Jordan Peterson: "Master Your Mind and Nothing Can Break You"

Right. Next. Borders are reasonable. How about that? The law is the border that stops someone from stealing your laptop. And if it's an Apple laptop, well, it's the sort of laptop that a social justice warrior would carry. And then the social justice warrior is going to be very irritated if you happen to perlloin their laptop. And then you might point out to them, you know, it's a border that protects you from having that thing taken. And they say, well, the border should be open. It's okay, man. No problem. You hand over that laptop right now. And everything else you own, too. If you don't like borders and you can get rid of the damn walls in your house, and you don't need doors on your bedroom either, and we can keep an eye on you whenever we want. And so much for borders.

One of the things that really differs between liberals and conservatives, between the left and the right, is the right is in the right likes tight borders between things. It's part of being conscientious at every level, conceptually, sexually, familially, proincially, nationally. The right says, look, let's keep let's keep the borders between things pretty distinct. And the left says, yeah, maybe not because some of those borders are in the wrong place, and a little bit more free flow of information wouldn't be a bad thing. And the thing is, they're right, but so are the conservatives. And that's why you have to talk. It's like, well, we've got some borders. That's a good thing. Maybe some of them need to be moved around a little bit. And that's what the political dialogue is for. But that doesn't mean that borders themselves are a bad idea. They're a great idea because without borders, everything mashes into the same untenable state of undifferentiated chaos. And you can't live in that. And so the people who are trying to tear down the borders conceptually, politically, and practically, what they want is the chaos that that would bring. They either want that or they're too foolish to know that their pursuits will produce that. So, let's let's let's be a little bit clear that if you stand up and say, "Yeah, borders, they're okay. They've got their problems, but they're okay." That doesn't make you a a a bigot beyond redemption, it just makes you someone with some sense. And it's actually okay to be someone with some sense.

Limits on immigration are also reasonable. Well, we need to figure out what those limits are. And that's what the bloody political dialogue is for. But the fact that it should be limited to some degree is also reasonable. Otherwise, why not just open the borders and let everybody come in? Well, the reason you don't do that is because a complex system cannot tolerate extensive transformation over too short a period of time. Now, you want immigrants to come in, especially if they're the sorts of immigrants who are likely to contribute properly to the success of your polity. And lots of immigrants do that. But I mean I think the vast majority for example of entrepreneurs in the United States come from the Indian subcontinent. So great you know bring them over. They're highly educated. They're extraordinarily productive. They make lots of new businesses and then they pump money like back like mad back into India. Good deal. But that doesn't mean that we have we have a our arms are open to everyone immigration policy because it's complete rubbish. All that means is you're not thinking about it.

So and here's a coded to that for conservatives. Here's something. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities. So we could say look there are a lot of countries in the world that are not governed well the vast majority of them right and they've been not governed well forever. And to me that means that there's something wrong with the values that are held collectively by the people who've established those policies. Well, you shouldn't be naive and assume that merely because you move them to a new country, they're going to let their innate democratic longings flourish. It doesn't work that way. So if you stand up and say, look, you know, let's be a little cautious. Let's make sure that we don't transform our society so rapidly that we lose what we have. Let's be careful about that. That doesn't mean that you're a morally reprehensible demon. It just means that you're conservative and it's a reasonable position to hold. So there's no sense in apologizing to it.

All right. So look, here's where the postmodernists are wrong. I think there's three places and there's serious errors. The first is that there is an infinite number of interpretations, but there is not an infinite number of viable interpretations. There's a very finite number of viable interpretations. And I don't think that this is theory. I think that game theorists have already demonstrated this to some degree and it's going to be built into AI systems very rapidly. Okay. So, what are the constraints? Okay. First of all, you can't have an interpretation that leads immediately to your death or you're dead. Now, if you want to be dead, that's fine. But if you don't want to be, then you got a lot of limited options, right? You don't get to run naked across an eight lane freeway at night blindfolded cuz probably you'll be dead. That's a bad interpretation. Okay? So you might say because you're fragile and vulnerable and mortal that there's a limited number of ways that you can look at the world that don't result in, let's say, death or serious damage or agony. That's a bad thing. Agony is a bad thing. Most people agreed on that. So you're constrained by pain and anxiety. At least your interpretations are constrained by pain and anxiety. And you know, you can make pain worse or better by thinking about it to some degree, but only to some degree. When push comes to shove, pain is your master. Okay? So that's a big constraint. That's a big big constraint.

Well, but the constraints are worse than that because not only do you not get to have an interpretation of the world that produces anxiety and suffering right now, but you don't get to have an interpretation of the world that if you iterated across time produces pain and suffering. And so that's that's a big problem because there's lots of you could go out tonight and get yourself blind drunk on cocaine and sleep with six hookers. And you know, maybe that maybe that'd be a good night. you know, you might not think about it being so good tomorrow, but then maybe you're dead of AIDS in a year, or maybe you're addicted to cocaine, or maybe you're a street alcoholic, or whatever. It's like as an iterable game, that's a downhill. And the thing is, you play iterated games. You don't play one, you play iterated games. And so, your interpretation of the world has to be one that will sustain multiple iterations across time because you have to worry about 40-year-old you and 60-year-old you. And that's a big problem. That's a lot of you's stretched over a long period of time. And it's worse than that because it's not just you. It's like you and your family, right? And not only So, not only do you have to take care of yourself now in a manner that allows you to take care of yourself when you're 40, you have to take care of yourself now in a manner that takes care of you when you're 40 so that other people are happy to have you around now and continually so that they'll cooperate and compete with you in a positive way. And so that's getting ridiculously complicated. It's not just you now and you in the future. It's you surrounded by other people doing the same thing now and in the future. And there's a lot of other people. It can't even just be you and your family, you know, like like the psychopathic burglar mob. That's just not going to go so well, right? Other people are going to object and the world's going to object. And so fine, there's an infinite number of interpretations. That doesn't mean there's an infinite number of viable interpretations. In fact, there are hardly any there are hardly any playable games.

Now, Pia, Jean Pia, the developmental psychologist who's a very smart guy, he pointed out something very interesting. He said, imagine you ran a set of iterated games as a competition. And in one iterated game, the rule was you bloody well do what I tell you to. And the other one is, well, we'll all get together and decide how we're going to do this. Okay, now we run the competition. Pia's claim is you do what I tell you fails and the reason for that is I have to impose force in order to keep you cooperating and the imposition of force is a cost. It's an efficiency cost and across time that efficiency cost is going to multiply and the equilibrated state solution which is the one where we all agree it wins. Now that's worth thinking about. You think think about that locally. So you've got you're trying to organize your family. You have a little family conference about who's doing what in the household and what do you if you want peace and harmony and an iterated game. You get everybody to say, "Well, here's the tasks and we they have to be done. People have to agree on that." And then you say, "Well, which task would you do?" You have to do some. How about you and you know which task would you do? And everybody agrees. And then you say, "Well, unless you can come up with a better solution, that's the one we're going to go with." And then people can be a little resentful and angry about the conditions of existence where they have to work, but they can't really blame that on anyone else. And maybe that's the best solution you can come up with. And that was Pia's idea of the equilibrated state. It was like it's a voluntary agreement that can be iterated across time that works at multiple levels of social organization. Man, that's a serious serious serious set of constraints. And Pia, by the way, was looking for a way to reconcile science and religion. He was looking for a biological origin to morality. And he thought he found it in the idea of the equilibrated state.

It's even deeper than that. So imagine this equilibrated state idea is actually there's something to it that if you set the the state up properly, it will iterate across time so long that it becomes a permanent part of the environment. A hierarchy is exactly that's exactly what a hierarchy is. Hierarchies are 350 million years old. They're not the patriarchal invention of white European Christian males in the last 300 years. They're 350 million years old. They're stable. They're stable solutions to this iterated game problem. And they've been around so long that we're actually adapted to them. And that's part of the reason we have archetypal representations of the social structure. So, and we also have archetypal representations of the relationship of the individual to the social structure. Your job as an individual in relationship to the social structure is to embody the social structure, but also to serve as as its eyes and its mouth so that it can update itself when necessary. So, you take on the mantle of your father, let's say, but he's dead. He's the past. He can't see. You can see. So you take the structure that's already there and you modify it where it's necessary and that modification process is necessary or the state becomes too static and collapses and that's why the state has to be subordinate to the individual and that's what western culture has discovered and we can't just let that go. That's the idea of the logos. That's a big idea. And you want to live somewhere where you want to live somewhere where the individual is subordinate to the state. It's like hey go right ahead. There's lots of places like that, man. Immigrate. Go there. 90% of the world's countries are like that. If you want to live like that, man, go find out what it's like. You don't see immigration going there. That's for sure.

Okay. So, that's a big mistake that the postmodernists made. It's not trivial. That's a big mistake, but it's not the only one. Well, here's another one. They don't like inequality. Well, who does? I'm against poverty. You know that's like classic protest sign. It's like really it's like I'm against torture. It's like it's so obvious. You don't get any brownie points for being against poverty. No one in their right mind is for poverty. You know, you ever watch the Simpsons? You ever see the the Republican party in the Simpsons? They all meet in an old haunted castle at night with like lightning bolts going off and there's a vampire and a crazy Texan. And even the Simpson Republicans don't sit around in the haunted tower at midnight saying, "Hey, we need more poverty."

Here's an interesting thing. So, one of the postmodernist claims is that diversity is necessary. and they make it racial and they make it sexual, they may get ethnic and all of that. That's actually technically incorrect by the way because I study individual differences. So those are the differences between people and I know the literature. So you know about James Demor's memo, right, from Google? He wrote that partly because he was watching my videos which is why he wanted me to interview him. And I'm a believer that there are biological differences in temperament between men and women. Apart from the other obvious differences and that they're actually not trivial and that they maximize in the societies that have the most have moved farthest to producing egalitarian states, the Scandinavian countries. And that the reason for that is that there's two reasons why men and women differ in temperament. One is biological and the other is environmental. And if you remove the environmental variation, which you do if you make the state egalitarian, you maximize the genetic variation. And that's been demonstrated in the scientific literature over about four decades. And no one wanted it or hoped for it. And they weren't biased in looking for it because that was exactly the opposite of what social scientists wanted to find because social scientists lean heavily to the left. And what they wanted to find was you flatten out the state so that everyone has equal opportunity and the differences between people disappear. That is not what happened. The opposite happened. That was wrong. And no one was happy about it. and no one's happy about it. Now, you can actually tell when you've discovered something in a social science because you're not happy about it. But if you take let's say there's a big difference between men and women in terms of trait agreeableness, compassion and politeness. On average, women are more agreeable than men. And the difference is approximately this. If you take random pairs of men and women out of the population, let's say you had to make a bet on who was more agreeable. If you bet that it was the woman, you'd be right 60% of the time. Well, that's not that much. Means you'd be wrong 40% of the time. That's almost 50% of the time. So, this is a big difference by social science standards, but that's the magnitude of the difference. There are some differences that are bigger, like the difference between men and women's interest in people versus things is actually bigger than that. That's the biggest difference we know. But it's a big difference. Let's say the agreeableness difference. But still the the shared attributes of men and women far outweigh the attributes that differentiate them because you could ask are there more differences within groups or between them? Now the postmodern answer to that is between them. That's why you need diversity by group, right? That's why you need different races. That's why you need different ethnicities and sexual preferences and all of that. Well, that's wrong. There's more difference within the groups than there is between them. You don't get diversity by crossing the groups. You get diversity by by selecting across individuals. In fact, the idea that there is more differences between groups than there is between individuals is actually the fundamental racist idea. It's the fundamental racist idea which is well let's say you're Asian oriental to use the old word to discriminate the one type of Asian say from the other. You're so different from me that there's no overlap between our groups and you're also so different and there's so little difference within your group that now that I know that you're not me, you're not one of mine, I actually know what you're like. No, technically that's incorrect. That's wrong. That isn't how you get diversity. Now, diversity is actually necessary because people differ in intelligence and they differ in temperament, they differ in skills and so you actually need diversity because otherwise you can't take advantage of all those differences. So, you need diversity, but you need genuine diversity. And like what would genuine diversity mean? If you're trying to put together a work team, you want enough you want people of sufficient diversity so that they more or less so that you gather together the appropriate talents to produce the implement that's necessary to work properly in the world. That's a competence marker because otherwise your business is going to fail. And so the proper diversity with regards to employment is the diversity that meets the the requirements of the business essentially. Obviously, that's why you try to hire people carefully and not randomly, let's say.

Third error, first error is there's only a finite number of valid interpretations. Second error is that um there are real differences between groups of people, but there's more difference within the groups than between them. Third difference is social status and payment especially in a free democratic capitalist society is based more on competence than on power. In fact, we would say that when a person in a hierarchy starts to act like their position entitles them to power, then that hierarchy has become corrupt. Harvey Weinstein's a good example of that. I'm serious. It's like he acts acted like a tyrant. What happened to him? It's not good. Not good for him. What he did was not good. But it's an indication. It's revealed. It's an indication that the misuse. So he's competent. Fine. He gets to have position because we need people who are competent. But that doesn't mean you get to turn into a tyrant. If you turn into a tyrant, then that overshadows your competence. And out you go. That's the definition of a functioning state. And our state essentially functions. It's not perfect. That's for sure. But compared to what? That's the issue. Compared to your hypothetical Marxist utopia. Well, compared to your hypothetical Marxist utopia. I mean, we're living in Auschwitz. But your but your actual Marxist utopia is indistinguishable from Auschwitz. So, we're not listening to that comparison. We're going to take a look at what we have and we're going to compare it to other places that actually existed in time and geographically. And by those criteria, it's like, is there another time you'd rather live? Is there another place you'd rather live? I mean, a real place in a real time. I mean, you want to live back in 1895, even in the Western world where the average person lived on less than a dollar a day in today's money. You want to live like those coal miners? It's like the answer to that no. If you have any sense, you should have some gratitude. That's another problem with the postmodern neo-Marxist. Like zero zero zero gratitude. It's all oh my god, I'm oppressed.

You know, you may know, you may not that I'm an admirer of Nietzsche. Um, Nietzsche was a devastating critic of I would say dogmatic Christianity. Christianity as it was instantiated in institutions. I I suppose although he he's a very paradoxical thinker because for example one of the things Nietzsche said was that he didn't believe that the scientific revolution would have ever got off the ground if it hadn't been for Christianity and more specifically for Catholicism because he believed that over the course of really a thousand years the European mind so to speak had to train itself to interpret everything that was known within a single coherent framework. Coherent if you accept the initial axioms, a single coherent framework. So, Nietzsche believed that that Catholicization of of of the phenomena of life and of history produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending its dogmatic foundations and then concentrating on something else which in this particular case happened to be the natural world. And so, Nietzsche believed that in some sense Christianity died at its own hand. It had spent a very long period of time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth. You know, absent the corruption and all of that that's always part of any human endeavor. And then the truth, the spirit of the truth that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity and everyone woke up and said something like or thought something like, well, how is it that we came to believe any of this? Um, it's like waking up one day and noting noting that you really don't know why you put a Christmas tree up, but you've been doing it for a long time. And that's what people do. And you know, there are reasons that Christmas trees came about, but the what would you say the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.

So now Nietzsche although he was a critic of Christianity and also a champion of of its disciplinary capacity because you see the other thing that Nietzsche believed was that it was not possible to be free in some sense unless you had been a slave and and by that he meant that you don't go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality. You go from childhood to a state of discipline, which you might think is akin to slavery to self-imposed slavery. That that would be the best scenario where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific before you might be able to reattain the generality that you had as a child. And he believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization. Um, but in the late 1800s he announced that God was dead and you often hear of that as something triumphant. But for Nietzsche it wasn't because he was too nuanced a thinker to be that simple-minded. See, Nietzsche understood that and this is something I'm going to try to make clear is that we there's there's a very large amount that we don't know about the structure of experience that we don't know about reality. And we have our articulated representations of the world. And then you could think of outside of that, there are things we know absolutely nothing about. And there's a buffer between them. And those are things we sort of know something about. and we don't know them in an articulated way. Here's an example. You know, sometimes you're arguing with one of your someone close to you and they're in a bad mood, you know, and uh they're being touchy and unreasonable and you keep the conversation up and maybe all of a sudden they, you know, they get angry or maybe they cry and then when they cry they figure out what they're angry about and it has nothing to do with you even though you might have been what precipitated the argument, you know, and that's an interesting phenomena as far as I'm concerned because it means that people can know things at one level without being able to speak what they know at another. And so in in some sense the thoughts rise up from the body and they they do that in moods and they do that in images and they do that in actions and we have all sorts of ways that we understand before we understand in a fully articulated manner. And so we have this articulated space that we can all discuss. And then outside of that we have something that's more akin to a dream that we're embedded in. And it's an emotional dream that we're embedded in. And that's based at least in part on our actions. I'll describe that later. And then outside of that is what we don't know anything about at all. And in that dream, that's where the mystics live and that's where the artists live. And there are the mediators between the absolute unknown and the things we know for sure. And you see what that means in some sense is what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don't really understand. And that if those two things are out of sync, so you might say if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream, then we become dissociated internally, we think things we don't act out. And we act out things we don't dream. And that produces a kind of sickness of the spirit. And and that sickness of the spirit it see its cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation. And then people turn to things like ideologies which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure to try to organize their thinking. And then that's a catastrophe. And that's what Nietzsche foresaw. You see, he knew that when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation, this this god ideal, let's say, that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism, let's say, and the extremes of ideology. He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology, you know, and believed and and predicted this in the late 1800s, which is really an absolute intellectual tour de force of staggering magnitude. Predicted that in the 20th century that hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these underlying dreamlike structures with this rational rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world. And you know, we've been oscillating back and forth between left and right in some sense ever since. And you know, with some good sprinkling of nihilism in there and despair and some sense that's the situation of the modern western person and in increasingly of people in general, you know, I think part of the reason that Islam has its backup with regards to the west to such a degree. I mean, there's many reasons and not all of them are valid, that's for sure. But one of the reasons is that you know they they being still grounded in a in a in a dream let's say they can see that the rootless questioning mind of the west poses a tremendous danger to the integrity of their culture now and it does I mean westerners us we undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect and I'm not complaining about that you know I mean it it there isn't anything easy that can be done about it but but it's still it's still a a sort of fruitful catastrophe and you know it has real effects on people's lives. It's not some abstract thing, you know. I mean, lots of times when when I've been treating people for depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential issues, you know. It's not just some psychiatric condition. It's it's not just that they're tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty, although, you know, sometimes that happens to be the case. It's that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life and they're not sure why it's reasonable to continue with it. you know, they they can feel the terrible negative meanings of life, but are skeptical beyond belief about any of the positive meanings. I had one client who was a very brilliant artist, and as long as he didn't think, he was fine, you know, because he'd go and create, and he was really good at being an artist. He just, you know, he had that personality that was continually creative and quite brilliant, although he was self-denigrating. But as soon as he started to think about what he was doing, then you know the the what it's like a it's like a drill or a thaw or something like that. He'd saw the branch off that he was sitting on because he'd start to criticize what he was doing even the utility of it even though it was sort of self-evidently useful. And then he would be then it would be very very hard for him to even motivate himself to create. And he I he always struck me as a good example of of the consequences of having your rational intellect divorced in some way from your being. Divorced enough so that it actually questions the utility of your being. And it's not a good thing. It's it's really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathology but also in social psychopathology. And that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies which which I really do think of as as they're like they're like crippled religions. That's the right way to think about them. They're like a religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along and it it provides a certain amount of security and group identity but it's it's warped and twisted and demented and bent and it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true. And that's how it looks to me anyways. and and so so I think it's very important that we sort out this problem. Um I think that I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done than that. I' I've thought that for a long long time uh probably since the early 80s uh when I started looking at the psych the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health um because they you can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems. It's like why the hell do they care exactly? What difference does it make if if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct? Like people get unbelievably upset when you when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak. And it isn't it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why, you know, but there's some it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on. It's it's it's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs, you know, and they're afraid they're going to fall in and drown. It's like drown in what? And what are the logs protecting themselves protecting them from? And why are they so afraid to to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? And like these are not obvious things. So I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time. And I've I've done some lectures about that that are on YouTube. Most of you know that. And some of what I'm going to talk about in this series, you'll have heard if if you've listened to the YouTube videos, but you know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles. And so, okay, so Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values essentially. Now, he understood that we had bodies and that we had motivations and emotions. like he was a romantic thinker in some sense but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free floating soul but was embedded in our physiology constrained by our emotions shaped by our motivation shaped by our body. He understood that but he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values. That was that's and he thought that the person he he talked about the person who could create their own values as the overman or the superman and that was one of the parts of Nietzschean philosophy that the Nazis I would say took out of context and used to fuel their you know superior man ideology but so and we know what happened with that didn't seem to turn out very well that's for sure for example very briefly there was a a deity known as Marduk and Marduk He was a Mesopotamian deity. And imagine this is sort of what happened is that as an empire grew out of the post ice age, say 15,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, all these tribes came together and these tribes each had their own deity, their own image of the ideal, but then they started to occupy the same territory, right? And so then one tribe had God A and one tribe had God B. and you know they one could wipe the other one out and then it would just be God A who wins but that's not so good because well maybe you want to trade with those people or maybe you don't want to lose half your population in a war something like that so then you have to have an argument about whose god is going to take priority which ideal is going to take priority and what seems to happen is that's represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in sort of celestial space but from a practical perspective it's more like an ongoing dialogue you believe this, I believe this, you believe that, I believe this. How are we going to meld that together? So you take God A and you take God B. And maybe what you do is extract God C from them and you say, well, God C now has the attributes of A and B. And then some other tribes come in and then C takes them over too. And so you get like with Marduk, for example, he has a multitude of names, 50 different names. Well, those are names at least in part of the subordinate gods that represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization. That's part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstracted. You think this is important and it works cuz your tribe's alive. And you think this is important and it works because your tribe is alive. And so we'll take the best of both if we can manage it and extract out something that's even more abstract that covers both of us if we can do it. And one of the things that's really interesting about Marduk, I'll just give you a couple of of his features, but he has eyes all the way around his head. He's elected by all the other gods to be king god. So that's the first thing that's quite cool. And they elect him because they're they're facing a terrible threat. Sort of like a flood and a monster combined, something like that. And Marduk basically says that if they elect him top god, then he'll go out and stop the flood monster and and and they won't all get wiped out. It's a serious threat. It's chaos itself making its comeback. And so all the gods agree and Marduk is a new manifestation. He's got eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words. And then he also goes out and when he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat. And and we need to know that because the word Tiamat is associated with the word Tehom. T H O M. And Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis. So, it's linked very tightly to this story. And Marduk with his eyes and his capacity to speak magic words goes out to confront Tiamat who's like a watery sea dragon, something like that. Uh, it's a classic it's a classic St. George story. Go out and and wreak havoc on the dragon and he cuts her into pieces and he makes the world out of her pieces. And that's the world that human beings live in. And the Mesopotamian emperor acted out Marduk. He was allowed to be emperor in so far as he was a good Marduk. And so that meant that he had eyes all the way around his head and he could speak magic. He could speak properly. And so that we're starting to understand there at that point the essence of leadership, right? Because what's leadership? It's the capacity to see what the hell's in front of your face and maybe in every direction. And then the capacity to use your language properly in a transformative manner and to transform chaos into order. And God only know how knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out. And the best they could do is dramatize it, but it's staggeringly brilliant. You know, it's it's by no means obvious. And this chaos this chaos is a very strange thing. And this is the chaos that God wrestled with at the beginning of time. Chaos is what it's half psychological and half real. There's no other way to really describe it. The chaos is what you encounter when you're thrown into deep confusion, right? When your world falls apart, when when you encounter something that blows you into pieces, when your dreams die, when you're betrayed, it's the chaos that emerges. And the chaos is everything at once. And it's too much for you. And that's for sure. And it pulls you down into the underworld. And all that's where the dragons are. And all you've got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open and to speak as carefully and clearly as you can. And maybe if you're lucky, you'll get through it that way and come out the other side. And it's taken people a very long time to figure that out. And it looks to me like the idea is erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors maybe tens of millions of years ago because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply using the same system that we used to represent like serpentine serpentine or other carnivorous predators. And it you know we're biological creatures right? So when we've formulated our capacity to abstract, our strange capacity to abstract and use language, we still have all those underlying systems that were there when we were only animals. And we have to use those systems there. They're part of the emotional and motivational architecture of our thinking. And part of the reason we can demonize our enemies who upset our axioms is because we perceive them as if they're carnivorous predators. We do it with the same system. And that's chaos itself. the thing that always threatens us, right? The snakes that came to the trees when we lived in them like 60 million years ago. It's the same damn systems. So the Marduk story is partly the story of using attention and language to confront those things that most threaten us. And some of those things are real real world threats, but some of them are psychological threats which are just as profound but far more abstract. We but we use the same systems to represent them. It's why you freeze if you're frightened, right? You're a prey animal. You're like a rabbit. You've seen a You've seen something that's going to eat you. You freeze. And that way you're paralyzed. You're turned to stone, which is what you do when you see a Medusa with a head full of snakes, right? You're turned to stone. You're paralyzed. And the reason you do that is because you're using the predator detection system to protect yourself. your heart rate goes way up and you get ready to move. Things that upset us rely on that system. And then the story, the Marduk story, for example, is the idea that if there are things that upset you, chaotic, terrible, serpentine, monstrous, underworld things that threaten you, the best thing to do is to open your eyes and get your speech organized and go out and confront the thing and make the world out of it. And it's it's staggering when I when I read that story and started to understand it just blew me away that it's such a profound idea. And we know it's true too because we know in psychotherapy for example that you're much better off to confront your fears head on than you are to wait and let them find you. And so partly what you do if you're a psychotherapist is you help people break their fears into little pieces, the things that upset them and then to encounter them one by one and master them. And so you're teaching this process of eternal mastery over the strange and chaotic world. And that that all of that makes up some of the background. We haven't even got to the first sentence of the biblical stories yet. But but all of that makes up the background. So you have to think that we've extracted this story the this or this strange collection of stories with all its errors and its and its repetitions and and its peculiarities out of the entire like the entire history that we've been able to collect ideas and it's the best we've been able to do. And I know there are other religious traditions. I'm not concerned about that at the moment because we can use this as an as an example, but it's the best we've been able to do. What what I'm hoping is that we can return to the stories in some sense with an open mind and see if there's something there that we actually need and hope and I hope that that will be the case. And as I said, I'll approach it as rationally as I possibly can.

So, well, this is the idea to begin with, you know, is we have the unknown as such and then we act in it like animals act. They act first. They don't think, they don't imagine, they act. And that's that's where we started. We started by acting and then we started to be able to represent how we acted and then we started to talk about how we represented how we acted and that enabled us to tell stories because that is what a story is. It's to tell about how you represent how you act. And so you know that because if you read a book, what happens? You read the book and images come to mind of of the people in the book behaving, right? It's one step from acting it out. It's you don't act it out because you can abstract. You can represent action without having to act it out. It's amazing thing. And that's part of the development of the prefrontal cortex. It's part of the capacity for human abstract thought is that you can pull the behavior the representation of the behavior away from the behavior and manipulate the representation before you enact it. It's that's why you think is so that you can generate a pattern of action and test it out in a fictional world before you embody it and die because you're foolish, right? You let the representation die, not you. And that's why you think and you know that you know that perfectly well. And this is another Freudian observation. You know, if you're sitting down to study, for example, your conscious intent is to study. But you know perfectly well that all sorts of distraction fantasies are going to enter the theater of your imagination nonstop and annoyingly. And and there isn't really a lot you can do about that except maybe wait it out, you know? So you'll be sitting there reading and your attention will flicker away. You'll think about, I don't know, maybe you want to watch Jane the Virgin on Netflix or something like that. Or maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich, or you should get the dust bunnies from out from underneath the bed, or it's time to go outside and have a cigarette, or maybe it's time for a cup of coffee. Or it's like all these subsystems in you that would like something aren't very happy just to sit there while you read this thing that you're actually bored by. And so, they pop up and try to take control of your perceptions and your actions non-stop. Maybe you think, well, this is a stupid course anyways. Why do I have to read this damn paper? And what am I doing in university? And what's the point of life? It's like you can really well, you can really get going if you're trying to avoid doing your homework and and and then you might think, well, what is it in you that's trying to avoid? Because after all, you took the damn course and you told yourself to sit down. Why don't you listen? Well, because you're you're a mess. That's basically why.

There's a series of actions that occur before you take your cocaine. Some of those are local. They're the things that happen immediately before. And some of those are distal. They're farther back in the chain of events. And when you when you have a hit of cocaine, it produces a dopaminergic burst. And that feels really good. But it also makes the circuits that were immediately active before that grow. That's what reinforcement is. And then the growth is proportionate, not linearly, but it's proportionate to how long before that event occurred. The closer it is, the stronger they're going to get. But even the ones that are somewhat distal get some reinforcement. Because you might say, well, what did you do before you you found your latest fix? And the answer is, well, how long before? Well, the closer the more rewarded. And so what happens then is that so if you take that person out of the normal environment, you put them into a treatment center, they're off their physical addiction, which is a weird thing in the case of cocaine, but um like not that long. A week will do it. Two weeks for sure, even heroin and and alcohol for sure if you can get them through the seizure part without dying. Um, and so they're done. They aren't physiologically dependent anymore. But you let that person go and the first thing that happens is his old friend who he's always out doing drugs with shows up and bang, he's craving like mad. And that's because that thing is in there is not dead at all. And it's it's activated by the cue and it's a it's a circuit. It's not it's a personality. It only wants one thing. It wants cocaine. It's going.

to suppress any nonrelated thoughts, and it'll use lies. That's no problem, especially if lies have been reinforced, which they certainly have. "Where are you off to, son?" You know, you'll have a lie for that. And then 10 minutes later, you have your drug. And so that little lie has just grown.

Or maybe you think you've tried to quit; you think, "To hell with it!" And every time, 10 minutes before you take your drug, you think, "To hell with it!" And you do that a thousand times. Well, believe me, the "to hell with it" circuit, that sucker is strong. And so it's alive. And it's not like it just disappears. It can't. It's you. It's grown in there.

Now, you can build another circuit to shut it down. And you can help it decompose across time by not giving it what it wants. But you're going to have to not give it what it wants in all of the multiple contexts that you've already associated with the drug.

Some of you have probably smoked and then tried to quit smoking. And what you'll see is you get a craving when, well, when you have a cup of coffee, or when you're finished dinner, or when you're done having a phone call, or when you first get up in the morning, or whenever you've regularly had the drug. Whatever you had the drug in relationship to, even complex things like ending a conversation, will produce a cued craving. And so then that can extinguish over time if you punish it by either punishing it or not letting it get what it wants. But a lot, you have to build another circuit to just shut it down.

Poor people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, they can spend half their time doing things that they can't really control, and they have very strong impulses to do them, and it's very hard on them to block them. You know, they, they'll almost panic if those things are blocked.

And then you have people with Tourette's syndrome, you know, that they'll be doing all sorts of weird dances and, and spouting off obscenities and, and, and, and imitating people without being able to control it. And, and sometimes a little bit of antipsychotic medication can dampen that down. But it's as if there are these autonomous semi-spirits inside of them that grip control over their behavior and make them do things.

And you know, you find that to some degree in your own life because maybe you've become very attracted to someone, even maybe you don't want to be attracted to the person, and then you find yourself, you know, texting them when you know perfectly well that you should be going to bed. And you know, you're, you're in a grip of something, and, and you can't control it. And that's all part of the unconscious and all part of what Freud was studying.

The way Freud thought about this, basically, was that with the id and the ego and the superego. So, if you think about the id as the place where these contradictory drives emerge, so it's sort of nature within. The ego is the thing that's sort of being pushed back and forth by those contradictory drives. And the superego is the thing that's on top saying, "You better behave yourself. You better behave yourself."

And so it's a different model than the Pedian model because PG assumed that what would happen is that as the child—and I like the Pedian model better. I, I think, I think in healthy development the Pedian model is correct, but in unhealthy development, I think the Freudian model is correct: that instead of integrating, say, the aggressive and sexual drives, for the sake of argument, into your personality as you develop, what happens is the superego just represses them instead. So they don't become a dynamic part of you integrated into your ego. They're just repressed. You just don't manifest them. And so that's how you be a good person.

And you can be the victim of a very harsh superego. And that often happens if you've had a particularly tyrannical parent, one or both, or maybe a tyrannical grandparent. Or maybe you're your own inner tyrant, and you've picked up tyrannical voices through your whole life and aggregated them into this terrible judge that's always watching you, that's criticizing everything you do, and, and restricting you badly, and really badly, and what you're allowed and not allowed to do.

You see that with anorexic women. Well, men could be anorexic, too, but it's much, much less rare. They have superegos that are just—or it's one way of thinking about it—that's just, they're just deadly. They're just criticizing every bit of them. Well, right to the point, they're really criticizing them out of existence, right? Is, you have to be so perfect that the perfection is not aligned with the ability to live. You don't get to eat, you know?

And, and people like that, they look at their bodies; they even look at their bodies incorrectly. Like anorexics seem to be unable to see their bodies as a whole. They can only see their bodies as parts. And when you start seeing your body as parts, you're really in trouble because you can't get a sense of actually what it looks like. And body perception is very, very complicated.

But anyways, PG thought about the ego as, in some sense, as the game that's played by all these dynamic drives that's shaped by the broader community. And so that could all be integrated. But Freud would say, "Well, look, when that doesn't happen, instead you're subject to the tyranny of the superego, and it just says you should never be angry, right? You should never express yourself sexually because if you do, there's something wrong with you. You're a bad person. And you're a bad person if you ever get aggressive or..." And so, and then people who are living like that under those circumstances, you know, they get, they, well, they're, they're repressed, is the right way to think about it.