Jordan Peterson: "How to Overcome Negative Thoughts"

But what happens is if I talk about responsibility, is everyone be is silent, just like they are now, silent and and not moving, right? Focusing, attentive. Say, "Pick up your responsibility. Pick up the heaviest thing you can and carry it." And the room goes quiet, and everybody's eyes open. And I think that always makes me break up. I don't, I don't know why.

I was speaking to an English journalist today who's going to write an article in Spectator magazine, and I was talking about this, and at the same point in the discussion, the same, I had the same emotional reaction. I don't really understand it. It's, I think it's something, there's something about it that's so crucial because, you know, we've been fed this unending diet of rights and freedoms, and there's something about that, especially, there's something about that that's so pathologically wrong, and people are starving for the antidote. And the antidote is truth and responsibility, right? And it, it isn't, it isn't because that's what you should do in some, you know, in some, "I know better" or "someone knows better for you" what you should do sense. It's that, it's that, it's that, it's that that's the secret to a meaningful life. And without a meaningful life, then all you have is suffering and and nihilism and despair and all of that, and self-contempt, and and that's not good.

So, the men, it's necessary for men to stand up and take responsibility. And they all know that, and and are starving for that message. And and the message is more that that's also a good thing to stand up and take responsibility because you're cursed so much now from from from when you're young with this notion that your active engagement with the world is part of what is destroying and undermining the planet and adding to the tyranny of the social systems. It's like, "How about not so much of that?" Hey, because it's, it's, it's too soul-deadening. It's antihuman, right, to the core. And my sense instead is that, you know, if you, if you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world, that you would be an overwhelming force for good, and that whatever errors might be made along the way would wash out in the works.

And that's the other thing that you see in the Abrahamic stories because Abraham is not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination. He's a real person, and he makes mistakes. But it doesn't matter. The overarching narrative is, you know, "Maintain your covenant with God," and despite your inadequacies, then not only will you prevail, but your descendants will prevail. It's like, "Great. That's really good news, you know." So, it's been really something to see that in the in the stories.

I, part of the reason that the biblical writers are pointing out that Abram's wife is barren is because it's a real catastrophe for Abraham and for Sarah as well, that she's barren. And so it's, it's showing the trouble that Abraham's in at the beginning of the story. And it's also, it's also see what happens as the story progresses is that Abraham, Abraham and Sarah are eventually granted a son, but it's way late in the story, and they're very, very old by the time it happens. And of course, you're not going to be a father of nations without having a child. And so the the the writers are attempting to to make the case that if you forthrightly pursue that which God directs you to pursue, let's say that all things are possible. That's that's the idea in the narrative.

And, you know, you you might say that's naive. And, you know, it, it's not. It, you think it when you're naive, right? And then you dispense with that idea. And then when you stop being the sort of person who dispenses with ideas, then you come to another place. And that's the place where you think you have no idea what might be possible for you if you, if you got things together and pursued what you should pursue. You don't know how much what's impossible to you right now would become possible under those conditions. It's an unknown phenomenon. And like I've watched people who've put themselves together across time, you know, incrementally and continually, and they become capable of things that are, not only jaw-droppingly amazing, but also sometimes metaphysically impossible to understand. And so, we don't know the limits of human endeavor. We truly don't. And it, it's, it's premature to put a cap on what it is that we are, what that what it is that we're capable of. And so you, you know, you're already something, and maybe you're not so bad in your current configuration, but you might wonder if you did nothing for the next 30 years except put yourself together, just exactly what would you be able to do? And you might think, "Well, that's worth finding out." But of course, that's that's the adoption of responsibility.

And one thing I've also learned over the years because I've been curious about this battle between meaning and nihilism, you know, and I mean, I mean, I could see for a long while the rationale in nihilism and and the power of the nihilistic argument, but it, it occurred to me across time that despite that, the power of the nihilistic argument is more powerful than naive optimism. But it's not more powerful than the optimism that is not naive. Because the optimism that is not naive says it's self-evident that the world is a place of suffering and that there are things to be done about that. And it's self-evident that people are flawed and that there's things to be done about that. And then the non-naive optimist says the suffering could be reduced and the insufficiency could be overcome if people oriented themselves properly and did what they were capable of doing. And I do not believe that that's deniable. I, I do, I do, I think that human potential is virtually limitless, and that there's nothing perhaps that's beyond our grasp if we're careful as individuals and as a society. And so I think that there's no reason for nihilism, and there's no reason for hopelessness, and and there's no reason to bow down before evil because we're capable of so much more. And I think that you can easily, you know, that first because you're not happy with who you are and you're ashamed and embarrassed about it, as you should be. And you know it because if you look out there, you see people who are capable of doing great things, and you know that we're not giving it our all, and still we're not doing so badly, you know. And so you, you might wonder if, if we devoted 90% of our effort to putting things right instead of 55% of our effort, or maybe even less than that, you might wonder just how well could things be put together. And I think that you can figure that out by starting with your room, by the way.

And the Lord said unto Abram, and this is this is the this is the opening of the story, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee." And this is one of those phrases where every clause is significant. Go somewhere you don't understand. That's the first thing. "Get thee out of thy country." You know, back in the 1920s, there was a whole slew of American writers who ended up as expatriates in Paris. Hemingway among them, and uh, and who wrote The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald. Yes. And a variety of others. It was very inexpensive in Paris at the time. And part of their transformation into great literary figures was the fact that they were out of their country. And now they could see what their country was because you can't see what your country is until you leave it. So, you have to go into the unknown. And that's that's God's first command. Go into the unknown because you already know what you know. And so and that's not enough unless you think you're enough. And if you're not enough and you don't think you're enough, then you have to go where you haven't been. And so that's the first commandment to Abraham. It's like, "Okay, that that's a good one. That makes perfect sense. Go to where you don't know." Yes.

"And from thy kindred." Well, what does that mean? It means grow up, right? That's what it means. It means get away from your family enough so that you can establish your independence. And that isn't because there's something wrong with your family. Although perhaps there is, you know, as there is perhaps wrong with you, but it means get away. You know, I talk to people very frequently whose families have provided them with too much protection, and they know it themselves, and that means they're deprived of necessity. You know, one of the things that you see in in in the United States, for example, is that um the children of first-generation immigrants often do better than the ch than the than their children. And the reason for that is that the children of first-generation im immigrants have necessity driving them. And you don't know how much you need necessity to drive you because maybe you're not very disciplined. And if an catastrophe doesn't immediately befall you, if you don't act forthrightly today, then maybe you never act forthrightly, right? Because the the the gap between your foolishness and the punishment is is lengthened by your unearned wealth. And so you never grow up and learn, and you have to get yourself away from your dependency in order to allow necessity to drive you forward.

Say you have a particular emotional response to something. Maybe it's a negative emotional response. And you, you see this very frequently with arguments with people. You're having an argument with someone you love, like a family member. That's a good example. So, let's say it's the same damn fight you've had with your mother 50 times. Okay? Well, that's interesting because what it means is that all of those 50 times that you fought with your mother are implicit in this fight. So, although it's taking place right here and now, the past has shaped it. And it's, and if you wanted to investigate the fight completely, you'd have to get to the bottom of that entire train of interactions you'd had with your mother. So, it's implicit in your current, in your current um, in your current experience. That's one way of thinking about it.

But the future's implicit in it, too, because what you're doing right now, it's as if the future's folded up in what you're experiencing right now. And it unfolds as you interact with it. And so, and the reason that it's conditional to some degree on you and your past is because it's your past and you that are determining the actions that you undertake right now that determine how the future is going to unfold around you. Now, not, not completely obviously, because you don't have complete control over how things unfold, but you seem to have some ability to determine how things unfold.

So, one of the ways I've sort of conceptualized the phenomenological viewpoint, this is this is one way of thinking about it, I believe, is that instead of thinking, and and it does mean you have to reconceptualize your idea of of objects, like an object seems like a undimensional thing in some sense. It's an object. But most of the things that people interact with aren't like that at all. So like here's an example. Let's say you have, yeah. Let's say you get a, you you're writing the MCAT. You want to go to medical school. You've written the MCAT. You get the envelope in the mail. It tells you what your score is. You hold the envelope. What are you holding? Well, if you think about it from an objective perspective, it's an envelope. Who cares? It's just a little piece of paper, right? It's a little, it's a rectangle of paper. But that isn't what you're holding at all. That's not what that thing is. That's how you see it. But it's not what it is at all. It's not even, and you know that. Your body knows that because you're shaking. It's like, well, what are you scared of? The envelope. Well, the the fact that you see it as an envelope is only an indication of just how narrow your perceptions actually are because it's a portal, right? It's a portal through which you're going to walk into one of two worlds. One in which you're in medical school, and the other in which you're not. And it also actually contains the past, which is really strange because you think, well, you already know what the past is. It's no, you don't. Whatever that score is in there determines what your past was. And you, you know that, too. You go watch a movie, and a bunch of things happen in the movie, and then something twisted happens at the end, and all of a sudden everything that you thought about the movie was wrong, and a whole new past for the movie pops into being. Well, are you a premed student? A a valid premed student? Well, the score will determine whether or not you were. Very strange. Very strange because you think of the past as fixed, you know, and you think of the things that you're interacting with as the things that you see, and they're not. And your body is smarter than that. Way smarter than that because it responds to, you could say, this is sort of a Rogerian perspective, your body is more likely to respond to what the thing actually is than how it is that you see it.

So okay, so the past is implicit in the current being, and the future is implicit in the current being, and so the past and the future sort of folded up inside it, and you can unfold them and take a look at them. Now here's the next thing. So in in from a classic scientific perspective, there's the world of independently existing objects, and there's the world of subjects, and the subject is really in a secondary relationship to the object because the objective world is what's real. One of the things that the phenomenologists were were concerned about that is that well, you, you run into this problem again of exactly how it is that you define the object because just as [snorts] the envelope with the scores in it can't be reduced to the paper. So the object that you're interacting with only reveals what it is as a consequence of the way that you interact with it. So for example, if you take a complex object like another person, it's like, well, what is it that you are? Well, a huge part of that is going to depend on exactly how I interact with you. Because you could be a raging beast if I interacted with you one way, and you could be a perfectly, you know, cooperative entity uh that was very pleasant if I interacted with you the other way, and another way. And so partly what's happening, you could think of what you're interacting with as something that's really multifaceted, truly multifaceted. And you're, you say, "Well, you're trying to determine what it is." But the problem is is that what it is manifests itself only in accordance with how you behave towards it. And it's actually the case with even even objects that you reduce right down to their constituent elements. So you might say like, let's talk about subatomic particles, hypothetically the most objective thing there is. Well, it turns out that whether they're a wave or a particle depends on the way you set up the experiment. Now, I don't want to make quantum analogies, but what I'm saying is that the object is a very, very complicated thing. And so even defining what it is means that you have to adopt a frame of reference with regards to it, and you undertake only some procedures and not others. So when you're defining an object, even scientifically, you actually don't define the object. What you say is, "Here's a multi-dimensional entity. If you approach it in this manner, that's the procedure, right? The methods. If you approach it in this manner, it will manifest that set of traits." But the problem is is that there's all sorts of other traits that it could manifest just as well if you treated it a different way. And so the object itself is not something that it's, it's not something easily reducible to a single set of properties.

I was talking to one of my students yesterday. He had a pretty smart thing to say about images. We were we were talking about uh deep images, you know, the sorts that you might see in a really high-quality museum. So maybe they're, I don't know, 15th century or 16th century Renaissance masterpieces. They're inexhaustible to some degree, which is why they're in museums and people go look at them, you know, decade after decade. And it's partly because every time you look at them, you're different. You go in one week, you look at it, you see something. You go in the next week, you look at it, you see something else. Well, it's partly because you're bringing something entirely different to the situation, and the image is complicated enough to allow it to reflect something new to you depending on the stance you take in relationship to it. And lots of things are like that. Lots of things are like that. A book you read when you were 16 is going to be an entirely different book when you read it when you're 35. Say, "Well, the book's the same." It's like, it depends on how you define the book because it isn't even obvious where the book is exactly. Well, it's, it's on my shelf in the library. It's like, "No, that's a chunk of paper that's on your shelf in the library." Where exactly the book is, that's a much more difficult question to to consider. So, it depends on how you define the book.

So, without a subject, nothing at all would exist to confront objects and to imagine them as such. True. This implies that every object, everything objective in merely merely in being merely objectifies by the subject is the most subjective thing possible. Well, you also know this again when you're in an argument with someone. It's you. No, it's you. No, it's you. It's like, "You don't know. Are you being biased? Are, are you looking at the situation incorrectly?" The person you're arguing with is going to convince you that it, trying to convince you that it's your problem. You think, "No, you made me angry." It's like, "Hm, an interesting statement, you know, as if you could do that." But it does seem that way. "You were being provocative." "Well, you're just too sensitive." It's like, "Hm, how are we going to settle that?" Well, it's a continual argument. And and that that again has to do with the crazy entangled dynamic between subjective perception and objective perception.

I've showed you this before, and I actually think this is a pretty good schematic representation of what's meant by dignite. And this is a complicated little diagram, although it, the diagram itself is quite simple, but it, it makes it, it's predicated on the following assumptions: is that you need to narrow down your world, and what you're doing is narrowing it down from, let's say, an infinite set of possibilities to a finite set of manageable possibilities. And you do that a bunch of ways. Partly, merely, you can't, your senses aren't acute enough to detect everything. So pure stupidity, in some sense, stops you from being absolutely overwhelmed. You don't have eyes in the back of your head, for example. So you don't have to worry about all those things you're not looking at behind you. But then it's far more than that. You just can't handle that full complexity. So there's a continual narrowing process, and then you exist inside that narrowed reality. Like if I look at you like that, there's not a hell of a lot of difference between that and looking at you like that. Like I can't really see these people. I can tell they're people. That's all. I can see your face. I've got just about all of it right there. So that's a very narrow, and you know, you're moving your eyes around and inhabiting this constant narrow space. Well, what, what's that space? What does that space you inhabit consist of? Well, that's dazz inhabit. And so we could say it's something like this: You have implicit in that perception a sense of where you are and what you're doing right now. It's in the perception. And then in the perception as well is what you're aiming at, because you're not just sitting here passively, or you'd be asleep or you'd be unconscious. You're sitting here doing nothing, you know, physically, but you have an aim in mind. And the aim is what you're pointing your eyes at. The aim is what's structuring your perceptions. The aim is what's revealing that part of the world that is being revealed to you to you. That's the revelation of the world. It also structures your emotions. It also primes your behaviors. So, it's not a drive. It's not a goal. It's not a, it's not a motivation. It's, it's, it's more than that. It's all of that at once. That's sort of what your personality is. But you see, the phenomenologists don't really think about personality. They think about the manifestation of your reality. It's not exactly your personality. It's that you're the center of a reality, and you, you constitute that reality. But all your elements of experience constitute that reality. And so it's something like its simplest element is something like where you are, where you're going, and the embodied actions you undertake to relate those two things, which would include your eye movements, because of course perception is an active phenomenon. You are shaking your eyes back and forth unbelievably rapidly. Otherwise, if you can, if you can make your eyes stand still, which you can do with great concentration, everything will black out because you have to move your eyes back and forth so that the light hits different cells, because the cells get um exhausted and then they stop reporting. So, you're just whipping your eyes back and forth in in a micro micro way constantly, and as well as moving them around voluntarily and involuntarily. So even perception is, perception is a lot more like feeling things out with your fingers, even when you're using your ears or your eyes. It's very active. There's no passive perception. It's a motor act to perceive. And so that motor act is determined by your hierarchy of values. That's one way of looking at it.

So another way of thinking about it, that's also how the past and the future are implicit in it. Your very active perception is determined by your entire value structure. So it's implicit inside of it. It's folded up inside of it. Now, I think what you do as a clinician to overcome whatever tendency you might have to impose your value structure on someone is you do an awful lot of listening. And so, my basic practice with people is to say to them, "Well, obviously you're here because you would like things to be better, but that's okay. We can use your definition of what constitutes better. We can use your definition of what constitutes worse, but or we can establish that through dialogue and negotiation. What are you aiming at? How would you like things to be better a year from now? Say, if if you could have what you wanted, if your life was put together, what would that look like?" And you can have a very straightforward discussion with people about that if you're not trying to cram the way that they're orienting the world into your particular perspective. Now, that's one of the dangers of being the adherent of a given psychological school.

Now, having said that, it's also, there was research done many years ago showing that if you were an eclectic psychotherapist, which means that you sort of pick and chose from different psychotherrapeutic schools, you tended to not be as effective as you were if you were the dedicated adherent of a given school. And I think the reason for that is that there's so many schools of psychological thought that if you say that you pick pick and choose from all of them, what that really means is that you don't know anything about any of them. And then there's also the additional uh factor, maybe you might call it uh that if someone comes to you and they're very chaotic and confused, helping them impose any structure onto their life is likely to be an improvement over no structure at all. And you could think about that in a pedian sense, is that, you know, you're going to be happier playing a game rather than no game, and there's many games that you could play that are better than no game. And so if you go to a therapist that has a particular viewpoint, and they help you structure your understanding of the world within the confines of a given clinical model, and you came in there very chaotic and uncertain, then maybe that's going to be a lot better for you than just floundering. And I, and I think there's some real truth in that. And I think that that's part and parcel of the same uh of another, what you might call it, reasonable observation about maturation is that it's very necessary for people at some point in their life to dedicate themselves to a single game of some sort, which is kind of what you're doing in university. You know, you have to become one thing at some point in your life. And the sacrifice, of course, is that you give up all the other things that you could become. But the, you don't really have a choice because if you don't decide voluntarily to become one thing, you know, to become a a disciplined adherent of some specific uh uh uh practice or profession or viewpoint, then you risk just aging chaotically. And you don't get away with not aging. So you might as well age into something that's that's actually something rather than just remaining or then just becoming an old child, which is really not a not a good thing. It's not a good thing to see, especially by the time people hit about 40. It's not, it's not, it's not pretty for them or anyone else. And even at 30, it's getting pretty old at that point. 40, it's like it's almost irreparable at 40. And the reason for that is you run, you start running out of opportunities. When you're young and stupid, people don't care because they think, well, you've, you know, whatever. You've got decades of of of possibility still ready to unfold in you. But if you're in the same unspecified position at 40, people are much less forgiving, especially because if they're going to hire someone who doesn't know what's going on or or employ them or or sorry, or engage them in some sort of productive activity, they might as well take a chance on someone young and full of potential rather than someone who's really lived more than half of their life already because of course you have by the time you're 40, more than.

Okay, so, so anyway, so, so that's with regards to putting the first half of the course to bed, so to speak. The second half is more more scientific, and there's a bit of a gap, a, and and it's a gap I'm trying to resolve conceptually because now we move into more biological models and into models that are psychometric. And psychometrics is the psychological study, or the study of psychological measurement. And now, if you're a scientist, you're, there's a couple of things that you're obliged to do if you're a scientist. Uh, one is to utilize the scientific method. That's usually the experimental method, where you take two groups randomly selected, apply a manipulation to one of them and not, and an equivalent manipulation of a different sort to another. Hypothesize about what the outcome is likely to be, and then test it. Uh, that's that's the the technical experimental model. Anyways, you're also obliged as a scientist to come up with a measurement of your of your uh, to come up with a measurement, let's just put it that way, that's reliable and valid. Okay? And what a reliable measure is, is one that measures the same way across multiple measurements. So, for example, you wouldn't want to take a ruler that's made out of flexible rubber to measure things with, because it wouldn't give you the same measurement if you put it in different situations. That's reliability, and it's a term you need to know. It means that the the measurement tool produces stable results across different instances of the measurement. Without that, you don't have a measurement.

The other critical um factor with regards to a measurement is that it has to be valid, which means that it actually has to measure what it purports to measure, and it has to be usable for an array of different purposes as a consequence. And so you might think, well, the purpose of scientific endeavor is to predict and to control. You could say understand, predict, and control. But understanding, prediction, and control are all manifestations of the same underlying thoroughly designed comprehension.

Now, here's what's happened with the measurement of personality. It's a funny story in some sense, a peculiar story, because in many ways, what we've come to understand about personality from a scientific perspective developed in a very, a theoretical manner. It's not very common in scientific endeavor that that occurs. Is that what we know about personality emerged from, I would say, statistically rigorous observation without it being the consequence of any real model. So often what happens in scientific endeavor is that someone generates a model first, a theoretical understanding, and then they generate measurement tools based on that theoretical understanding, and then they test the measurement tools to see if, well, if the measurement tools perform properly, and if they fail, at least to invalidate the underlying theory. That isn't what happened with psychometrics. What, except in a loose way. So here's the loose theory, and you got to get this exactly right to understand this properly. You got to get it exactly right. And it's really important because in so far as you guys are interested in psychology, especially in the experimental end of psychology, measurement is everything. And so much of what psychologists publish and write about is incorrect. And the reason it's incorrect is because they do not have their measurements properly instantiated. It's a massive problem, especially in social psychology. In fact, it's probably a fatal problem in that most of the things that social psychologists measure don't exist. And social psychology has been rife with scandals for the last four or five years, and and there's good reason for it. But a big part of the problem is is that the measurement that people are not stringent and careful enough about their measurements. So we're going to walk through this very, very carefully. So I'm going to set forward a set of propositions, and you, you have to think about them because each of them are they're axiomatic. So you sort of have to accept them before you go on to the next step, and there's certainly room to question them. But here's the bare bones of the psychometric model of personality. So we'll call it roughly the Big Five model. And the reason it's called the Big Five model is because the psychometric investigations have indicated that you can specify human personality along five basic dimensions. You might ask, well, what exactly is personality? And well, that's partly what we've been trying to wrestle with the entire course so far. And I would say >> [snorts] >> um, or what exactly is a trait? Think of a trait as an element of personality. And I think the best way to think about a trait is as a subpersonality. So you're, you're made up of subpersonalities that are integrated into something vaguely resembling a unity. But the unity is is diverse. There are there are there are there are describable stable elements that characterize you that are elements of your being. So for example, here's here's some common ones. I might say, well, are you social or or would you rather be alone? So here's here's a good question for you to define decide whether you're extroverted or introverted. It's pretty straightforward because that's that's the first major dimension. Basically, if you take any set of questions about any any set of questions that could be applied descriptively to a human being, and you subject them to a statistical process called factor analysis, you can determine how they group together. So what I would be interested in, let's say I asked you a 100 questions. Let's say I asked a 100 questions of you and a hundred other people. What I would find was that reliably, if some person answered question A, say on a scale of 1 to seven, six or seven, there would be other questions in the set of questions that they also tended to answer on the upper end of the scale, or reliably, if they answered one question at the top of the scale, they'd answer another question at the bottom. That's a pattern of covariation. So you're looking for how the questions covary across large numbers of people. So let's say here's a stupid example, but it's it's really, it's really uh straightforward, easy to understand. I might say um, "How often do you smile?" 1 to 7. "How often are you happy?" 1 to 7. Well, what you'd find obviously is that people who tended to answer that they smiled a lot would also tend to answer that they were happy a lot. And so smiling and happy are not exactly the same thing, which is why we'd have two different phrases to describe them, but they're close enough so that they seem to be reflective of some underlying structure. And so that's what a factor analysis does. It allows you to take a a large set of questions, to administer it to a large number of people, and then to statistically analyze it looking how the questions relate to one another across the entire group so that you can infer what the underlying structure is. And here, here's the question. In some sense, if I ask you a hundred questions, how many questions am I really asking you? Because you might say, "Well, are you, do you smile a lot? Are you happy? Uh, do you wake up eager to start the day?" And you say, "Well, is that one question asked three ways, or is it three separate questions?" And the answer is, well, if the answers reliably covary, then it's reflection of underlying single dimension. Now, obviously those questions are slightly different now, but they'll relate to one another stably, and so you can infer out the central stable factors.

Now, it might be the case that, so here's here's an example, because you might ask, how many stable underlying dimensions are there in any set of questions? If I ask you questions that relate to your capacity to manipulate abstractions, I'll find that there's one factor. So imagine you had an infinite library of problem-solving questions. Doesn't matter what they are. Capital of Georgia. Um, here's a sequence: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. What's the next number? Here's five patterns. Here's and and they they transform uh predictably across the pattern array. Here's five alternatives that the next pattern might be. Pick that one. Um, here, here's 10 words. Tell me what they mean. Anything like that. Here's a mathematical operation. Compute it. Anything like that. Imagine you had a very large library of questions like that. Okay? An infinite library, and you took random sets of a hundred questions from that library, and you gave that those sets to a thousand people. What you'd find was that people who, and and the score, say you gave them 100 questions, and then you summed across all the items to see how well they did. What you'd find was that people who did very well on one set of items would do very well on another set of items, and very well on another set of items. And that would be the same for people who did badly. If they did badly on any one of the sets of randomly chosen items of abstraction, they do badly on the rest. That's basically IQ. That's all there is to it. So it, what IQ does is correct that for age. But other than that, that's all there is to it. And the thing that's interesting about those random sets of abstract problem-solving questions is there's one dimension. That's it. Intelligence has one dimension. And it's, it's one of the most terrifying statistics that are known to social scientists. And IQ is a an extraordinarily powerful predictor of long-term success, especially in complex jobs. And the reason for that, it's quite straightforward. Most complex jobs throw random sets of complex problems at you. That's what that's that's their definition. So, for example, if you're working as a lawyer on complex on complex court cases, you have to be able to read very quickly. You have to be able to abstract. You have to be able to problem-solve. You have to be able to formulate arguments. And you have to do that repeatedly in different ways across very large spans of time. And so the the fact that your ability to solve any set of random problems is a really good predictor of your ability to solve any set of random legal problems. It's more or less self-evident that that would be the case. But the, but the thing is, the thing that makes IQ so damn powerful. And and it's one of the personality traits, roughly speaking. The thing that makes IQ so powerful is you can basically get a decent measure of it in 20 minutes.

We could do a little quick survey here. How many of you think in words? Put up your hands. Do you think in words? Okay, so it looks like. What about pictures? How many of you think in pictures? Okay, so that's interesting. How many of you think, that's about half and half, by the way. Probably a fewer on the word side. How many of you think in pictures and words? Okay. And and so, all right, so it was roughly a third in each category. But that's also something that I really haven't encountered any research on from the neuroscychological perspective. It's like, well, do you think in pictures or do you think in words? And and is is that actually a reliable distinction? I think I think in words most of the time, but I can think in pictures. Like, if I'm trying to build something, I can think in pictures very almost instantaneously, but it isn't my natural mode of thinking. I'm hyperverbal, and so my natural mode of thinking is to think everything through in words. But I know my wife isn't like that. She thinks in images and then has to translate them into words. And so anyways, Jung was very literate, and he could really think in words, but he could really think in images also. Talking to my wife quite extensively, like her, the intensity of her visualization vastly exceeds mine. So, for example, if I close my eyes and I try to imagine the crowd in front of me, it's pretty low resolution and vague and and not brilliantly colored and and vivid, you know, it's, it's like I'm seeing through a glass darkly, let's say. I can't bring images to mind with that with spectacular clarity, but my wife is very good at that. And Jung seemed to be absolutely a genius at that kind of thinking, and he had a lot of visionaries in his family history as well. So I don't know to what degree there's a hereditary component of that, and I don't know to what degree that's actually like a neurological specialization. I presume it would be associated with the trade openness distinguishes itself, differentiates itself into interest in ideas and interest in aesthetics. And my suspicion are is that the people who are more interested in aesthetics are the visionary types, the ones that think in images. Anyways, Jung could really think in images, and he could imagine beings. And I had a client once who was a lucid dreamer. And how many of you have had a lucid dream? So, you know, you're dreaming while while you're Okay, many. That that phenomena wasn't really even even identified as a phenomena until the end of the 19th century. There was a book written about it that Freud tried to get his hands on but couldn't because it was a very rare book. And then there was a researcher about 30 years ago who started to study lucid dreams. But anyways, I had a client who was a lucid dreamer, and one of the things she could do was ask her dream characters what information they were trying to convey, and they would tell her. So that was very interesting. And one of the consequences of that was, and I don't have this story completely right in my memory, but it's close enough. She was afraid of a very large number of things. And in her dream, I think it was a gypsy standing by a wagon, told her that if she was going to be successful in university, that she would have to visit a slaughterhouse. And that was something that was way beyond her capacity to tolerate. She was a vegetarian. She couldn't stand the sight of raw meat even. And so, and she was very oppressed and depressed and anxious because of the slaughterhouse nature of existence. And so her dream focused on that. And one of the consequences of that, because the slaughterhouse was out of the question as a clinical intervention, um, I took her to an inbombing, right? Cuz cuz I asked her, I asked her what, what might be equivalent to that. And so she suggested that. And you know, exposure therapy is a hallmark of clinical psychology, right? One of the things you do with people as a clinician is you find out what they're afraid of, and you gradually and voluntarily expose them to that, and that cures them. And that's associated with the hero myth, right? It's exactly the same thing. It's like there's a dragon, and it's stopping you because there's lots of dragons. Most of them aren't stopping you. You can ignore them. You don't have to just, you know, slash away at randomly. You're not supposed to be fighting dragons that aren't in your way. But if they are in your way, you can't ignore them. And then you decompose them into subdragons. And you have people, you know, take them on. And as they take them on, they dispense with the dragon and they gain the power of the dragon. It's like a video game. Actually, a video game is like that. That's why people like the video games. Well, that's right. Right. There's a reason that you absorb power when you overcome things when you play a video game. It's not like that's intrinsic to the video game structure. That's an archetypal idea. Anyways, we went and saw an embombing, which was a very interesting experience, and and quite quite useful for her because she knew what she could tolerate after that, and it was a hell of a lot more than she thought she could tolerate. And so that's very useful to know.

Back to Jung. He's a visionary thinker. Now, my client, I said she could lucid dream, and she could ask her dream characters what they wanted and what they were trying to communicate to her. So, that was pretty interesting. That happened spontaneously. Had nothing to do with me. I mean, I'm interested in dreams, and many of my clients are great dreamers, especially the creative ones, because I think it's a hallmark of creativity to have vivid dreams and to be able to remember them. But that was a faculty that was natural to her. Jung had this other client at one time at one point, and she had a variety of fears, and she had this dream that she told me, and she was walking down a beach, and on the side of the beach, up a dune, a small dune, there was this old man with a snake, a big python, and there's a crowd around him. And she was walking by the snake handler and the snake and the crowd, and she didn't want to have anything to do with them. He was sort of showing people this snake. And she told me that dream, and I thought, well, you know, you probably need to go see that snake. And so I relaxed her, quasi hypnotic technique. And it's very straightforward. Hypnosis is generally nothing but pronounced relaxation, although you have to be susceptible to hypnosis to actually fall into a hypnotic trance as a consequence of being relaxed. I just relaxed her. I had her breathe deeply and pay attention to different parts of her body and just relax her muscles one by one, essentially, so that she could concentrate. And then I told her we'd play with the dream a little bit. It's a yian technique. I said, "Well, so call the dream image to mind," which she could do quite well. Said, "Okay, so let's let's explore it. It's like pretend, it's like pretend play, you know, if you're a kid and you're pretend playing, you don't exactly direct the game, right? You you play the game." So, it's partly your direction, obviously, because you're the player. But the thing also happens spontaneously of its own accord. And you could think about that as a dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, in some sense. It's a developmental dialogue. It's not a fun game if you just direct it. It's only a fun game if you're inviting, and something is welling up as a consequence. It's the same thing that happens when you're you're engaged in some kind of artistic or literary production. If it's all top down, you know, if you're forcing it, then it's propaganda. It's empty. What you want to sort of is put yourself in a receptive state of mind, in an imaginative state of mind. And it's sort of half you and half nature itself manifesting itself in your creative imagination. And that was the sort of state that we were striving for. And she, I asked her when she was in relaxed, I

said, "Well, what do you think about the snake handler?"

And she said, "Well, he's probably a charlatan and he's just there trying to impress the crowd and to show off." And she was afraid to go up there because she thought people would push her towards the snake and she'd have to touch it. And so, there was a fear of the crowd issue going on there, too.

And I said, "Well, just look, go up there, but do it under these conditions." Is that, you know, if if people get pushy, what are you going to tell them? And so, we we figured out something. He said, "Look, you just tell them that, you know, you want to look at the snake at your own pace and that you don't need any encouragement or help and it would be good if you were just left alone." So that enabled her to defend herself.

So she was afraid that the crowd would push her to do something that she didn't want to do. That was part of the theme of the dream. So anyway, she eventually climbed the dune in her imagination and went into the crowd. And the crowd turned out to be quite welcoming and not hostile and not pushy, which isn't what you'd expect, right? Because the you'd think the crowd would have ex reacted in accordance with her fears since it was her fantasy. But that that's the thing about fantasies. They have this autonomous quality.

But that the crowd was welcoming and not hostile. And it turned out that the snake handler wasn't a charlatan. He was just an old guy who had this snake and he was out there just showing it to people because he thought it was a cool thing and and and that maybe it was good for people to come and look at a snake. And so she got close enough to the snake to touch it.

And so, so I'm telling you that because I want you to understand a bit more about what Jung was trying to do. And so he wrote these books, notebooks that haven't been published yet called the black books. And the black books are the documentation of his experiments with his imagination. And what he would do is daydream like like a child daydreams. He he regained that faculty, although I think with Jung it was a faculty that had never really disappeared. And he had figures of imagination that came to him that he could speak with. And he spoke with these figures of imagination and documented that over a very long period of time. And that was originally that was eventually distilled into a book called the red book which was published about three or four years ago. And it was a book that Jung regarded as the central source from which all his inspiration emerged.

That was sort of the way it looks to me is that we embody a lot of information in our action, right? And our action has developed as a consequence of imitating other people. And not only the people the people around us, but of course the people around us imitated the people who came before them. And those people imitated the people who came before them and so on. So far back that it's as far back as you can go. And so you embody these patterns of behavior that are extremely informative that you don't understand that are a consequence of collective imitation across the centuries. And so then those patterns can become manifest as figures of the imagination. And those figures of imagination are the distillations of patterns of behavior. And so as the distillations of patterns of behavior, they have content. And it's not you that content. It's you could even think about it as content that's evolved. Although it's culturally transmitted, it's content that's evolved. And so these figures of the imagination can reveal the structure of reality to you. And that's what happened with Jung. And that's what he described in the red book. And that was what permeated his psychology.

A psychology that was based on the presupposition that the fundamental archetypal structures of religious belief were not pathological, not deceitful, not protective in some delusional sense against the fear of death, but quite the contrary. The very stories that enabled us to move forward as confident human beings in the face of chaos itself. And it's conceivable, I think perhaps probable, that nothing more important conceptually happened in the 20th century than that because it was the first time post enlightenment that a reproshont between the intellect and the underlying religious archetypal substructure occurred. You have in the capacious intellect of Jung and the same thing happened to some degree with PG the religious domain and the factual domain were brought back together and the fact of Jung's enduring and increasing popularity and influence I would say is a direct consequence of out.