches it, God strikes him dead.
Modern people look at a story like that, and the first thing they think is, that seems a little bit harsh on the part of God, given that the man was attempting to do something that he believed was good.
But what the story is designed to indicate, in my opinion, is that there are certain things that you touch at your peril, regardless of your intentions. And those things that you touch at your peril, regardless of your intentions, most cultures regard as sacred, as untouchable. I want to make a case for you today that those things exist, and also why they exist, and why it’s necessary for you to know that they exist.
I would also say that if you’re properly educated in the university, especially with regards to the humanities, which are in some conceptual trouble at the moment, what essentially happens to you is that you’re introduced in a relatively secular way to the concept of the sacred. You’re here in the university to learn about the eternal values of humankind. And I think that people who tell you that those values do not exist, or that they’re endlessly debatable, do you an unbelievable disservice.
HOW YOU THINK ABOUT THE WORLD
Now, I’m going to tell you first how you think about the world, I think. So, this would be a Newtonian view of the world. It’s Newtonian and deterministic. And it’s a worldview that dominated psychology, and economics, and anthropology, and political science, you name it, for probably 400 years. But it’s come to a crashing halt in the last 50 years.
And the consequences of that have been manifested in a number of domains. The old world presuppositions are something like this: The world is made out of objects. When you look at the world, you see the objects. There they are in front of you. As a consequence of seeing the objects, you think about what to do. And after you think about what to do in presence of the objects, you act.
Now, that seems self-evident, because when you look at the world, there the objects are. And it appears to you that you see them, and then you think about them, and then you act.
But there’s a real problem with that. First problem is, use half your brain to see. Literally. Human visual cortex is a very large part of your brain. And the reason that the visual cortex is so large is that seeing is, as far as we can tell, actually impossible. Now, the fact that seeing perception is impossible wasn’t discovered by psychologists, and it wasn’t discovered by philosophers. It was discovered by people who were working on artificial intelligence, and trying to make artificially intelligent machines.
The presupposition of the people who were making intelligent machines was, the hard part of interacting with the world is figuring out what to do once you see the objects. But it turned out that making machines that could see objects was impossible. And the reason for that is that boundaries between objects are not obvious. They’re not obvious at all. In fact, it’s very difficult to understand how it is that we separate things up at all.
Now, let me give you an example. So, if you think about yourself, when you look in the mirror, you see yourself as an object. You see your eyes, you see your nose, you see your face, you see your body. And that’s pretty much what you see when you look at other people. But that isn’t all there is to you. In fact, that’s hardly any of what there is to you.
So, you could say, for example, you exist at the level of the quantum particle. You can’t perceive that. In fact, people didn’t know that until 75 years ago.
Now, when you look at yourself, you don’t see that. You see yourself at a certain level of resolution. When you look at the world, you see yourself at a certain level of resolution. But all those other levels are equally real and equally relevant. And we, in fact, have very little idea how it is that you’re only able to see what you see.
THE FRAME PROBLEM
Almost nothing has obvious boundaries. And this has real-world consequences. It’s not something that’s merely abstract. The technical term for this problem, the problem of how to bind your perceptions, to limit them, is called the frame problem. The frame problem was discovered about 40 years ago. And the philosopher Daniel Dennett called it the most important philosophical discovery of the last 50 years.
The frame problem emerges to cause all sorts of trouble for people. So, for example, when Henry Ford invented the automobile, well, at least invented the modern procedure of building the automobile, what Ford presumed was that he was building an efficient means of transporting people from one place to the other.
There were other unintended consequences of Ford’s discovery. So, for example, Ford happened to be a great supporter of fascism. And the reason that he was a supporter of fascism was because he regarded the fascist political structure as a logical extension of the efficient methods that he’d used to assemble vehicles. So his mode of production was instantly manifested in a political philosophy.
Furthermore, now, 2009, 100 years after the invention of the automobile, we’ve discovered some other things that the car was other than a place to move people from point A to point B. So, for example, it turns out that the automobile and the internal combustion engine are among the most effective technologies ever devised to transform the nature of the atmosphere and to heat up the world.
Not only that, the car has completely transformed the nature of cities. And these were all unintended consequences of the fact that the car was far more than what people thought it was. And you can say that about any technological structure. No one knew what TV would do to the news, for example. No one knew what the internet would do to the music industry. Everything that you interact with is far more complicated than you see.
NATURE OF REALITY
The most ancient ideas we have about the nature of reality are predicated on a certain presupposition. And the presupposition is this: There are two fundamental modes of being that characterize reality. One is the absolute. And the absolute is the sum total of everything. So if you think about things in their most unbounded possible form, if you think of things in their infinite number of potential variations, you can think about that as one pole of reality.
It appears classically that people have regarded their encounters with the absolute, which is all those multiple levels of being that are beyond your perceptual capacity, as equivalent to an encounter with God.
Now you know that in the Islamic religion, it’s against the rules to make a graven image of any sort of Muhammad, right? The idea is that you’re not supposed to make an image. And among the ancient Hebrews, the idea was very similar. The Daoists say that you shouldn’t confuse the moon with a finger pointing to the moon.
And what all that means is that the absolute is always something that transcends the finite frame that you place around your perceptions. So as soon as you start talking about it, representing it, making statues of it, or idolizing it, you lose your connection with the absolute, because you’ve turned it into something that’s understandable and concrete.
Part of the wisdom traditions that the world still maintains is to make the constant moral presupposition that you should always be aware of what it is that transcends both your understanding and your perceptions. And you should keep firmly in mind that that exists.
Now when people talk about God in the modern world, they tend to think about something that has more of the characteristics of a being. And I suppose that’s where most of the debate about religious reality comes in. The idea that there’s an absolute that’s outside of your perceptual capacity seems to be merely a statement of fact, especially given what we know now about the nature of perception, that the phenomena always transcends the manner in which you frame it.
We’ve also come to understand that not only does reality have multiple levels of existence, but in order to perceive it, you have to stand inside multiple frames. This is a picture of a French city. It’s a walled city. Now, the walls are there to keep the people in, and the walls are there to keep what isn’t in the walls out. And so you can think about that as a protective structure.
Now, I want to tell you how it is that you still inhabit a walled city, and exactly what that means. So for example, you think about this room. And I’m going to tell you how it is that this room allows you to see what it is that you see.
Now, when you’re interacting with a computer, you actually don’t interact with the computer. You interact with the keyboard and the screen. If the computer crashes, then you interact with the computer. And you find that, as a general rule, very annoying, because you don’t really understand the computer very well, and you don’t actually see how complex it is until it stops working.
Most of the time, when you’re interacting with the world, you’re doing things with the world. You’re interacting with it in a way that produces some consequence that you want. And that means, in part, that your perceptions are always framed by what you want. And that’s actually one of the reasons why the world isn’t just made out of objects. The world is made out of things you use, and things that get in your way.
Now, you’re always applying a frame like that to the world in order to simplify it enough so that you can understand it. And you’re aided in this process by all sorts of processes you really don’t notice. Because when you look at the world, you think, well, there are the objects, but there’s a thousand things going on before you make that judgment.
So, we’ll look at this room. When you walk in here, the room tells you what to do. The reason it tells you what to do is because all the seats are pointed in the same direction. They’re all slanted in a particular way. When you walk in here and there’s other people sitting, you can see that all their faces point to the front. People’s faces point towards what interests them. The room is set up to make you face the front. The theory behind the room is that the thing that’s interesting in the room is happening at the front. It’s a theatre.
What’s happening at the front is a drama. Because theatre is there to promote and undergird drama. A lecture is a dramatic act. The room tells you what to do. So, you don’t have to think about what to do when you come into a room like this. You can just do it, because the room tells you what to do.
And then you can think, you can sit in here in relative comfort and listen to this lecture. Why can you sit in here in relative comfort? Well, the people around you have been relatively carefully selected. As a consequence of analysis of their 12 years in school, the university has made a determination that they know how to sit down and listen. That hypothetically, they’re intelligent enough to understand the lecture, and that they’re very unlikely to disrupt the proceedings with any unexpected outburst of emotion or motivation.
Now, if anybody broke one of those rules, you can be sure that your eyes would move very rapidly away from me and directly towards the person who was causing the trouble, because that would take center stage.
Now, this room is actually supported by a million invisible processes. So, for example, while you’re sitting in here, you don’t have to worry about whether it’s raining, because there’s a roof, and you don’t have to worry about whether the roof is going to fall in, because you make a presumption that the people who built the roof are competent. And the electricity works, because the utility is run by people who are competent, so it’s almost always on.
Buildings hardly ever burn down. The electricity hardly ever fluctuates. There’s thousands of people out there working as hard as they can diligently to make this environment constant enough so that you can ignore all the thousands of things that you’re ignoring, so that you can concentrate well enough to attend to the few things that you are attending to while you’re in this room.
You’re in a walled city. There’s multiple walls, and those walls protect you from what’s outside the walls. You can think about it this way. This is a Taoist image of reality. Now, people think about this as a metaphysical symbol, but it’s not a metaphysical symbol. It’s an unbelievably practical symbol.
The Taoists believe that the world, the reality, is made up essentially of chaos and order. Chaos is all those things you don’t understand, so I would say that chaos is all those things that exist outside of your perceptual preconditions. Order is all the things you do understand, and all the places you go, where the things that you do produce the results that you intend.
And the Taoists would say, Everywhere you go is like that. Everywhere you go has things that you understand that are orderly, and has things that you don’t understand that are chaotic. And the chaotic things attract your attention because you already understand the orderly things.
If something unexpected happens, your nervous system automatically reacts to it and orients you towards it. And sometimes that can be catastrophic. So this is an experience that some of you will have in the next four years. Undoubtedly, there’s a number of you that want to go to medical school, or to graduate school, or to law school, or to business school. And a certain percentage of you will take the admission tests that will determine whether or not you’re able to take that path.
And a certain percentage of you will score below the 50th percentile on those tests. And that will mean you will not be going to those institutions. And when that happens, first of all, you’ll shake and tremble when you open the envelope to find out your results, and second, if you haven’t achieved the score that you expected that you would achieve, your world will fall apart.
And what that will mean is that you descend from the domain of order into the domain of chaos. And that happens to people all the time. It happens to people when they develop an illness that’s serious that they can’t control. Because then their body stops becoming something they can predict and starts to become something that they can’t predict. It happens to people when they’re in an intimate relationship and they’re betrayed. They assume fidelity and the person tells them that they’ve had an affair. That’s chaos. That means you didn’t know who that person was. The future you imagined no longer exists.
Your perceptions of people are erroneous at some level of analysis that you don’t understand. It’s conceivable that you’re naive beyond belief and that everything you believed about yourself and other people up to that point is false. And when a revelation occurs that knocks out one of the walls that supports you and you descend accidentally into chaos, you’ll regard that as one of the worst experiences of your life.
When that happens to you, your brain knows exactly what to do. It stops thinking about the future. It stops saving up resources for the future. It puts you in emergency preparation mode so that you’re ready to do anything at the drop of a hat because you don’t know what to do.
So your body prepares to do everything. It shifts your cortisol levels up. It activates your left and right cortices. Your limbic system and your motivational systems are disinhibited, turned on. And you sweat and you can’t sleep because the orderly structure that you thought you inhabited, that provided you with security and direction, has now disappeared.
The Taoists believe that the world is always an interplay between chaos and order and that if you live your life properly, you stand with one foot in order and one foot in chaos. Because if you’re only in order, nothing that’s interesting ever happens to you. Nothing, if anything, but a repeat of all the things that you already know. That’s the state that fascists desire. Because fascists desire things to be exactly the way they are forever.
And if you’re in a state that’s only characterized by chaos, you’re at sea or overwhelmed or things have fallen apart for you. And there’s too much of everything for you to deal with.
Now the Taoists, being very wise people, know other things as well. They know, for example, that chaos can turn into order. That’s why there’s a white dot in the middle of the black paisley. And they know that order can turn into chaos, which is why there’s a black dot in the middle of the white paisley.
And the Taoists believe that a meaningful life, the optimally meaningful life, is to be found on the border between chaos and order. And I would say that your nervous system tells you exactly when you are there, and it’s a kind of place, and you can tell when you’re there because you’re secure enough to be confident, but not so secure that you’re bored. And you’re interested enough to be awake, but not so interested that you’re terrified.
And when you’re in a state like that, when you find things interesting and meaningful, time slips by you and you’re no longer self-conscious.
CHRISTIAN REPRESENTATION OF THE NATURE OF REALITY
There’s a medieval Christian representation of the nature of reality. On the outside you have the Virgin Mary. Inside the Virgin Mary you have God the Father. And God the Father is supporting a crucifix with an individual on it. The individual in Christian thinking is Christ.
What does this image mean? The walled city divides order from chaos, or order from nature. We think about nature as the thing that’s outside of what we understand. That’s Mother Nature. Mother Nature gives birth to all things. That’s the idea that’s expressed in this image.
The Virgin Mary is standing for Mother Nature. Out of Mother Nature arises order and tradition. That’s true for primates, like chimpanzees, as much as it’s true for us. Any social animals that are grouped together have to form an orderly structure that they can inhabit together that defines their boundaries and their goals, because otherwise they fight each other to the death.
So in the state of untrammeled nature, as Hobbes pointed out, it’s every man for himself. And without the order that tradition brings, there’s nothing but chaos, and chaos is murderous and unproductive. There’s a problem with order.
If you look at the history of the 20th century, it’s a toss-up whether Mother Nature has been harder on us or whether our governmental traditions have been harder on us. You know, of course, that the dictatorship of Hitler killed 6 million Jews, 120 million people in the Second World War. You may not know that the Stalinist dictatorships in the Soviet Union killed an estimated 60 million people in internal repression, not counting those people who died in the Second World War. And the internal repression that characterized Mao’s communist China killed 100 million people.
And so the problem with tradition is that sometimes it’s a wise king, and sometimes it’s a king that eats its own sons, which means that although we need tradition to guide us and to structure, even the manner in which we perceive the world, our traditions can become archaic and outdated and cruel and inhuman, and as a consequence, they can pose a worse threat to us than chaos itself.
Nature or chaos is exactly the same dichotomous structure. The figure on the left is a Medusa or a gorgon. If you look at a Medusa, as you probably already know, you turn to stone. The reason you turn to stone is because when you look upon nature or chaos, without your normal veils, it paralyzes you, physiologically. Just like a prey animal like a rabbit is terrified if it sees a wolf.
For millions of years, human beings were prey animals. We were probably prey animals for large reptiles, which accounts, for example, for the reason that it appears that primates like us are naturally afraid of predatory reptiles. If you’re in the presence of something that violates your assumptions of safety, you’ll freeze. You freeze so that the thing that might eat you can’t see you, and that’s what turns you to stone. That’s nature in its terrible aspect, and the terrible aspect of nature can freeze everyone, and you can be sure, and will be seldom taught, that you will encounter that at some point in your life.
The primary Buddhist dictum is that life is suffering. What does that mean? It means that because you’re finite, and you’re surrounded by something that’s absolute, in a sense you’re in a battle that you can never win, because there’s always more of what it is that you’re trying to contend with than there is with you.
Worse than that, and it’s for this reason that tyrannies can’t last, is that the thing that you’re contending with isn’t even static. It keeps changing, so that what worked for you yesterday won’t necessarily work for you tomorrow.
This is an alchemical version of the Taoist yin and yang symbol, and basically it says something that’s more sophisticated and complex. It says that the world’s made up of chaos and order, things that you can predict and understand, and things that you can’t predict and can’t understand, and inside the order there’s some chaos, and inside that chaos there’s some order, and inside that order there’s some chaos, and so on and so forth, and equally the case for order.
You have Mother Nature, representation of chaos, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. You have a representation of the Great Father, that’s security and tyranny, two things you’ll always have to contend with. And finally, in this representation, you have a representation of the individual, at least a Christian representation of the individual, and that’s Christ, and it’s a terrifying representation. It’s a remarkable representation, because it’s not a representation of transcendence, it’s a representation of suffering.
And it’s a funny kind of representation of suffering, because the manner in which the story unfolds is this: Christ, as the archetypal individual, the model for individuals, from a psychological or mythological perspective, knows that he’s limited, and knows that he’s doomed to both suffering and death.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before his crucifixion, he has an argument with God, and the argument basically is, ‘Do I actually have to do this?’ And the answer is twofold. Well, no, actually you don’t have to accept your suffering, but you don’t have to voluntarily accept your suffering, but there are consequences if you don’t.
Now, the Christian story is predicated on the idea that if you voluntarily accept your suffering, you can simultaneously transcend it. It’s a remarkable philosophy, and it’s also something that we have very good support for from a psychological perspective.
So, for example, if I’m treating someone who has an anxiety disorder, a panic disorder, who can’t go out of their house without their heart rate elevating and without collapsing into a panic-stricken heat, without visiting the emergency ward every time their heart rate accelerates, every time they’re in a subway, or every time they’re in a mall, so they’re so terrified of existence they can’t even get out of their house, the way you cure that person is by getting them to voluntarily approach the things that they’re afraid of.
And it turns out that physiologically, if I force you to accept a certain kind of challenge, your body will go into emergency preparation mode, and you’ll become stressed, and that stress will cause you physiological damage, including brain damage, if it’s sustained for long enough.
But if I present you with the same challenge and you accept it voluntarily, your brain doesn’t produce stress hormones and completely different physiological systems kick in. And what that means is that people have evolved two modes for dealing with the unknown. One is voluntary approach, and the other is panic-stricken paralysis and flight.
In this representation, you can see that there are crowds of people standing in the wings of the open statue looking at the crucified individual. It’s a very strange thing, but you still see people doing things like this that they don’t notice.
I went to a museum in New York, and there were a very large number of paintings there from the late Renaissance, and they were all religiously themed, like medieval paintings, except they featured recognizable individuals. And people had come from all over the world to look at those paintings. They were extremely valuable paintings. They were painted by Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, and each of them was probably valued for reasons that are very difficult to understand at something approximating hundreds of millions of dollars.
The late Renaissance was the first time in human history where human beings dared to presume that sacred images could be given an individual human face. And that idea was actually what launched the Enlightenment and launched the development of modern culture. The late Renaissance thinkers, the artists in particular, were the first people to posit that there was some direct relationship between these sacred images and actual people. And people come from all over the world to look at these paintings even though they don’t understand what they mean.
IDEA OF THE SUFFERING INDIVIDUAL
I want to show you some images that describe how the idea of the suffering individual developed and what that means.
The first thing I want to show you is this picture of St. George and the dragon. Now, you know the main street that runs through the university is named after St. George, right? This is a very old image. The oldest story we know, which is a Mesopotamian creation myth, features a god who confronts a reptilian monster and makes the world as a consequence of the conflict. He faces her. She’s terrifying. He cuts her up into pieces and out of the pieces he makes the world.
Now, the Mesopotamians, 5,000 years ago, were trying to figure out what the nature of individuality was and what the nature of consciousness was. And their presupposition, which was dramatized because these people told stories, they didn’t think the way we think in explicit philosophical, logical, with philosophical processes. They thought in stories, which is a natural way for people to think.
They came to the conclusion that the object of their ultimate worship was the god who confronted the dragon of chaos, cut it into pieces, and made the world. And that idea has echoed down through the ages. It’s an idea that human beings have never lost. Now, this idea is very interesting.
So, you see the castle in the background. Now, we already know what the castle stands for. The castle stands for order. And it’s a multi-walled castle because everyone’s protected by multiple walls. But those walls are constantly breached. Now, young people, especially modern young people, are often very cynical about the traditions that they inhabit. They’re cynical about them because they see the fact that the world is theoretically devolving into some kind of environmental catastrophe. And they’re cynical because there’s still war and because there’s still hunger.
They’re cynical because often the people who are teaching them the traditions don’t seem to believe in them themselves. And it’s very easy for young people to look at the traditions that were and to notice the breaks.
But the truth of the matter is that throughout human history tradition has always been anachronistic and out of date. And what you see in images of St. George and the dragon is that the dragons always breach the walls, which means that tradition is always under attack from chaos.
Well, of course it is because the future is different than the past. But that doesn’t mean that the past should be abandoned. Because if you abandon the past and you knock down all your walls, you fall into a pit of chaos. And that, classically speaking, is indistinguishable from hell.
And I can tell you that if you spend long enough in that state, you’ll become bitter and cruel because that’s what happens to people who suffer endlessly.
St. George is a different kind of individual. When the walls come crumbling down, as they always do, he decides to go out and to confront the dragons. Now, dragons are very strange creatures, as you may have already noted. First of all, they don’t exist. Second of all, they have very weird propensities. So, for example, they hoard gold and they tend to trap virgins in their lair, which you will also admit is very strange behavior for a reptile.
Now, the idea behind this is that it’s a very, very complicated idea. It’s all presented pictorially. The idea is that the thing that lurks underneath, if you look to the right of the picture, you can see that there’s a cave. The cave goes way down into the ground, and way down into the ground is the terrifying place that’s underneath everything. The dragon crawls out from time to time to threaten the structure of everything that’s known.
St. George comes out to confront the dragon, voluntarily overcomes it, and in this image, rescues the virgin that the dragon has been guarding. It’s a very complicated story. It means that the things that terrify you contain things of value. That’s also what the image of the gold that the dragon hordes represents. It means something else as well. It means that the individual man who’s likely to go out and confront chaos when tradition is crumbling is more likely to find a mate.
STORY OF JONAH
This is Jonah. Jonah had a very weird experience. He was swallowed by a whale. That’s a very strange whale, as you might well note. It’s a medieval whale, and of course medieval people didn’t really know what whales were, and so they were guessing what a whale was.
So a whale for a medieval person would have been a big fish. It would have been a squid. It would have been some monstrous thing like a shark that lurks in the deep. They weren’t able to segregate all those things out biologically. Their powers of collective observation weren’t that good.
So the whale for them was what lurks underneath in the darkness, right? And the idea with Jonah was that now and then what lurks underneath in the darkness rises up to swallow you. But if your attitude is proper then you can come back out the other side changed. Now that’s the story of redemption.
So for example, imagine that you were in a bad relationship, and maybe you weren’t that happy about it, but you know, it was better than no relationship at all. And then the person that you were in a relationship betrayed you. Maybe they did that because you actually weren’t that happy with the relationship anyways. Maybe they did that because you were a little bit naive. Or maybe they did that because you were a little bit too easy to get along with and as a consequence a little bit on the boring side.
And so when they first leave you it’s a catastrophe because your world falls apart. But when your world falls apart you’re somewhere new and it’s possible to learn something new in that place. So you might learn, for example, that you should be a little sharper the next time that you go out with someone. Or you should be a little bit more careful about picking up on clues that your partner is bored with you.
Or that maybe you should stop associating with lying psychopaths and your life would be a lot more positive. And stop thinking that you have the capacity to redeem somebody that is not after redemption in the least.
And what that means now and then is that when you fall into the belly of a whale and you’re swallowed up by something that lurks underneath that you can come out the other side transformed. And that’s actually how people learn. Every time you learn something you learn because something you did didn’t work. And that exposes you to the part of the world that you don’t understand. Every time you’re exposed to a part of the world that you don’t understand you have the possibility of rebuilding the structures that you use to interpret the world.
That’s often why it’s more important to notice that you’re wrong than it is to prove that you’re right. One of the things that you’re supposed to learn in university is precisely that. It might be useful to listen to people that annoy you on the off chance that they know something that if they tell you you can use instead of dying.
Talking to people who agree with what you say is like walking around in a desert. You already know everything that they say. The reason you’re associating with them in that situation is so that they never say anything that challenges you because you’re afraid that if you go outside of what you understand that you won’t be able to tolerate the chaos.
But it isn’t the case. People have an unbelievable capacity to face and overcome things they don’t understand. And not only that, that’s essentially what gives life its meaning. The Buddhists say life is suffering. And you think, well, if that’s the case, why bother with it?
And people do ask that question. And they ask it in ways that result in their own destruction and, worse, in the destruction of others. So, for example, people who become particularly cruel, particularly in a genocidal manner, are more than willing to dispense with as many human beings as they can possibly train their sights on because they’re so disgusted by the nature of human limitation that they’d rather eradicate it. And lots of people become suicidal because they can’t bear the conditions of their own existence. And suffering is real and it’s inescapable.
So the question is, what do you do about it? You notice in your own life, and you can do this by watching your own life, and I often ask my clients to do this, say, look, watch your life for a week and pretend you don’t know who you are at all. What you understand most about yourself are the arbitrary presuppositions that you use to hem yourself in. And you act as if those presuppositions are true so that the revelation of the full nature of your character won’t terrify you.
People hide in their own boxes and it’s not surprising, but it’s not a good idea because life is too hard to hide in a box. You can’t manage it if you do that.
If you watch yourself for a week, you’ll see certain things. You’ll see some of the time that you’re resentful and annoyed. And those are times when you’re either taking advantage of yourself or you’re thinking improperly. Some of the time you’ll be bored, in which case you’re either undisciplined or you’re probably pursuing something you don’t want to pursue.
And some of the time you’ll actually be engaged in life. And the times that you’re engaged in life you won’t notice that you’re there. The distinction between subject and object disappears when you’re engaged in something that you find meaningful.
The purpose of life, as far as I can tell, from studying mythology and from studying psychology for decades, is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant. Or maybe that it’s even acceptable. And I would say as well that people know when they’re doing that. You know when you’re doing that in part because you’re no longer resentful. You think, jeez, I could do this forever. There’s a timelessness that’s associated with that state of being.
From a mythological perspective that’s equivalent to brief habitation of the kingdom of God. That’s the place where you are that’s so meaningful that it enables you to bear the harsh preconditions of life without becoming resentful, bitter, or cruel. And there’s nothing that you can pursue in your life that will be half as useful as that.
Your nervous system being an evolved structure is evolved for a universe that is composed of the interaction between chaos and order. Those are the most fundamental constants that we know. They transcend the mere perception of objects. Everywhere you go is chaos and order.
Traditional Chinese doctors go into people’s houses to diagnose why it is that someone in that house is suffering. And they walk in and they think, there’s too much order here. I’ve been in houses like that. That’s a house where all the furniture is covered with plastic. That’s a house where if you put a glass on a wooden table, the mistress of the house runs over with a coaster, slips it under immediately, and gives you a dirty look. That’s a place where the children never play in the living room. That’s a place where the lines in the carpet are vacuumed so precisely that they’re actually parallel. That’s a place where there’s so much order that no one can survive because the person who runs the house is a tyrant. And that anyone who’s sick in that house is sick because they’re suffering from an excess of order.
And then you can walk into a house that’s completely different. And you can even see this in your own room where everything’s in complete disarray. You can’t even look at that place. You’re sick the moment you cross the threshold because everywhere you look there’s parts of untransformed chaos yelling to you, do something about this, loser.
If you walk into your study and you have a stack of papers in the midst of which is buried your homework, you’ll notice that there’s a stack of papers in the middle of which is buried your homework. You’ll notice that you have a very tough time looking at that stack of papers. And the reason for that is that the stack of papers that you’re ignoring that’s aging and causing you more trouble with each passing day is a porthole into order through which chaos is flowing.
And if you ignore that long enough the chaos will flow through that portal and take over your room and then take over your life. And you might think, well, that’s a very strange way of thinking. And I suppose it is.
But just as an experiment to see whether or not this is true, try not paying your taxes for ten years and see what happens. This is an old representation, right? Atlas with the World. Well, it’s a representation that says that that’s the proper way to live, right? That the way that you live properly so that you can withstand the nature of your own being is to pick up a load that’s heavy enough so that if you carry it you have some self-respect.
That’s a very weird idea because it’s frequently the case that people do everything they can to lighten their load. But the problem with carrying a light load is that then you have nothing that’s useful to do. And if you have nothing useful to do all you have around you unless you’re extremely fortunate and that will only be the case for very short periods of time is meaningless suffering. And there’s nothing worse for your soul than meaningless suffering.
If you look around you see the people that you respect, and I don’t mean that you think about respecting, I mean the ones that your gut, your whole being, your embodied being tells you to respect, you’ll see that it’s always people who picked up something heavy and are carrying it successfully, you think now that’s what it means to be a human being.
And when you see that you can think, well perhaps life is worthwhile despite the fact that the essential nature of reality is suffering. There’s an old Jewish idea — an idea that man and God are in a sense twins. It’s a very strange idea but it seems to hinge on something like this.
The classic attributes of God — these are the attributes of the absolute — are omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Do anything, be anything, can’t translate the other one momentarily. There’s a question that goes along with that: what is a being that’s characterized by the absolute attributes of God lack? And the answer to that is limitation.
And that’s an unbelievably interesting idea. And the reason it’s so interesting is because one of the things that modern psychology is increasingly telling us is that without the limitation that a creature like us, with the structure of our consciousness, brings to bear on the world there’s no reality. That what reality is is an emergent consequence of the interaction between something that’s painfully limited like us and whatever the absolute is which is something that is completely without borders.
And what that implies in a sense is that without limitation there’s no being. With limitation there’s suffering. Without suffering then there’s no being.
Well you might think well perhaps there should be no being. And lots of people act their whole lives in order to see if they can make that a possibility. And that’s really a luxury we don’t have anymore.
But the alternative is to presume that being is to worse the suffering and to find a mode of being that allows you to make that claim in reality. And I would say in a sense that’s your existential destiny. And if you’re here at university rather than at trade school, your job is to figure out how to be a human being. And that’s a much more important job than any specific time-limited concrete pragmatic plan. You have an unlimited possibility for good. Really. Individuals are way more powerful than they think. They’re more powerful for evil but they’re also more powerful for good.
These archaic stories that I’ve been telling you about they have something to say to you. They say life is uncertain. You’ll never know enough. And not only that you never can know enough. And not only that everything that you stand on is shaky. And then they say but you still have to stand on it. And while you’re standing on it you have to improve it. And that’s how life goes on. And that’s how you live your life.
And if you forget those things or if you undermine them you’re in the same situation that the unfortunate man was that I told you about in the Old Testament who reached out to touch something he should have left alone. To the degree that you’re human you have to abide by a certain set of truths.
The truths that I told you about today are as far as I can tell something that’s close to a minimal set. There’s chaos. There’s order. You’re stuck with both of them. And they both have a cost. And they both have advantages. And your job is to figure out how to serve as the appropriate mediator between the two.
And you can tell when you’re doing that because when you’re doing that the dismal circumstances of your life manifest themselves to you as eminently acceptable. And it’s in that situation that you know that you’ve placed yourself in a position in nature where everything is in harmony and that’s the place to aim for.
Nice talking to you.
[Question Inaudible]
JORDAN B PETERSON: The first thing I would say is that if you’re dealing with someone who’s depressed and they’re really depressed, you should try giving them antidepressants, because if they die you can’t help them.
So if you’re suffering you are obligated in a sense to hold on to whatever rope someone throws you. And one of the things I do with my clients all the time, especially if they’re really in trouble, is to tell them look, I don’t know exactly what’s going to help you but don’t arbitrarily throw out any possibilities because you might not have that luxury.
Antidepressants help a lot of people and there are technical reasons why that is the case. That’s a simple, it’s not relevant to what I already described except that if you offer to give by your society and it works, try it. I don’t care what your presuppositions are.
Apart from that, lots of the time you see people who are suffering with depression for example. There’s a multitude of reasons but I’ll take one common reason. You could think about it as associated with the story of Peter Pan. Peter Pan is someone who won’t grow up. Now the problem with Peter Pan is he gets to be king but it’s king of Neverland. Neverland doesn’t exist. So being king of nothing isn’t that helpful.
Well one of the things that you often see with people who suffer from depression and I’m not making a blanket statement about the cause of depression because there’s lots of them is that people who don’t have enough order in their life tend to get overwhelmed. So for example if someone comes in to see me and they say they’re depressed, I always ask them a very standard set of questions. Do you have a job? If you don’t have a job you are in really trouble in our society. First of all your biological rhythms tend to go off the rails right away because there’s no reason to go to bed at any particular time and there’s no reason to get up.
For many people if they don’t get up at the same time they fall off the functioning of their circadian rhythms and that’s enough to make them depressed right off the bat, especially if they start napping during the afternoon. They also don’t have a purpose. People aren’t good without a purpose. And this isn’t hypothesizing. We absolutely understand the circuitry that lies positive emotion. We know how it works. Almost all the positive emotion that any of you are likely to experience in your life will not be a consequence of attaining things. It will be a consequence of seeing that things are working as you proceed towards a goal you value. That’s completely different, and you need to know this because people are often stunned, for example, they finish their PhD thesis and their presupposition is that they’re going to be elated for a month and often instead they’re actually depressed.
And they think what the hell, I have been working on this for seven years and what do I do now? And that’s what depresses them right? It’s the what do I do now? Well they’re fine if they enjoyed pursuing the thing as long as it was working out. They get a lot of enthusiasm and excitement out of that because that’s how our nervous systems work.
Most of your positive emotion is goal pursuit emotion. If you take drugs like cocaine or amphetamine the reason they’re enjoyable is because they turn on the systems that help you pursue goals. That’s why people like them.
So if you don’t have a job, you’ve got no structure, that’s not good, plus you tend not to have a point, so you’re overwhelmed by chaotic lack of structure and you don’t have any positive emotion. Well do you have any friends? So sometimes you see people who are depressed they have no job, they have no friends, they have no intimate relationship, they have an additional health problem and they have a drug and alcohol problem.
My experience has been if you have three of those problems it’s almost impossible to help you. You’re so deeply mired in chaos that you can’t get out because you make progress on one front and one of the other problems pulls you down. One of the things I tell people who are depressed is like, don’t sacrifice your stability. Get a job, even if it’s not the job you exactly want. Get a damn job. You need a job.
Find some friends. Get out in the dating circuit. See if you can establish an intimate relationship. Put together some of the foundational items that are like pillars that your life rests on. Well that’s the practical thing to do. So that’s one example with regards to depression.
[Question Inaudible]
JORDAN B PETERSON: Well the thing is you don’t just launch it on them. You’ve got to negotiate with the person and you’ve also got to teach them to negotiate with themselves. This is something that’s very useful to know. You can tyrannize yourself into doing things but I wouldn’t recommend it. What I would recommend instead is that you ask yourself what you’re willing to do. It’s a really effective technique. It’s like a meditative technique.
So for example, you can get up in the morning and you can think, well I like to have a good day today so I would like to go to bed tonight without feeling guilty because I didn’t do some things I said I was going to do and I’d like to have kind of an interesting day. So you’ve got to fulfill my responsibilities and I want to enjoy the day.
Then you can ask yourself, well, okay, what would I have to do in order for that to happen that I would do? And the probability if you practice this for three or four days is your brain will just tell you. It will say, well there’s that piece of homework that you haven’t done for three weeks. You should knock that sucker off because there’s a little interesting thing you can do and maybe this is a little obligation you should clean up.
So what you do in a situation like that is you teach the person to negotiate with themselves. Say, well let’s figure out what your aims are. You’ve got to have some aims, whatever they are. And they might say, well I’m so depressed I don’t have any aims. And then I say, well pick the least objectionable of the aims and act it out for a while and see what happens. Because sometimes your emotional systems are so followed up that you have to act it out before you can start to believe it.
I mean people always assume they have to believe and then act. But sometimes that’s true and lots of times it isn’t. So the trick if you’re doing therapeutic work with someone and you’re helping them establish the structure is to find out what they’ll do. Now if they want to get better, which is not a given because there are often payoffs for not getting better. That’s basically the payoffs of being a martyr or maybe the payoffs of doing what your entirely pathological family members want you to do.
So if you’re trying to get better and you fail, assuming you want to get better, there’s usually something you can figure out that would constitute a step towards some sort of concrete goal. And my presumption, it’s a behavioral presumption fundamentally, is that small accruing gains that repeat are unbelievably powerful.
So this is another thing to know about in your own life. It’s something I learned in part from reading the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He’s a great Russian philosopher and novelist. He said you can look at your life and you can see what isn’t right about it. I mean all you have to do is look. And then you can start to fix that.
And the way you fix it is by noticing what you could in fact fix. You know, people are often trying to fix things they can’t fix, which I would not recommend because if you try to fix something you can’t fix, you’ll just ruin it. Like you can find all sorts of undergraduates who are perfectly willing to restructure the international economic system who cannot keep their room clean. And there’s actually a gap there, you know, which ends up surprising that people don’t actually notice.
So I would say if you pay attention, you can see things that you could fix. They yell at you. They really do. We even know how that happens.
Let me give you an example. The rooms are full of stories. And the stories have effects on you. So here’s a classic experiment. So you take two groups of undergraduates. You bring them into your lab. And you give one group a multiple choice test that has a bunch of words in it that are associated with being old.
And then you give the other group the same multiple choice test except the words are associated with being young. This is independent of the content of the test. It’s just descriptions. And then you time the undergraduates as they walk back to the elevators. The ones who completed the multiple choice test that had more words associated with aging walk slower back to the elevators. And they don’t know that. And they don’t know they’re doing it.
And that study’s been replicated in various forms many, many times. You’re unbelievably sensitive to the story that your environment is not made out of objects. That’s just wrong. Your environment is basically made out of something like tools and obstacles. You’re a tool-using creature. You’re a tool-perceiving creature. If I take you out of this room and I say, well, what was in the room? You’re not going to say random patterns in the carpet because they’re real. They’re just as good an object as anything else. You’re going to say chairs because you can sit on them.
You’re going to say handrails because you can hold them. You’re going to say chairs. And if you pay attention to your environment, which is you, by the way, extended, all of your experience is you, it will tell you all the time what you should do. All you have to do is do it. But then you have to decide if you want to do it.
One of the things I’ve noticed about people, because I’ve wondered, once I started studying these mythological stories and I got this idea about the fact that life can be meaningful enough to justify its suffering, I thought, God, that’s such a good idea. Because it’s not optimistic exactly.
Some people will tell you, well you can be happy, like those people are idiots. I’m telling you, they’re idiots. There’s going to be things that come along that flatten you so hard you won’t believe it. And you’re not happy then. And so if life is to be happy, well, in those situations, what are you doing? Why even live? But life isn’t to be happy. If you’re happy, you’re bloody fortunate and you should enjoy it. You should because it’s the grace of God, so to speak.
With regards to meaning, I thought, well, people know when they’re doing something meaningful. They can tell. So why don’t they do meaningful things all the time. It seems obvious. You could do it. I mean, it’s hard, you know, because other people want you to do other things. It’s a struggle, but everything’s a struggle.
And then I thought, well, oh, I get it. I see why. It took me about ten years to figure this out. People have a choice. Choice number one, nothing you do means anything. Well, that’s kind of a drag, right? Meaninglessness of life and all that, existential angst. You know, that’s kind of a pain.
But the upside of nothing that you do is meaningful is you don’t have to do anything. You’ve got no responsibility. Now, you have to suffer because things are meaningless, but that’s a small price to pay for being able to be completely useless.
The alternative is everything you do matters. Really. If you make a mistake, it’s a real mistake. If you betray someone, you tilt the world a little more sharply towards evil rather than good. It matters what you do. Well, if you buy that, then you can have a meaningful life. But there’s no mucking around. It means responsibility. It means that the decisions you make are important. It means that when you do something wrong, it’s wrong.
Well, do you want that? See, that’s a very hard question because people don’t always mean the same thing when they say their own moral compass.
Now, so here’s what I mean by that, technically. Part of the way, the reason that you’re able to distinguish between right and wrong is because you are a certain kind of biological organism. And then another reason is that your head is full of other people. Right? All the people you’ve met, all the people that you’ve interacted with. They’re all telling you a way to behave that’s good and a way that isn’t.
There are circumstances under which your conscience should, the duty you have to your conscience should override the duty you have to social norms. But before you break a rule because you think you’re going to be doing a good thing, you bloody well better make sure you have your head screwed on straight.
Because every time you tell yourself a lie and every time you act out a falsehood, you disturb the pristine integrity of your nervous system and the reports it will give you about the nature of the world will be distorted as a consequence of that. So yeah, you have a moral obligation to follow the dictates of your conscience, but you also have a moral obligation to make sure that your life is straight enough so that you can rely on your own judgment. And you can’t separate those things.
For Further Reading:
Jordan Peterson: Life, Death, Power, Fame, and Meaning (Transcript)
Jordan Peterson on 12 Rules for Life (Transcript)
Dr. Jordan Peterson: Redefining Reality at TEDxToronto (Full Transcript)
Dr. Jordan B Peterson on Freedom of Speech & Political Correctness (Full Transcript)
[/read]
Related Posts
- Diary Of A CEO: w/ Ian Bremmer on 2026 Top Risks Report (Transcript)
- Transcript: How America Recovers From All This – Yale Conversations w/ David Brooks
- Transcript: Tucker on the New Religion of Trump’s America @ Tucker Carlson Show
- StarTalk: w/ Andy Weir on the Science of Project Hail Mary (Transcript)
- Transcript: Everything You Know is About to Collapse w/ David Friedberg @ Modern Wisdom