Ep 107 | Jordan Peterson Knows Why We're Obsessed with Aliens | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Some days call for working up a sweat,

working on your passion,

and endless action.

Ditch the glitch with Liquid IV's new energy multiplier sugar-free, refreshing flavors like strawberry kiwi and blackberry lemonade.

Scientifically formulated to support physical energy, hydration, focus, mood, and social stamina.

Liquid IV's new energy multiplier sugar-free, hydrating energy.

Tap the banner to learn more.

Jordan Peterson is one of the most misunderstood people I know and believe me I know a lot of people that people think they know and they don't.

To me and millions of others all around the world, he is reshaping the world in incredible educational ways.

He is a force of positive change in a world that badly needs it.

Now, the fanatics who hate him, mostly woke elites pretending to be journalists or pundits or academics, they really,

really really hate him.

And I mean, it's an obsession with them.

But they not only hate him, they hate anyone who associates with him, which was an extra added bonus of associating him with me in this podcast.

They hate anyone who is effective, and he is

very effective.

Those people are trying to destroy anything, like I said, that is effective, even the conservative media.

They accuse the conservative media of going easy on Peterson.

I don't think anybody goes easy on Peterson.

I just, I think, you know, maybe there's manners and we're like, hey, he's down.

Maybe we should stop kicking him.

I mean, maybe.

If you don't already know about Peterson, you are in for a treat.

He is one of the most important intellectuals of our time.

Until 2016, he was a clinical psychologist and a professor in Canada.

Then he was catapulted into the culture war, and he was saying things that so many people just feel is true, and he had the courage to say it.

Well, one controversy after another brought him more fame, but also drew more hate.

The result has been a vicious seesaw of yin and yang that he has managed somehow or another to survive.

The guy is captivating.

I took my son to see him because he did for an entire year

a stage show where he just sat and he talked and he sold out opera houses and theaters and arenas all around the world for his book tour.

I brought my son and I leaned over.

He was, I think, 13 at the time, and I said, what are you getting?

And he said, almost nothing, dad, but it's fascinating.

Last fall, the announcement of his latest book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules, caused protests within the company publishing it.

The announcement caused protests.

Nobody even knew what the book was about.

That's how much they hate him.

Discourse has deteriorated so much that a conversation about life and love and the importance of cleaning your room has been deemed not just offensive, but deadly.

To the hateful activist, the mere fact that anyone, but especially Glenn Beck and some of his other conservative friends, are having Jordan Peterson on and they're having civil conversations is proof that all of their delusions are true.

But in the words of Marcus Aurelius,

it's the truth that I'm after.

And the truth never harmed anyone.

What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

Today, The Glenn Beck Podcast is pleased to welcome Jordan Peterson.

Hey, it's Mother's Day.

It's Mother's Day weekend.

Fantastic.

I haven't really had a chance to talk to my kids about Mother's Day.

Father's Day is much easier, much better, because you don't have to do any thinking.

In fact, every holiday is easier because mom always does all of the thinking for the whole family.

That's why Mother's Day is so important.

Which makes it worse that I haven't prepared.

Now, every mother I know loves built bars.

Mother's Day, Bilt Bars, Coors, Bilt Bars keep you healthy.

You could probably swing that, but they're low calories, even though they taste fantastic.

That's starting to look like, mom, you're fat, or yes, you do look fat in that dress.

Probably not a good idea.

You know what?

Skip Bilt Bars for the Mother's Day present, but get Bilt Bars.

You'll love them.

Your woman in your life will love them.

It is a revolution in the world of protein bars because it's made by people who first wanted to make something taste good and then second wanted to make that something actually good for you.

I don't know how they do it.

I think it's witchcraft, but I know how you can get them.

You just go to builtbar.com slash Beck.

Builtbar.com slash Beck.

They are amazing flavors.

Check them out.

If you use the promo code Beck, you're going to save, I think it's 15%.

Beck 15 is the promo code.

15% off your first order at Beck15builtbar.com.

Dr.

Peterson, how are you, sir?

Mr.

Beck, good to see you.

It is good to see you.

I wish it was in person.

It has been

a wild trip in just the, I think it's two years since we saw each other.

The whole world seems to have changed.

And I want to talk to you.

I want to approach things differently.

I don't want to go to politics.

I want to talk,

let's start here.

I don't know if you've been following this, but the Pentagon in the U.S.

has for the last five years, and it's becoming more and more clear,

they are

verifying UFOs, they're verifying ships, they are saying that we now have technology that is extraterrestrial.

And

it is a fascinating thing to watch.

And the one question that I've been having is: what will that do if one day we wake up and

the president says, Hey,

a three-headed alien was in my office last night.

I'd like you to meet him.

What does that do to

religion politics as normal?

I actually would be relieved if the three-headed said,

we're going to kill all your politicians.

You're now under us.

I think I would be okay.

But what would that do to us?

And why do we have this fascination?

I read some Young where,

you know, the modern myth of things seen in the sky, where

we seem to need

something

like that.

Well, that isn't a question I expected.

I can tell you that.

Why do we need something like that?

I think it's because there's something within us that is constantly compelling us to look for and work towards an ideal.

And it's built into us extraordinarily deeply.

It's an instinct.

Now, what that means

for the fundamental structure of underlying reality, I don't know, but it's definitely there.

I mean, you can see the manifestation of that instinct in all sorts of ways once you learn to look.

So I was writing this morning about a hypothetical football team in a hypothetical American small town, you know, which is the theme of endless numbers of American films and stories.

It's a story that's told over and over.

The high school team, everyone knows, the whole town watches.

The boys compete to be on the team or they're jealous and envious because they can't be.

Then when they make the team, they compete for top spot.

Sometimes the best sport comes out on top, even if he's not as athletically gifted as the cynical player.

You know the story, everyone knows the story.

The cheerleading team is striving to go out with the quarterback, etc.

Well,

you might say, well, what does that have to do with your question?

Well, look,

why do we watch football?

It's because we like to see people, we like to see men organize themselves into groups, aim at a target, and hit it with skill.

We really, really, really like that.

It's a religious ceremony to go to a football game and to watch that.

That accounts for the tribal identification with the teams and

the what the spontaneous and deep enjoyment that everybody has in witnessing the spectacle.

And we want ethical behavior as well as part of the play because we want the great player to be a great teammate, to be generous with his prowess, to bring his teammates along for the ride, to help them develop their skill.

And so

even in something as basic as that, as fundamental as that, as trivial and day-to-day in some sense as that, you can see this deep desire we have to identify an ideal and to pursue it.

And so we're searching, that was what Jung was pointing out to some degree when he talked about UFOs as symbols of

redemption from the sky.

And in science fiction stories, often aliens are there to save us or to judge us.

They're the projection of heavenly beings.

And that's our association, our tendency to associate the ideal with what's transcendent and above us.

And you might ask, well, why would that be?

It's like, well, what happens when you go out and look at the night sky?

And the stars are there?

You're filled with a feeling of awe.

And

that awe is of...

It's your reaction to the magnificence of the ultimate unknown.

And so you you project eternity into the sky.

And that becomes the place of the ideal.

And so,

well, so that's part of the answer to why we need such things.

There's no way around that.

So I know I lived in New York City for a long time, and it was amazing.

I bought a ranch in the middle of nowhere.

And I mean, you see the depth.

of the sky when there's no lights around you.

And we sat outside the first night and we just talked about the meaning of things and life.

I hadn't done that at all, really, like that when I was in New York.

There's some relationship where

you are pondering bigger things.

And I think as we go into the cities, as we have more and more light and more and more distractions, we are missing some fundamental things of just,

I guess we're just becoming so arrogant and we don't ponder how small we really are in things.

Well,

I think your comment about the night sky is well taken.

I mean, it's definitely

a good view of the night sky when it's dark is definitely one of those places, let's say, one of those situations where you encounter the absolute.

And you have to ask yourself, well, what's your life like when you don't have that opportunity?

Now, people made opportunities like that, too, right?

That's why they built cathedrals with their massive ceilings and the light pouring through in color and the music that would produce that sense of encounter with the transcendent.

But you can certainly experience that in, especially in nature, especially at night, especially in relationship to the sky.

People experience a similar sort of...

experience, I suppose, when they look at something like the Grand Canyon or the Niagara Falls, some massive work of nature.

But it does,

it calls to that part of us that's always aiming to move ourselves higher.

And it's become increasingly clear to me as a psychologist and as a biologically minded psychologist, just exactly how deep an instinct that is.

And, you know, there are people who believe that we can dispense, for example, with religious belief.

But I don't believe that's true.

And I think the reason it's not true is because we can't dispense with the religious questions.

We can't dispense with what's the meaning of our life, What's the difference between good and evil?

What's the ideal?

What should we avoid?

We can't avoid those questions ever.

And so we need a realm that provides answers.

I think one of the first things I ever heard you talk about was relationship

in a kind of abstract way with God and how important

the redemptive story is.

And

I so like the way you approach it because you don't know, or maybe you do and you don't say, but

you don't profess that you are a believer, but you understand the importance to humans to be able to start again and have redemption.

And we are destroying that now in our culture.

You know, cancel culture, all of this stuff.

Critical race theory.

There is no redemption.

And that is...

Yeah, well, one of the things, one of the things you're pointing pointing to is that there's an unrecognized danger of our technology.

I don't suppose it's entirely unrecognized.

But, you know, the miracle of memory is not that we remember.

The miracle of memory is that we forget

and that we only remember what is necessary.

And because we can forget, we don't drag the past along with us, right?

So we can get free of the past.

Like all you need is three sleepless nights to understand what kind of hell life would be if you couldn't dispense with the past.

Because each night when you sleep, you dispense with that day.

And that renews you.

And so that story of

descent into the depths and redemption, I mean, that's part of our natural biological rhythm.

That's the descent into unconsciousness at night, into deep sleep, and then our re-awakening in the morning.

And that's associated with solar mythology, with the setting of the sun and the rising of the sun.

All that's tangled together, but that definitely does renew us and it enables us to start afresh in the morning.

The problem with technology, a problem with technology, is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to shed our past.

And without that, you can't redeem yourself.

And that is a mistake.

It is a problem because everyone makes mistakes, and everyone makes mistakes all the time.

And you might ask yourself, well, why isn't it appropriate for you to be crushed by the weight of your own stupidity?

You know, given that it's

immense and that you make all sorts of mistakes.

No one can live under those conditions.

We need to be able to let go and to forget and to forgive.

And we all need to forget.

I've seen an interview.

I think there's like four or eight people on earth that have perfect recollection.

And

it's beyond just I remember.

They feel what they felt on any given day.

You can tell them a date, they'll tell you the weather, they'll tell you what they were wearing, what was happening.

And I saw an interview with one of them, and they became very emotional because they're reliving it.

And the people who have that gift or curse,

it's a curse.

Yeah,

some deal okay with it.

The others are just crushed by it.

Well, it's very

forgetting, forgetting and remembering are very, very sophisticated cognitive processes.

So normally what we do with an experience is we reduce it to its significance.

Then we remember the significance and we let go of the details.

We do something like that when you write fiction.

When you write fiction, you don't write down every single thing a character does or thinks.

That would bore your reader to death.

You write down what's significant and important about what they're experiencing and about what they do.

And if you get that right, then the story is interesting.

We do the same thing with our own lives.

Like we boil our lives down to the gist of the story and then we remember that.

And then we're not crushed by the weight of the detailed recollection.

And that's actually a consequence of very sophisticated psychological processing, that ability to reduce and forget.

So one of the things you do in therapy, for example, and I wrote about this in my new book, about writing memories down if they still bother you.

So if you have a memory, for example, that's more than 18 months old, for technical reasons I won't go into, and it still produces a negative emotion when it comes to mind, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, then that memory has information in it that has not yet been unpacked.

So imagine the purpose of your memory is to extract wisdom from the past that you can apply to the future so that you don't do the same stupid thing over and over or so that you repeat things that worked well.

That's the purpose of memory, not recollection as such.

It's the extraction of wisdom, the lesson.

Well, if you have a memory that's more than 18 months old and it's still hurting you, making you anxious, disappointed, ashamed, guilty, any of that, it means that you have not undertaken the complex process of analyzing that memory, pulling out from it the moral, and dispensing with the details.

So that's why you say in the book, if you have a bad experience, you have a bad memory, it won't leave you alone.

Write it out.

Write it out.

Yep, write it out.

Yep, write it out.

Write it out.

Everything you can remember about it.

We have software online at a site called self-authoring.com that helps people write an autobiography.

And so they go through their lives, breaking their lives into epochs and identifying the most emotionally and practically significant events and detailing them.

And that's all in an attempt to help people forget and to let go of uncertainty and threat and anxiety and well, the whole panoply of negative emotions that their life memories might otherwise be contaminated with.

And so you do that in therapy continually with people when you're talking about their past.

And it isn't catharsis.

The Freudians believed, for example, that if someone had a traumatic experience and then they were able to express the emotion that was associated with that experience, that that would be curative.

But it doesn't look like it's the expression of the emotion.

It looks like it's the extraction of the significance of the event.

Interesting.

I had a friend over last night who has had,

you know,

a year like I have had in the past, and you have had, they're just under attack, and it's relentless.

And

the attacks, they always go to, it seems to me, to the thing that you hold most dear.

Like I've always valued my

word to tell the truth as I understand it, to correct my mistakes, because I was an alcoholic and I lost the ability to tell anybody anything and have them believe me.

So I understood

the importance of your word.

And so that's where the attacks would always hit me, or at least those are the ones that I felt.

His were very specific, too.

He's a public figure, and he just had the worst year of his life.

And he came over, and as he was recalling some of the things he's gone through,

he teared up, and I said to him, and I'd love to hear your opinion on this.

Congratulations, you now have a superpower.

And he said, what do you mean?

And I said,

You've had the worst done to you.

You've had the worst said to you.

You've You've had to face every fear that, you know, any fear that you had, somebody come after me or somebody's going to say this about me or something.

That's all over now.

And now you have the ultimate, now you can walk into a room and you can have the attitude of, go ahead, do your best.

It's not going to bother me now.

It's not going to bother me.

I know who I am.

I know what I believe.

I know the truth.

And nothing's going to stop me.

What are your thoughts on that?

Well, I can just relate my own experience, really.

When I come under attack now, it's usually a consequence of some press

attention.

It still disturbs me deeply, and I'm very concerned about what the consequences are going to be.

Now, I've learned, and my family has learned, that if we're careful and we ride it out and we attempt to deal with it truthfully and carefully, that it'll likely subside within about two weeks and that public opinion will maintain itself on my side.

And so that's been the case.

I don't take it for granted.

I do think it's made reacting to the attacks somewhat

less stressful.

somewhat less stressful.

But it's still nothing that

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone else.

I mean, there is some utility in watching yourself go through it.

Yeah,

I would never wish it on anybody, and I don't even want to think about it.

But if you do go through it,

I think you become

it either destroys you or it makes you much stronger because you are

you know the bogus lie that you're dealing with?

You know, if they're taking you down in such a way and it's kind of true, I don't know.

I think it would be easier in some ways.

If it's absolutely not true, it's hard to get your arms around things and say, well, that's that.

I mean, you know, you feel like you're in a Hitchcock movie

where,

you know, where you're just trapped and it's surreal.

But once you get through it and you're on the other side and you've made it, you realize that is nothing but shadows and mirrors and smoke.

It's nothing unless

you give into it, unless you play ball, unless you start to become

part of it and put it back out in the other direction.

You know, it was

helpful with that.

Yes, yes.

It was helping people deal with that sort of thing when I was a clinician.

that really alerted me to the miracle of the presumption of innocence.

So, example, I had a client whose details I'll obviously disguise, who was a very competent professional.

And

this person had brought a substantial amount of work into a new company they had been hired by.

And then that work was taken by a predatory individual and aspersions cast on this person's reputation.

They described them as unstable and unreliable and vengeful and vindictive and partly I suppose because the person whose work had been stolen was actually upset about it.

But they produced a very credible case and

because the person I was working with was a good person with a strong conscience, it wasn't easy for them to defend themselves because most people, when they're attacked,

especially if many people are doing it, and many doesn't mean that many.

20 is plenty.

20 is plenty.

Five is probably plenty, but 20 is certainly a mob a big enough mob it's very very difficult not to take accusations against yourself seriously no not not if you have a conscience because people most people are quite aware of their own flaws and so you get attacked and you think well is it possible that i am that son of a bitch that everyone is claiming

yeah so then you think you you're a monster if you don't think that if somebody's attacking you and it's and it seems universal you'd be a monster if you went wait a minute wait a minute, what am I doing that might give that appearance?

Or am I that person?

That's the kind of soul searching that you go through that I think makes you stronger in the end.

Yeah, well, if it works out for you and if you have support from people, you know, generally what happens in my experience is generally what happens is people cave very rapidly and they apologize like mad, even if they haven't done anything wrong.

And I think that's a mistake.

I understand why people do it.

I mean, I really do understand why people do it, but

it isn't, I don't think it's a good idea.

If you haven't done anything, so that's the thing about the presumption of innocence, and it really is a miracle, right?

Because if you think that,

you know, if I accuse you, my tendency is to think that you're bad, and you might think, well, my tendency is to think that I'm good, but you know, that isn't the tendency for most people.

People have a pretty guilty conscience, almost everyone, and it does.

tie itself up with this idea of monstrosity that you just described.

The only person for whom public opinion means nothing is a psychopath, right?

The rest of us regulate ourselves by watching our impact on others, and we're doing that all the time.

And generally, even if the fault is relatively trivial, I mean, we're capable of denial and all of that, but generally, we take our impact on other people very seriously.

And so the presumption of innocence is a very difficult thing, even to apply to yourself, but it's unbelievably useful.

It's like, wait a sec, you're innocent unless you're proven guilty.

So I think I agree with you, but I think if we want to put this in today's terms, the idea of I'm not that,

we've heard, you know, racist, racist, racist, bigot, whatever, all these name-calling for so long that it is now, it's now made that charge

laughable.

And

some people are deeply affected by it, but most people are like, yeah, whatever, everything is racist now.

What happens when when you don't, when you have so overexposed and you've called everything,

you know, bad, dangerous, bigoted, racist?

What happens to a society when they lose the ability to point something out when it's real?

Yeah.

Yeah, well, that is the danger of casual critique, isn't it?

Is that you lose the capability of pointing to actual danger when it exists.

It's the problem with

gerrymandering the borders around concepts.

So,

I mean, I think what's happening, what we're seeing now, and I'm not exactly sure why it's happening, but it definitely is happening, is we're seeing a tremendous decrease in trust in public institutions, in institutions in general.

And that's not good because societies...

Societies are healthy and prosperous to the degree that they run on trust.

And trust is a moral virtue.

In its essence, it's not naivety.

You can naively trust, you're a fool when you naively trust, but you're courageous when you trust when you're not naive.

And societies that are functional run on trust.

It's a catastrophe when it's eroded.

And that is happening.

Now, you know, is that happening?

Why is how is that related to the constant assaults that our culture is taking?

I can't put my finger on that exactly.

I don't understand the relationship, but

this deep cynicism about our institutions is is

a real problem.

It's growing.

Part of it is because

things have gone on too long, but a lot of it is smears and

intentional things.

And I don't know why this keeps coming to mind as we've been talking,

but

Star Wars.

There is Darth Vader all dressed in black.

You know he's a bad guy the minute he walks in.

Then you have the reluctant hero of,

what's his name, Skywalker.

Then you kind of have everybody else,

you know, that are on the side of the empire.

Are they doing it out of fear or do they actually believe it?

How do you get people, because right now, I think we're looking at some things that are truly evil.

And I don't use that word lightly, but as I look at things like critical race theory, I can only see destruction out of that.

I can't see any positive telling people you'll never make it because this group of people are after you, so we have to destroy these people, and these people are irredeemable.

I can't think of anything more

evil, anti-good.

Well,

in my writings and

lectures, I've tried to encourage people to deal with malevolence at the level of the individual.

Because when you start dealing with it in others,

there's a big risk in that.

It's like clean up your own house, which is

not being parodied for that.

It's like, well, look at all the social problems in the world.

And Dr.

Peterson is telling the oppressed to clean up their rooms.

It's like, how is that going to solve anything?

It's well, first of all, have you tried it, actually?

It's not that bloody easy to clean up your room.

It's harder.

It's much easier to clean somebody else's room.

Yes, yes, or it's certainly a lot easier to point to the mess in someone else's room.

And, you know, there's such a danger.

There's such a danger in that.

And it's so attractive, right, to identify, to localize malevolence externally.

It's so attractive because, first of all, it lets you off the hook and that's a relief.

And second,

if you've identified malevolence, there's nothing you can do to what is malevolent that's unjustifiable.

And so your worst impulses have free reign, because especially if you can also add to that a good cause, you know, you say, well, this is in the service of the eventual utopia.

It's like, well, now you have carte blanche for your worst motivations.

And that's very, very dangerous.

And so I always think that it's better to stick to the psychological, which...

So here's what I think I want, I was trying to drive at, was

You know, you see it in these big movie terms.

People see it in big movie terms and you can't move.

You know, you're either on this side or that side and you can't move and nobody moves.

Nobody wants to recognize, you know, they're on the wrong side.

Nobody's making a case.

They're just killing each other.

There is a growth of the reluctant hero in all stories.

There is this arc of that hero.

And

something happens and they change and they become heroic, but they're not.

heroes.

And so many people don't think that they have what it takes.

They're not the hero.

And the people who are standing around are looking and

just following the crowd.

How do you get, or what's happening to us to where

so many people are seeing what's going on?

If they know history at all, they'll understand the pitfalls.

It doesn't mean we end in the same place, but we could see the patterns repeating.

How do you get people to

recognize and then have the courage to stand?

You've taken a beating.

Nobody wants to do that.

Why is that worth it?

And how do you get there?

Well, I think it's worth it because the alternative.

I believe the alternative is worse.

I mean, that's why I think it's worth it.

I think it's a decision to make

to stay silent when you have something to say.

You know, you don't know what it is within you that that that that requires your voice, right?

Because you feel I have something to say.

It's like, well, where does that come from exactly, that feeling that you have something to say?

You're disgruntled at work and you're choking on your own bile because the situation is not just in your estimation.

You're dying to say something, but you won't.

Well, you'll die if you don't say it.

Maybe it's a death of a thousand cuts.

I don't like deferred punishment.

I'd rather take it now

and keep the future clean,

which is why I encourage people to have the fights now.

Don't

hide things in the fog for later because they grow and metastasize.

It's better to confront what you need to confront when it's small and when you have some possibility of victory.

You

talk about in your book one thing that I think is

such a huge key

to healing of ourselves.

Because you're right, everything is personal.

And we somehow or another have lost this.

Well, we insist that everything is political.

I'll just interrupt you for one second.

The other thing that I do believe the idea that everything is political is a very bad idea because everything isn't political.

Love isn't political.

Religion isn't political.

We need separation between these domains.

And if everything is political, then the political becomes contaminated with

all sorts of things that aren't in its proper purview.

And one of the things that I see happening continually is that political belief takes the place of religious belief.

And so Caesar is elevated to the position of God.

And that is not a good idea psychologically or politically.

We need a separation between church and state psychologically, just as we do in our society.

So

when everything's political, political becomes religious, and that's not good.

Let me switch gears.

I want to ask the question I was going to ask, but let me switch gears on this because I think it's tied into this.

You have, I read someplace that

in one room in your house, maybe your living room or hallway or whatever, you have real

pretty dark

propaganda from Soviet Union.

Go ahead.

Yes, I had 250 pieces of Soviet realist

art.

It's not hanging in my house at the moment, but it was for years.

Yes.

I collected as well.

I kind of feel like if you don't understand the darkness, you can't really understand the light and you won't see the pattern because some of it, the propaganda can be beautiful.

The art can actually be beautiful until you attach it to what it did.

You know what I mean?

Yes, I do.

Is that why you were attracted to that?

Or why were you?

Well, that was one of the reasons.

Well,

some of it was just sheer

shock that I was able to purchase these items.

Because when I grew up, when you grew up,

we never saw anything from the Soviet Union.

I mean, that was just impossible.

And it was so comical to me that I could buy portraits of Marx on eBay.

It was so unlikely that that was the case.

It was a miracle, right?

I mean, my daughter bought me once a Karl Marx doll at a scientific toy store, and it was half price off, so she couldn't resist it.

It's the same kind, right?

It's the same kind of comedy.

It's like, really,

I can buy a picture of Lenin and Marx on the most...

free market platform that's ever been devised for next to nothing.

How could I pass that opportunity up?

It was so ironic.

And I was interested in the artifacts themselves.

But the paintings in particular, because many of the paintings I purchased were very high quality paintings.

Technically,

they had taken people months to make.

They were huge, like eight by ten.

My house was literally covered with paintings, every square inch, virtually.

Ceiling as well, paintings everywhere.

And they were very high quality.

So technically, they were very sophisticated.

And there was a battle between the propaganda and the art going on in the in the canvases all the time.

And I could see that.

And and that was really fascinating because over time, as we moved farther and farther away from the Soviet Union, the art won out over the propaganda.

So that was really something to see.

And yet it is many times the

many times it's the art that drags you into the problem.

Yes, and then it is the art and the artist that drags you back out.

Yes, well, it's a terrible sin for art to be subjugated to propaganda, to politics.

It's like the subjugation of religion religion to politics.

It's the lower subordinating the higher.

It's a catastrophe.

It's an ethical catastrophe.

And I was very interested in that in those paintings as well to watch that and to see it.

And so right now they're in storage because we renovated our house and we're not exactly sure what to do now in terms of what the walls should portray because maybe the time for that is past.

Perhaps not.

We'll see.

But yes, I had many, many paintings for years.

Your whole book is about what you just talked about in the art, the battle between the extremes.

That it is,

it's this daily fight.

I'm fascinated by the Kondrakiev wave or the

pendulum of, you know, the societal pendulum that keeps going from,

you know, me, me, me to the collective.

It's the same thing over and over again.

And when we as a society get it right, it's generally,

you know, five o'clock to 7 o'clock, not 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock.

It's that middle ground.

Is there a way to,

or are we destined to always repeat?

Okay, there is a way.

And that's why we have the instinct of the way.

And the marker for that is meaning.

That's the marker.

So imagine that you're a biological organism.

I'll speak scientifically.

You're a biological organism.

You're adapted to reality.

You have instincts that orient you in the world.

Deep, Deep, deep instincts, way underneath your cognition.

They direct your cognition in ways you can barely comprehend.

And one of those deep instincts is the instinct of meaning.

And so look, you know,

you do this sort of thing, this conversing.

You do this for a living, at least in part.

Now, you know perfectly well that there's a difference between a high quality and a low quality conversation.

You can feel that.

You know when you're in the zone in a conversation.

And you know because you're completely compelled by what's happening.

Time disappears.

your attention is focused on the content, you're generating some spontaneous responses, but your attention is very, very focused.

You're not thinking about anything else.

Okay, well, then that's because

the conversation is manifesting itself to your deepest instincts as meaningful.

Okay, that meaning signifies that you're in the right place between chaos and order.

you're able to maintain a certain stability of thought and outlook, but you're introducing new information into that stable structure at the rate that's optimal for you.

And all of a sudden you're in the right place at the right time.

And that's the marker for that, because being in the right place at the right time is...

But I think there are a lot of people that are agents of chaos

and Tifa.

They're agents of chaos.

They are going for, they believe, burn it all down.

Others have been like this, that they believe their meaning is something extraordinarily destructive without

a true North marker.

How do you do that?

Because they're convinced they're right.

Look,

one of the things that I puzzled out a long while back and tried to adhere to to the best of my ability was driven by exactly the concern that you're expressing because I realized that the instinct for meaning is a genuine instinct and it it it underlies even our attention.

It's unbelievably deep.

It's the deepest thing about us.

Okay, but what about

the search for meaning?

That's that or

the experience and the search.

Well, I would say both of those, both of those.

They're somewhat independent because the search for meaning is very motivating, but the experience of meaning is something in and of itself.

We talked about that in relationship to the night sky, for example.

Right.

So, okay, but your objection was, well, what if that meaning instinct goes wrong?

It's like, yeah, what if?

What if?

Okay, how do you make it go wrong?

Lie

and see what happens.

Because you'll pathologize that instinct and then you're lost.

So if you understand that,

there isn't anything more frightening than understanding that.

Because

your stability as an entity, as a soul, is dependent on your relationship with that instinct for meaning.

And if you pathologize that with deceit,

you will find yourself in the hands of things that you do not want to be in the hands of.

Put it that way.

The argument today is there is no truth.

Who's truth?

That's my truth.

It's your truth.

I think what you're saying is you find meaning in truth.

And if you're lying about something,

then that's the absence of truth.

But

if you tell the truth to the best of your ability, then you can trust your instincts to some degree,

to the greatest degree that you're capable of.

And then that can help orient you in the world properly.

You can rely on your instincts if you don't pathologize the information that you're feeding yourself.

So, you know, if you want to live in harmony with yourself, which you would assume to be somewhat somewhat desirable, rather than a hellish disharmony, then don't feed yourself what's indigestible.

And certainly don't warp the world around you with deceit you know to be deceitful.

It's extraordinarily damaging and dangerous.

And so

because I...

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

Well, because I realized that the instinct for meaning could become pathologized, that's what made me obsessed to begin with about

the spoken word with free speech, for example.

You were also talking about what orients us in the middle.

Well, the thing about the middle is where the middle is shifts because the environment around us shifts, the natural world shifts, the social world shifts, and so that middle moves on us.

And so what we do is we talk to each other, which is a form of thinking.

Thinking is internalized speech.

So the dialogue we're having is thought.

If I'm thinking, I just have that dialogue in my head by myself.

It's still a dialogue between two viewpoints.

So we orient ourselves with untrammeled, honest speech in a constant search to find that optimal middle ground.

But it always moves.

So we are destined in some sense to continually communicate about where we should be.

That's for sure.

But the idea that there's a desirable middle that we can attain through dialogue, well, that's a presupposition of the that's a presupposition of Western individualism.

it's also something that's under attack conceptually right i was going to say to me that's where we lose the middle when we are the collective or we are just isolated at me me me and you know when you're me me me

you generally don't lead a you know a mass murder uh you know as a country you don't you don't round people up so it's a little less dangerous but that self-absorbed you know nature of just there's nobody important but me is also dangerous.

But we've lost, it seems, in a country that should understand it, in a society, the entire Western society that was entirely built around the individual,

we were seemingly missing it.

Well,

there is an assault on that idea.

So if you buy the idea that our institutions are basically predicated on tyrannical power, so that's the basis for institutional organization, is power,

then

you buy the argument that the dialogue between

institutions is nothing but the expression of that power.

There are no individuals, and there's no space for rational negotiation.

And that case is being made constantly.

particularly by radicals on the left.

It is fundamentally anti-individual.

And there is no room in that system for free speech itself.

It's not like it's anti-free speech.

That's a misconception.

Something isn't anti-free speech if it has no room whatsoever for the concept of free speech.

That's a much deeper criticism.

And that's part of what's driving this identity politics movement.

It's an assault on the idea of the individual word.

the word itself.

It's an assault on the idea of the redemptive power of the word itself.

There's no individuals.

There's no rational discourse.

There's no possibility of meeting in a middle.

There's no middle.

There's just a territory defined by struggles for power between groups.

That's why it's okay not to invite someone who disagrees with you.

They don't disagree with you.

They represent a different power structure.

And you might think you have an opinion, but you don't.

You're merely mouthing the platitudes of your social structure.

You're not there as an individual, not from that perspective.

This is a much more radical critique than people generally realize.

It goes all the way to the bottom.

That's why

we are finding ourselves in tribalism, and most people don't even realize it.

Both sides think they're fighting for the good, and they don't realize, wait, wait, wait,

you're entering tribalism.

You're just parroting what your side believes.

And you don't really solve anything until you can find

the people who think uh

in in broad

uh values or virtues on the other side and you can come together and say okay wait wait wait does this make sense to you it's like well that's i think what i can have a conversation with i can have a conversation with your country is what he's being so good at

right

we had we had this this e pluribus unum uh you know our our yes we came we came here for

one idea, and that idea is enshrined in our Bill of Rights, that the individual is supreme.

And, you know, just blow it off.

I don't necessarily have to like you or agree with you, but I'll support you.

I'll fight to the death to have the right for you to say that.

We don't have that.

We don't have that attitude.

I don't ever hear that expressed ever.

I grew up hearing that all the time.

Well, you know, you might think, at least under some circumstances, that it's useful to have an enemy because perhaps they could point out flaws that you wouldn't be otherwise prone to notice.

And so there is, just at that level alone, there's utility in free speech and dialogue across avenues of disagreement.

You want to approach the conversation

ready to hold your fort, but not with the assumption that you're absolutely right.

I mean, and it's,

I remember I was on,

oh, now I'm going to forget, I'm going to forget the name of the show, Bill Maher.

There we go.

Good.

Got it.

The holes of my pockmarked memory.

And it was a panel composed mostly of people who were liberal and left-leaning, although not particularly extreme.

But the conversation degenerated into

something like an exchange of insults about people who were supporting Trump.

I'm a Canadian, right?

So I'm kind of watching this from the outside, at least to some degree.

And I thought, I asked, too, I listened for a while.

I said, well, how do you propose to live with these people since they're 50% of the population?

It's like, they're all stupid?

That's your theory, is it?

Really?

That's your theory.

They're all stupid.

And you're not.

And you're going to live with them.

How are you going to do that?

Well, that's the problem that confronts us, right?

And now, look, most people in the U.S., the statistics bear this out absolutely clearly.

There are very few radicals.

on the left or the right.

It's a very tiny proportion of the population.

Most people are moderate.

Most people want to meet in the middle.

We have some problems though.

We don't know exactly what to do with.

For example, and I've really seen this in watched your political system.

I was shocked.

I became somewhat familiar with Washington over the last few years, visiting there many times, talking to many senators and congresspeople.

And

I was shocked.

Well,

most of them were very admirable.

Most of the people I met were very admirable, regardless of which side

of the poll they were on.

But I was shocked at the lack of a coherent policy-making apparatus for both parties.

It just isn't there.

There's no coherent policymaking apparatus.

There's no structure for generating policy.

There's no messaging structure.

There's no sophistication in messaging delivery.

The congresspeople and the senators spend a disproportionate amount of their time raising money outside of their office, and they're required to do that by their parties.

and reacting to the worst excesses of the extremists on the other side of the table.

Well, that's a structural problem.

So it's a structural problem in the manner I just described, but there's another problem too, which is

say what you want about the extremists.

Here's what they've got going for them.

They have a story and it's romantically attractive.

Okay, you're going to defeat that?

Tell a better story.

Well, so that's up to the moderate Democrats.

What's their story?

And so I can...

criticize the moderate Democrats.

You guys need a story that's better than the radicals.

You don't have one.

But the same applies absolutely to the moderate conservatives.

And then I'm not going to point fingers at the moderate conservatives or the Democrats.

I'm going to pull back and say, no, this is our problem.

Here we are, technologically sophisticated, wealthier than we've been at any point in the entire history of the planet, with an almost unlimited future ahead of us if we can grasp it and we don't know what to do.

But is that

a so but doesn't this stem from aren't we prey to this?

The most important chapter of your book is,

I think it's the last one.

To be grateful.

In COVID, I've heard, oh, everybody complained about COVID.

I could complain a lot about COVID.

A lot of bad has come out of it for my family and my business.

However, my family is closer than ever.

You know, we spent time together.

We recognized the importance importance of things because of the absence of other things.

We went, oh my gosh, what have we been doing?

This is much more important.

So you can look and be grateful for horrible things, horrible things.

My brother-in-law just committed suicide.

I can be grateful for that experience of going through that and being reminded of that and what's important.

And

you can

find gratitude, but now what we're doing is just finding axes to grind.

We're blaming it.

I think it's one of the things we lost when we became

a culture that was driven by the cities, not by the farmlands.

You can be a farmer.

I'm a farmer, part-time farmer.

You can be a farmer.

You can do absolutely everything right.

You can plow the fields.

You can plant at the right time.

You can do everything.

You could have the greatest crop coming in because you've done everything right.

Then you cut that crop, and as it's laying on the ground, it can rain and it's all destroyed.

You don't blame anybody.

It's just part of it.

I mean, it happens sometimes.

We're looking for blame on everything right now.

In chapter 11 of Beyond Order, this new book that you've been referring to, I tried to delineate out sources of tragedy.

And malevolence, for that matter, but we can start with tragedy because

you need a theory of tragedy because otherwise you tend to blame simplistically.

Okay, so we could walk through it very quickly.

You just talked about one particular kind of tragedy, which is natural.

It's like you can do everything right and nature can take you out at the knees, right?

Okay, so that's one source of suffering in life, the natural world.

Another source of suffering is the inadequacy of our social institutions.

And a third source of tragedy is our inadequacy as individuals.

And you can, malevolence doesn't apply particularly to the natural world, although it can feel like that at times if someone you love is afflicted by some terrible disease, for example.

And we tend to think of that as particularly malevolent when we admire the moral stature of the person so affected, right?

But it's somewhat unfair to attribute malevolence to nature.

It's more fair to attribute it to social structures.

And it's more fair to attribute it to the darkness in our own souls.

But you need to know,

you need to know, I think you need to know

you need to have a sophisticated representation of tragedy and malevolence so that you don't fall prey to simplistic blaming so human suffering is not caused by capitalism

that's wrong now you could say there are elements of human suffering that are exaggerated by excesses and defaults in capitalism that's a different statement that's not a black and white statement it's a reasonable statement you can progress from there but you should say perhaps at the same time that for all its faults, this is the good that it's done and it isn't obvious what system would work better.

So

now the question, I suppose part of the question is, why do we fall prey to more simplistic forms of reasoning?

And some of that is,

well, it's convenient.

It's easy and convenient.

It's easy because it's easier to think in black and white terms to just attribute malevolence.

So, for example, if you believe that all human suffering is a consequence of capitalism, that solves a lot of problems for you.

You know where malevolence is.

You know what your moral duty is.

You've simplified the world.

You've taken a huge burden off your shoulders.

And you certainly don't have to take on

the moral requirement of participating in the system.

And perhaps you don't want to.

And God only knows why that might be.

You want this more nuanced approach, and that was actually part of the purpose of a classical education.

A humanities education was designed to give you a more nuanced view.

That was its original purpose, although that's, you know, sadly, I would say, gone by the wayside.

It looks like it.

I've had these conversations recently that have been quite interesting.

You know, they're very disturbing, actually.

I talked to two of Canada's most outstanding people in the last two weeks, Conrad Black, who ran a huge newspaper empire, and Rex Murphy, who's probably Canada's best-known journalist

personality, because he's both.

He's a great journalist, but he's a personality as well.

And they remembered their university education.

Jocko Willink, as well.

He's not a Canadian, but he had the same kind of memory.

He talked about, they talked about their education in the humanities, mostly concentrating on English literature, and described it with tremendous fondness as a turning point in their life, as an opening up of the world of knowledge

to their youthful eyes, right?

Very, very fondly.

Contrasted that with Yon Mi Park, who

is an escapee from North Korea, very brave woman who was then enslaved in China, had a life that was just sheer hell, and spent a good part of the interview telling me how much better her life was than the lives of many people she knew.

She wrote a book called In Order to Live, but the book stopped at the year 2015.

So I asked her what she did.

She went to Columbia.

took a humanities degree, which was a dream of hers,

after finishing

her entire education in one year her you know her her education prior to university right exactly then she went to a south korean university for three years they're hard to get into and then she went to columbia i said what was it like going to columbia

taking a humanities degree from this escapee from totalitarianism who was once enslaved got to go to one of america's august institutions and be trained in the humanities someone who'd been exposed to george orwell and who was motivated to write because she read animal farm understood the power of literature, she said it was a complete waste of time and money and that she was afraid to say anything.

Wow.

Yeah, wow.

It's a hell of a thing to hear when you're a university professor.

I thought, how catastrophic, how utterly catastrophic that that can be the case.

She compared it to being in North Korea.

I said, surely, surely there was one professor, one course that provided you what you were searching for.

She thought for a while and conjured up a biology course where she learned about human evolution, but said that that had degenerated into political correctness by the end of the semester as well.

I can't leave it here.

I know we are really, we are really over time, but you can't leave it with that story.

Where do you find the hope and the strength to continue to fight, or for those who are listening, to get the motivation to stand up and say what's on their mind.

Well,

people have to have a dialogue with their own conscience.

You know,

if you don't

imagine that you get upset with something when you recognize an obstacle in your path, and then imagine that you need a path and that you've chosen reasonably wisely, let's say, not perfectly, but reasonably wisely.

An obstacle arises, you're frustrated, disappointed, ashamed, afraid.

Well, you have something to do do to clear out the obstacle.

You have something to say.

Well, then you don't clear out the obstacle because you're afraid to speak or you're unwilling to speak.

You want to defer the conflict because you hope it will go away.

All that'll happen is that the obstacles will pile up.

Then your life will be nothing but obstacles.

Well, you need to know that.

And you have to ask yourself if you believe that's true.

If it's true, then

you don't want to

remain silent.

Imagine too that as you remain silent, you get smaller because you're not manifesting the courage necessary to live by your own standards.

And the problem gets bigger.

Well, if you're not going to speak now, what makes you think you're going to be more prepared in the future?

Why is that going to happen?

When does that ever happen?

Well, I can't believe we're talking about school.

People who say, just stay quiet in school, just get the grade.

That you're

paying them.

That's wrong.

That's right.

You're paying them.

You don't have the courage when you're paying.

When somebody's paying you and they're doing something at work and they want you to play along, you think you're going to have courage then?

I mean,

you've got to face it.

I taught my students all the time to never, never

write something they didn't believe to be true.

And I know this as a psychologist, too.

You know, you might think, I can get away with writing out something I don't believe for the grade.

But there are studies of this sort of phenomenon so for me imagine you have a viewpoint and I measure that with a political attitudes questionnaire okay

maybe it's a viewpoint you're you're you're

what do we take your your anti-immigration just for the sake of argument and then I ask you to write out a 500 word pro-immigration essay And then a week later, I give you the political questionnaire again.

Now, I'm going to bury it in a bunch of other questionnaires so you don't know what I'm measuring.

Your belief has tilted way towards the argument that you've made, even though you don't know it.

So, and it's because most of your beliefs are actually rather shallow in terms of their explicit formulation.

You think you believe something, but it's pretty shallow.

It's just an assumption.

Now, you might act on it and all of that, but it's not well differentiated and articulated.

Now, if you take one of your assumptions and you write a counterexample, you're going to articulate that.

Well, then that's going to move you.

And so, if you think that you can write an essay that you don't believe and you'll remain unscathed by that, well, you're wrong.

You won't.

And if you do it 20 times, you will turn into what you wrote.

That's what will happen.

And it's an absolute sin, in my estimation.

I mean that specifically for

anyone who attends university to write what they do not believe to be true.

It's certainly a sin for anyone to encourage them to do that.

Now, you can do that as an exercise.

You can ask people to delineate out an argument that runs contrary to their viewpoint.

That can be part of the reasonable process of learning.

That is not the same thing as doing it for deceptive purposes to manipulate your professor because you're too cowardly to formulate your arguments properly.

And I mean, I blame the professors for setting up an environment where that is implicitly expected.

But I will tell you, my experience within the university system is that it's the rare professor professor still

who's so corrupt that they're going to severely punish a student who writes an essay that runs counter to their opinion, that's a good essay, and fail them.

That takes a lot of corruption.

Yes.

You still say that's the abnormal circumstance.

Yes, I do believe that that's still the abnormal circumstance.

So it takes a lot of corruption to do that in spite of quality.

Right.

Doctor, professor, thank you.

Really appreciate it.

You have an extraordinary voice.

I don't know if I shared this with you.

Last time I saw you, we were in a...

Me and Kermit.

Yeah, and I saw my,

I saw my son was with me.

And I don't know if I told you this.

About 20 minutes into it, I leaned over and I said, Rafe, what are you getting from this?

And he said,

I don't know if I understand any of it, but it's fascinating.

And I kind of felt the same way he did.

You are

a breath of fresh air that you don't

talk down to people.

You expect them to come up a level

and

to think deeply.

And that is very rare.

And we pray for you, and God bless you.

Thanks very much for the discussion.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.