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Home » Jordan Peterson: Life, Death, Power, Fame, and Meaning (Transcript)

Jordan Peterson: Life, Death, Power, Fame, and Meaning (Transcript)

Transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast with Jordan Peterson on Life, Death, Power, Fame, and Meaning.

TRANSCRIPT:

LEX FRIDMAN: The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, an influential psychologist, lecturer, podcast host, and author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, and Beyond Order. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Jordan Peterson.

Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot, spoken through the character of Prince Myshkin, that beauty will save the world. Solzhenitsyn actually mentioned this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. What do you think Dostoevsky meant by that? Was he right?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I guess it’s the divine that saves the world, let’s say. You could say that by definition. And then you might say, well, are there pointers to that which will save the world or that which eternally saves the world? And the answer to that in all likelihood is yes. And that’s maybe truth and love and justice and the classical virtues, beauty, perhaps in some sense foremost among them. That’s a difficult case to make, but definitely a pointer.

LEX FRIDMAN: Which direction is the arrow pointing?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, the arrow is pointing up. No, I think that which it points to is what beauty points to. It transcends beauty. It’s more than beauty.

LEX FRIDMAN: And that speaks to the divine.

JORDAN PETERSON: It points to the divine. And I would say again, by definition, because we could define the divine in some real sense. So one way of defining the divine is what is divine to you is your most fundamental axiom. And you might say, well, I don’t have a fundamental axiom. And I would say that’s fine. But then you’re just confused because you have a bunch of contradictory axioms. And you might say, well, I have no axioms at all. And then I’d say, well, you’re just epistemologically ignorant beyond comprehension if you think that, because that’s just not true at all.

LEX FRIDMAN: So you don’t think a human being can exist within contradictions?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, yeah, we have to exist within contradiction. But when the contradictions make themselves manifest, if they in confusion with regard to direction, then the consequence of that technically is anxiety and frustration and disappointment and all sorts of other negative emotions. But the cardinal negative emotion signifying multiple pathways forward is anxiety. It’s an entropy signal.

LEX FRIDMAN: But you don’t think that kind of entropy signal can be channeled into beauty, into love? Why does beauty and love have to be clear, ordered, simple?

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, I would say it probably doesn’t have to be, it can’t be reduced to clarity and simplicity. Because when it’s optimally structured, it’s a balance between order and chaos, not order itself. If it’s too ordered, if music is too ordered, it’s not acceptable. It sounds like a drum machine. It’s too repetitive. It’s too predictable.

It has to have, well, it has to have some fire in it along with the structure. I was in Miami doing a seminar on Exodus with a number of scholars. And this is a beauty discussion. When Moses first encounters the burning bush, it’s not a conflagration that demands attention. It’s something that catches his attention. It’s a phenomena and that means to shine forth. Moses has to stop and attend to it, and he does. And he sees this fire that doesn’t consume the tree. And the tree is a structure, right? It’s a tree-like structure. It’s a branching structure. It’s a hierarchical structure. It’s a self-similar structure. It’s a fractal structure. And it’s the tree of life. And it’s the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the fire in it is the transformation that’s always occurring within every structure.

And the fact that the fire doesn’t consume the bush in that representation is an indication of the balance of transformation with structure. And that balance is presented as God. And what attracts Moses to it in some sense is the beauty. Now it’s the novelty and all that, but like a painting is like a burning bush. That’s a good way of thinking about it. A great painting. It’s too much for people often.

You know, my house was, and will soon be again, completely covered with paintings inside. And it was hard on people to come in there because, well, my mother, for example, say, well, why would you want to live in a museum? And I’d think, well, I would rather live in a museum than anywhere else in some real sense. But beauty is daunting. It scares people. They’re terrified of buying art, for example, because their taste is on display. And they should be terrified because generally people have terrible taste.

Now that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t foster it and develop it. But, and you know, when you put your taste on display, it really exposes you.

LEX FRIDMAN: Even to yourself as you walk past it every day.

JORDAN PETERSON: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, and look how mundane that is and look how trite it is and look at how cliched it is and look at how sterile or too ordered it is or too chaotic.

LEX FRIDMAN: Or how quickly you start to take it for granted because you’ve seen it so many times.

JORDAN PETERSON: Well, if it’s a real piece of art, that doesn’t happen.

LEX FRIDMAN: You notice the little details.

JORDAN PETERSON: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I mean, there are images, religious images in particular, so we could call them deep images that people have been unpacking for 4000 years and still have. I’ll give you an example. This is a terrible example.

So I did a lecture series on Genesis and I got a lot of it unpacked, but by no means all of it. When God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, He puts cherubim with flaming swords at the gate to stop human beings from re-entering paradise.