Transcription
The question, to some degree, is: How do you help someone that's lost? And the answer to that is, if they aren't willing to not be lost, you cannot help them. And I would also say that, as a clinician, you see, I mean, it's a statement that's informed, I would say, by mythological knowledge, but also by straight clinical wisdom. Not mine, particularly. I mean, one of the things that Carl Rogers pointed out was that there were necessary preconditions for entering into a therapeutic relationship, and that would be really any relationship where the mutual flourishing of the two people involved was the paramount goal. And one of the preconditions was that both people had to want that to happen. And Rogers believed he didn't know how to get the horse to drink once you had brought it to the water.
And I've thought about that a lot because when people are really lost, sometimes they're so lost that they can't be found. And I think the only thing that you can do in a situation like that is get your life together and manifest the reality of an alternative mode of being. That's what you've got. And so that's the only way I know of to solve an intractable problem. "Don't cast pearls before swine." And what that means is, if you're trying to help and it doesn't work, then stop helping. It's not helping, right? It may be just wasting your time. It might be making things worse. Now, if you're offering something and it's not taken, then perhaps you should be offering it somewhere else. And sometimes, if you offer a hand and the person won't take it, you have to stop offering the hand. And then what you do is you go off and you have your life. And sometimes that means, in people's lives, for example, that they have to leave their family members behind. Sometimes the thing you do is walk away because there's no other solution. And if you are trapped in pathological relationships and you see no way out of them, if someone who is sinking has their hands around your neck and is pulling you down, you're not obligated to drown with them.
You know, there's a rule, too. If you're a lifeguard, you know, some of you have had lifeguard training. How do you approach someone who's drowning and panicking in the water? Feed out, right? Like this. It's like, "I'll save you, but that doesn't mean you get to drown me while I'm doing it." And if it's you drown or both of us drown, it's you drown. And that's wisdom. That's not cruelty.
One of the things you don't want is too much mismatch between you and that person on the five fundamental dimensions. So, for example, if you're really extroverted and you have a really introverted partner, you're going to engage in continual conflict about how much social activity the two of you should be subjected to. And it's very, very difficult for people who broadly differ, widely differ on those dimensions, to come to consensus because it's not just a matter of opinion, right? It's really a matter of different, if you're looking at extremes of really different types of people. And the thing about introverts is they just don't enjoy large-scale social interaction that much. One-on-one, they're often fine, but in a group, they don't like that, and it tires them out. Whereas a real extrovert, it's like you isolate them, and they just wither on the vine because a huge part of what actually motivates them in a positive way is tangled up with social interaction.
And so if you're an agreeable person and you have a particularly disagreeable partner, you're also going to run into problems because the agreeable person will say, "Whatever you want, whenever," and the disagreeable person will say, "Well, I'd like to know what the hell you want for a change," and be much more harsh and much more demanding in the situation. And the agreeable person is going to find the disagreeable person harsh and unpleasant. And the disagreeable person is going to find the agreeable person wishy-washy and unable to stand up for themselves. And again, that's one of the primary sources of tension between men and women because women tend to be higher in agreeableness than men. It's about half a standard deviation, which is quite a large difference by psychological standards. And so, um, what it means, I probably haven't got the statistic quite right, but I think I've got it about right. What that means fundamentally, just so you have some sense of how large an effect that is, is that if you have a group of men and women and you pick out random pairs, the woman is going to be more agreeable than the man 60% of the time. So that's not an overwhelming proportion, but it's reliable and it's quite large by psychological standards.
So there's the problem with agreeableness. With conscientiousness? Well, if you're conscientious, you're industrious and orderly. And orderly people seem to be sensitive to disgust, which is something we'll talk about in detail later. We've had a hard time specifying exactly what makes industrious people industrious because it's hard to come up with an animal model for that sort of thing. And there's no theoretical model. But our latest idea is that it's not my idea, it's actually the idea of my graduate student, Christine Brophy, is that industrious people find it unpleasant and unsettling to not be doing something. So it isn't so much that industriousness makes them happy or fills them with positive emotion. That would be more extroversion, right? Because extroversion is the positive emotion dimension. It's that industrious people can't stand sitting around doing nothing. And you know, this is speculation, but human beings are obviously always engaged in the exchange of labor, especially the reciprocal exchange of labor. And you can imagine that, um, in a community where everyone knows everyone, the people who work hard are going to be pretty irritated on a fairly chronic basis with the people who are completely unproductive. And my suspicions are that plenty of people who were completely unproductive in the history of our species were wiped out by people who were unhappy with their lack of productivity. And so I think generally speaking, human beings have this sense of ethical obligation with regards to one another to share labor. And people who are conscientious really, really feel that. So they feel bad if they're not busily working on something that's productive all the time. And so the advantage to being with someone conscientious is, well, they're going to work like mad. But the disadvantage is, they're going to work like mad. So, you know, if you're looking for a partner that you want to relax with or have fun with, or who isn't uptight, then a conscientious person is probably not a very good choice. On the other hand, if you're a conscientious person and you're living with someone who's really unconscientious, that's good because they might be able to help you relax, but you're not going to be happy with them because they don't work nearly as hard as you do.
Even worse on the orderly dimension, you know, some of you have had roommates and maybe you're more orderly than your roommate. What does it mean? Means you're annoyed by mess before they are. And you don't have to be annoyed by mess much before your less orderly roommate for you to be the one that's always running around picking things up. And so, actually, one of the things that's emerged from the psychometric analysis is that women are slightly more orderly than men. And I suspect that has something to do with the inequitable distribution of housework because even if your proclivity is to be triggered by disorder 25 seconds before your partner's, well, you're going to end up, it doesn't take much difference for you to be the one that's always concerned about the mess first. So anyways, and so if you're a really orderly person and you live with a disorderly person, well, good luck getting along with them. They're going to regard you as uptight and overconcerned with details and unwilling to relax. That's for sure. And they're going to regard you as just a bloody mess. And how can anyone possibly live with someone like you?
And so, another reason why it's useful to understand your personality is because I think it gives you a better crack at finding someone that you can actually live with over the long run. And we don't know what the optimal. I don't think you want to live with someone who's exactly like you because then both of you have the same strengths and weaknesses, and there's a bit of a problem there, right? Because maybe an agreeable person can use a bit of a disagreeable person around them to balance each other out, and vice versa, right? So we don't understand the optimal balance for long-term thriving in a relationship, but I think we do understand the fact that if you're too different in your traits, those where you're different is going to constitute a chronic source of conflict.
Here's an interesting tidbit from the psychological literature. Let's say you want to determine what the best predictors are for lifetime success in a Western society. Well, what would you hope for? How about intelligence? That would be a good one. Let's hope the smart people occupy more positions of complexity, right? Because they're smarter. Would you want it any other way? Okay. And then, so, and that's great. The number one predictor of accomplishment in Western societies is intelligence. So that means the system works. What's the number two predictor? Conscientiousness. Well, what's that? It's a trait marker for hard work. So who gets ahead? Smart people who work hard. Now, that doesn't account for every bit of the difference between people in terms of their hierarchical structure because hierarchies aren't perfect. They're corrupt. People get to the top sometimes because they're psychopathic. Although, believe me, a hell of a lot less than you think. Because a psychopath has to keep moving from place to place because once he reveals himself as deceitful and untrustworthy, he has to go find new suckers to fleece. So, the idea that there's no distinction between a CEO and a psychopath, it's like that's only made by someone who knows nothing about psychopaths, knows nothing about CEOs, and has something fundamental against the entire capitalist structure because it's simply not true. Corrupt sometimes, greedy, sometimes shortsighted, sometimes running companies that are doing their best to auger themselves into the ground. And so, you know, it's bad people running a dying organization. But generally speaking, it's not the case. Our hierarchies of competence are reasonably functional. And not only are they functional, they're valuable. We need to know who the competent people are. And we need to reward them. And even more importantly, we need to tell young people, hey, there's some hierarchies of competence out there, like a thousand of them. Go be a plumber, man. But be a good one, you know? Be an honest one. Be. I had a plumber once, you know. It was the night before we were putting drywall in our house. We were redoing a house, and he had put in all the plastic piping, you know, and I was going to test the joints. They're supposed to be glued together with this pipe glue, right? And I said, I told him I had to test the joints. And he said, "Well, you don't have to test my joints. They never leak." And I thought, "Yeah, that's okay. How about if I test them?" So I went up on the third floor and filled the pipes with water, capping them in the basement like you're supposed to. And like half an hour later, I had two inches of water in the basement. There were 30 leaking joints. That was the night before the drywallers were supposed to show up. So, well, so he wasn't particularly competent. That's the point of that story. But even more so, he had put a bunch of the plastic pipe outside where the drywall would be. So it would have been sticking through the wall. So I spent a frenetic night, you know, sawing through plastic pipe and regluing joints so that my, well, so that the drywallers could come in. What's the point? If you're going to be a plumber, man, be a good plumber because otherwise all you do is go out there and cause trouble. We don't need people to cause more trouble. We need people to solve problems, you know. And so you can be a tradesman, and you can make a lot of money as a tradesperson. It's a bloody, reliable, honorable, forthright, productive way of making a living. And there is a hell of a lot of difference between a working man who knows what he's doing and one who doesn't, both in terms of skill and ethics. Right? And you work with someone who knows what they're doing, it's a bloody pleasure. They tell you what they're going to do. They tell you how much it will cost. They go and do it. It works, and you pay them. Perfect. Everyone's happy. And that's what happens when you have genuine hierarchies of competence.
And so you listen to these panderers of egalitarianism and equity, and they fail to recognize completely that there are differences in rank between people. It's not such a terrible thing, man. Maybe you wouldn't be a great lawyer. Like, it's certainly possible. Most people aren't. But that doesn't mean there isn't something you could be great at. There's lots of hierarchies to attempt to climb, and if you fail in one, go try in another. But the point is, you're still trying to aim for the top. And what the hell are you going to do if you don't try to aim for the top? Flap about uselessly and whine about your life? It's not helpful. It'll just make you miserable. You're not reliable to anyone. You can't help out in a crisis. It's like, so you tell young people, and this is another message for conservatives, like, I don't care what you're going to do, but go out there and make something of yourself. Be an honest person and work and get to the top of whatever it is that you want to get to the top of, you know, and stand up for yourself like a respectable human being and be a bit of a light on the world instead of a blight, you know. And you can tell young people that, and they haven't been told that by anyone now. And so the young men are so hungry for that that it's painful to watch. They're so relieved when someone finally comes up and says, "Hey, you know, you get your act together a bit, discipline yourself, see if you can learn to tell the truth, concentrate on something for a year or two, you could be a bloody world-beater." They think, "Really? That's possible? Wow, that would be interesting. That might make life worth living." It's like, yeah, it might. So why don't you go do it? That's what the damn universities were supposed to be teaching people. And they've forgotten that. It's like, get yourself educated, man. Read some books, learn to talk, learn to think, make yourself into something. Get the hell out there and make the world that put you here happy that you were put there. So hierarchies of competence are desirable, and they should be promoted. So none of this idiot egalitarian equity. It's not good for anyone. First of all, it's impossible. Second, it would be murderous to impose. But third, even if it succeeded, it would fail. As fast as it succeeded, that would be how fast it would fail. Why would you strive for anything if there was no up to strive for? If everything's flat and equal, well, when you're starving or dying, then everyone's equal. And believe me, the egalitarian totalitarians who dominated the 20th century knew perfectly well how to make people equal. And they made them equal in gulag work camps and in starvation. And I'm sure we could attain that if we wanted to. So, all 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 purloin 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, then 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 likes tight borders between things. It's part of being conscientious at every level: conceptually, sexually, familially, provincially, nationally. The right says, "Look, 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.
Political belief is determined in large part by temperament and personality. And that's very strongly biologically influenced. And so conservatives tend to be lower in openness, which is a trait associated with creativity, and higher in conscientiousness, which is a trait associated with industriousness and orderliness. They tend to make good managers and administrators and lawyers. They tend to make good conservative business types. That's their forte. That's their niche. And that's a valid place to be and a valid thing to be. And, you know, conservatives aren't so good at being entrepreneurial, and they're not so good at being artistic and creative. That's not their niche. That's more the niche of the liberal end of the spectrum. And as far as I'm concerned, for the political system to function properly, you need proper representation for all the temperamental types, and they need to be engaged in dialogue. So, but the thing is, is that when the conservatives are saying, well, you know, especially when they're perhaps thinking about leading the damn party, let's say, that they're worried about speaking their mind in a conservative manner, that's just not a good thing. That means that something's gone wrong with our political system, and seriously wrong.
You know, and another thing that I've noticed, you know, when this all, some of you may know and some of you may not know that I made a couple of videos back. September 27th, I woke up one night because I couldn't sleep, and I thought, I usually go and write if I can't sleep because I've got something to figure out. But I've been playing with YouTube videos. I've been putting my lectures online since 2013, and by last April, they had about a million views. And so I thought, "Wow, that's really something, man." You know, like you write a book and you sell a million copies, you're one happy character. And I thought, a million views is a very large number of views. It really tuned me into the fact that YouTube was something completely other than what I thought it was. But anyways, that night I thought, "Oh, I'll get up. I'll make a video instead of writing it down." So, okay.
What else? Here's some things you might think about if you're a conservative. These things have become, what would you say? People are afraid to say them. Here's the first one. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid. How about that? You know, it's not. You think it's an accident? Oh, here's how you find out. Okay. Which countries do people want to move away from? Not ours. Which countries do people want to move to? Ours. Guess what? They work better. And it's not because we went around the world stealing everything we could get our hands on. It's because we got certain fundamental assumptions right. Thank God for that. After thousands and thousands of years of trying. And because of that, we've managed to establish a set of civilizations that are shining lights in the world. You know, now you can be pretty damn filthy and still be a shining light in this world, right? Because if you look around the world at the state of governance in most places, it's like the most pathological, corrupt, and vicious thugs rule. And to stand out as an illuminated light against that background isn't so difficult. But nonetheless, you know, we're as good as it's got. And unless we can come up with something better, we should be very careful about messing around with that. So why don't we start with the assumption that we're doing something right?
One of the things we're doing right, for example, is that we actually value the individual, right? The individual has intrinsic value in Western societies. Do you know how long it took people to formulate that as an idea? And how unlikely that idea is? That poor you, you know, useless, powerless you, with all your damn faults, you're actually worth something. You're worth something to the point that the law has to respect you.
Assumption number two: Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy. Okay? So, you want to live alone in the bush, you're going to starve to death and be eaten by blackflies. It's not a good solution. Okay? So, you have to cooperate with other people. And that means you can't get to be your whimsical self 100% of the time. It means that most of you has to be sacrificed so that you can be approximately like everyone else. Now, that's a real sacrifice, right? It's a sacrifice of some of the unique qualities that everyone needs from you. Socialization costs, but the advantage of it is, well, we get to exist. Look, we can all sit together in this hall and no one has their hands around each other's throats, and we're talking about serious things. Okay, man. That's worth something. And what it's worth in part is you don't get to be whatever spectacularly colored creature you want to be all the time. You have to do what you can to be normal and predictable. And it's not like normal and predictable is the highest virtue because it's not. And being more than normal and being unique and creative and contributing in that way is extraordinarily important. But the fundamental point is that social being requires the sacrifice of a certain amount of individual idiosyncrasy. And that's a fundamentally conservative claim. It's like, you should be, you should do what everyone else does unless you have a really good reason to vary. It's a good rule. It's like, you do what people have done throughout time. You grow up, you find a partner, you establish a stable relationship, you get a job, you make yourself useful, you have some children, you do something productive and interesting with your spare time, and you try to act like a respectable human being. That's what you do. That's a conservative ethos. And if you have something spectacular about you that needs to be revealed to the world, then break some rules, man. Go right ahead. I'm dead serious about that. But most of the time, you don't. And even if you happen to be a special person, and you might be, 90% of you still isn't special. So most of the time, you're still going to be following the rules. And the rules aren't there to oppress. They're there to keep us away from each other's throats because human beings are very warlike and we're very competitive and we're very aggressive. And if we are fortunate enough to have woven together a social fabric that basically renders us peaceful and cooperative, we should try disrupting that at our great peril.
Next, equality. Equity. Equity. That's worse, right? Equity means equality of outcome. It means that every single organization has 50% women and 50% men. Doesn't matter whether the men and women differ in their intrinsic preferences, which, by the way, they do. The scientific literature on that is completely clear. It was established by the early 90s. It was established in the Scandinavian countries where they've done most to flatten out the socioeconomic differential between men and women. Didn't get rid of the differences between men and women. In fact, they became exaggerated. The biggest personality differences in the world between men and women are in Scandinavia, just as the biggest differences in interest between men and women are in Scandinavia. Because when you get rid of the sociocultural differences between men and women, the biological differences don't disappear. They maximize. So you hear the egalitarian clarion call everywhere. Everything should be equal. Everything should be equally distributed. We should strive for equity. It's like, wrong. Especially if you're a conservative. Wrong. What we want are just hierarchies of competence. Not everyone's a neurosurgeon. You know, if your father has a brain tumor, you probably want a hierarchy of competence for neurosurgeons so you can pick the one that's the best so that he might not die. That's what a hierarchy of competence is for. For the postmodernists, there's no hierarchy that isn't based on power. Well, because they think the world runs on power. We need the best plumbers. We need the best contractors. We need the best carpenters. We need the best lecturers. There has to be a hierarchy of quality, and not only so that we know who the best are and can reward them properly, but so that we can reward them so they keep being the best. It's like, you know, if you have a great educator, if you have a great leader, if you have a great thinker, you want to reward them so they keep thinking and they keep educating so they can tell you something. It's not a reward for their intrinsic being. It's a calculated move on your part to suck everything out of them that's valuable as fast as you can. That's what a hierarchy of competence is for. And the idea that hierarchies of competence don't exist is so cynical. It's such a pathologically cynical idea. And it's actually quite patently untrue.