Jordan Peterson: "Master Your Mind"

Now, Dossi criticized utopianism, and it's, it's brilliant, his, his formulation. So, I'm going to read it to you.

In short, one may say anything about the history of the world. Anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational. The very word sticks in one's throat. And indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening. There are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbors, simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet, we all know that these very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one.

Now, I ask you, what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing. Drown him in a sea of happiness so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface. Give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of his species. And even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It's just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself, as though that were so necessary, [snorts] that men still are men and not the keys of a piano which the laws of nature threaten to control completely, so completely that one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.

So clearly, that's Dosski's criticism of materialistic determinism, right? Which he felt as a spiritual threat, fundamentally. Its proposition being that animals and human beings were deterministic machines. It's a Newtonian worldview, and that because of that, everything could be calculated and planned ahead of time, because it could be predicted and measured. And that is not all. Even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means, he will contrive destruction and chaos, sufferings of all sort, only to gain his point. He'll launch a curse upon the world. And as only man can curse, it's his privilege and the primary distinction between him and other animals. Maybe by his curse alone he will attain his object and convince himself that he's a man and not a piano key. If you say that all this too can be calculated and tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point. I believe in it. I answer for it. For the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he's a man and not a piano key. It may be at the cost of his skin. It might be by cannibalism. And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off and that desire still depends on something we don't know? You will scream at me. That is, if you condescend to do so, that no one's touching my free will. That all they're concerned with is that my will should, of should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two makes four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that. [snorts]

So, what's his point? Well, it's sort of a Garden of Eden point. You know, what are people like? Imagine you could reconstruct a paradise on Earth. You know, hypothetically, that's what everyone wants. We could go live in the paradise, and that would be the end of the problem. We'd all live happily ever after. But in the [snorts] original paradise story, that's what people were provided with. And the first thing they did when they were put there was to do the one thing that they were told not to do, that would bring it all crashing down. And that was immediately what they did. And so Dosski's story is actually a retelling of that idea. The idea was that that people aren't like the utopians think. We don't want it easy. We don't want it comfortable. We don't want it good. And the reason for that is we'd be bored stiff. And so that if anybody ever did put us in the kind of nursery that would require us never to exert any effort to do anything at all whatsoever ever again, even if it meant going insane, we'd destroy it. And then he takes that further. He says, "And that's a good thing."

Kierkegaard, writing earlier, about 40 years earlier, said something quite similar. "It is now about four years ago that I got the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author. I remember it quite clearly. It was on a Sunday. Yes, that's it. A Sunday afternoon. I was seated, as usual, outdoors at the cafe in the Fredericksburg Garden. I had been a student for half a score of years. Although never lazy, all my activity nevertheless was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have a great partiality, and for which perhaps I even have a little genius. I read much, spent the remainder of the day idling and thinking, or thinking and idling, but that was all it came to. So [snorts] there I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought. Among other thoughts, I remember these: 'You were going on,' I said to myself, 'to become an old man without being anything and really without undertaking to do anything.' On [snorts] the other hand, wherever you look about you in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much-heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about. The many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier. Some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing. And finally, the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing here?' My soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was smoked out and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again. And then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: 'You must do something. But inasmuch as with your limited capacities, it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.' This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the whole community. For when all combined in every way to make everything easier, there remains only one possible danger, namely that the ease becomes so great that it becomes altogether too great. Then there's only one want left, though it is not yet a felt want, when people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere."

You know, it's not obvious either for people who aren't, what would you say, who who aren't accustomed to those sorts of extremes of experiences. It's not obvious at all how much of this sort of thing you have to become conscious of, you know, because death is obviously one of the things that terrifies people deeply. And it's not obvious how you should accustom yourself to that. So, I, I can tell you a story that's quite, quite interesting. I had a client at one point who was a vegetarian. Um, and that actually turns out to be relevant. Part of the reason that she was a vegetarian was because she couldn't even go into a like a, um, what, a grocery store where there was a butcher's department. Like, she couldn't even look at the array of meat. It just horrified her. And it was associated with something that was like a Sleeping Beauty complex for her, because when she was a child, her parents treated her like she was a fairy princess. And they really protected her from, from everything. You know, remember how many of you have seen Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty? Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Hey, that so many of you would have, you remember there's a, when the girl is born, when Sleeping Beauty is born, they don't invite someone to the, to the christening. Who do they not invite?

>> The witch, right?

I think it's Maleficent in, in Sleeping Beauty. I think that's her name. She's the one that turns into the dragon of chaos at the end of the story. Well, there's a, there's a message in there. Like, do not shield your young people from natural catastrophe because it makes them unconscious, and it'll come back and revisit them when they, especially, you know, when they grow up, when they hit puberty, it'll come back with force. And if they're uncon, like, if they're not prepared, the horror of that will make them unconscious. And that's what happened to this girl. Like, she was sleeping 20, 22 hours a day when she came to see me. It's like she was a fairy princess until she hit puberty, and then she was like, an evil, as far as her parents were concerned. It was like, bang, things, you know, things switched completely. Of course, that was horrifying to her, but it, it was also tangled up for her with kind of the horror of life in general. And that was one of the things that made her so sensitive to, say, to these displays of these displays of meat, which are of course quite horrifying. You know, it's kind of remarkable that you can wander through them, you know, with, you know, maybe a little bit of of discomfort, but, you know, it's slaughterhouse stuff, and, you know, to be normal is to be able to tolerate that, and that's quite strange. And she couldn't tolerate it at all.

So, you know, I took her to butcher shops now and then, because you do that with people. If, if they have an identifiable fear, it's actually quite easy to start the psychotherapeutic process because you start to expose them voluntarily to the things that they want to avoid. So, you know, I took her into a butcher shop, and, geez, you know, just about flipped her over. You know, she sat in the car afterwards and cried for 20 minutes and told me about how terrible life was, and that she couldn't live in the face of all this, you know, dismemberment and constant death. And she was also very, very inclined towards identification, you know, with little cute animals, which is generally a fairly solid feminine trait, right? Because females are very attracted to things that are cute, and cute things are basically infantile and and helpless, right? That's sort of what activates the cute detection. You know, it's part of, well, it's part of maternal behavior, and it's really an important part, you know, because if you didn't find your babies cute, you'd really be in trouble, 'cause they're a lot of, well, they're a lot of trouble, you know, and they, and they push you because they require so much care. So, they bloody well better be cute and smiley and, you know, make friends with you. So, so, but, but she, like, was hyper-identified with, like, little vulnerable animals, you know, and, and that's not good because she wasn't just a little vulnerable animal, you know. She was also partly a predator, and human beings are partly predators. And, you know, maybe you think that's terrible, but that's how it is. And the predatory part of yourself better be incorporated and used, because otherwise, first of all, you'll be weak without it, and second of all, if you don't incorporate it, believe me, that doesn't make it go away, it'll just go out and have fun on its own in ways that are unconscious that you don't control.

So, she was a really good dreamer, this girl. And, and she could, she actually had lucid dreams, quite remarkable. And sometimes she could even ask her dream characters what they symbolized, right in the dream. You know, it was the only time I've ever seen that, although I've had some lucid dreamers in my practice. And one day she had this dream because she was really having a hard time finishing university. It was like her sixth year or seventh year or something like that. And that was part because she slept all the time, and then she wouldn't get anything done. Like, she was trying to sleep to avoid consciousness, right? To avoid being alive, because consciousness was too painful for her. And so she had a dream one day that she meant, actually, I'm mixing two dreams here together, but it doesn't matter because it, it just sort of, it just sort of collapses the narrative. She, she dreamt that she met a gypsy that was traveling through the forest, and the gypsy told her that unless she was able, unless she would be willing to work in a slaughterhouse, she'd never finish her degree. So she came, and she came and told me that dream. And I thought, well, the slaughterhouse, that seems a little bit difficult to arrange, you know, and she wasn't sure she could handle that anyway. And I said, well, is there anything that you can think of, if you imagine something, is there anything that you can think of that you know might serve as a substitute? And she came back to me about a week later and she says, she said, "I want to see an embalming." And I thought, wow, that's, that's rough. That's no doubt, no doubt about that, that's rough.

So, I phoned around to a bunch of different funeral homes and I told them that I had a client who was like, so terrified of death that she couldn't even live, and that, you know, that I wanted to bring her to the funeral home and walk through it, and if it was possible to see an embalming preparation. And, um, they were very understanding. It was quite interesting because, of course, funeral parlor people are kind of strange people, right? Because they're dealing with death all the time. It's like their daily life, you know, and they get so, it's, well, they're not dying of horror every night, you know, they're able to deal with it, which is a good thing, 'cause like, we'd be need bodies otherwise, right? Someone, someone has to do this sort of work. So, and apparently you can specialize in it. And so what that also means, unless you think, you know, funeral parlor directors are like completely non-human in some fundamental way, clearly indicates that it's possible for a normal person to become so conversant with death that it's daily business. And, you know, emergency department people are in that sort of situation, and people who drive ambulances. Like, human beings are bloody tough. You know, we can take something like facing death and turn it into [clears throat] an everyday occurrence. It's like, it's kind of horrifying in a sense to think that you could be that harsh, in a way, you know, but by the same token, you know, you don't want to run away screaming the first time there's an emergency in your life. You know, what the hell good are you if, you know, someone close to you gets really sick and all you can do is whine and snivel about it because it's so hard on you? It's like, it's not your turn for that. You should be strong so that you can help then. And that means that, you know, you have to be able to face these sorts of things.

So, anyways, we went to the funeral parlor, which is quite a weird thing for me too, because I actually have rather a squeamish stomach. I'm kind of disgusted, and so it's hard for me, especially odors, just they're just not good for me at all. But, um, you know, so I could have never been a surgeon or anything like that. But we went to the funeral parlor, and I found it extremely interesting because, first of all, you actually need to know how these things operate because at some point you're going to be called upon to deal with them, and maybe it'd be nice if you had a little knowledge beforehand so that, you know, you didn't only have the grief that was knocking you over, but all the novelty that is associated with trying to orient yourself in that space. And so we talked to the funeral director, and we talked to him about how he sort of managed his day-to-day encounters with death. And, you know, he said he, he sort of saw it as his role to shepherd people through the grieving process. And that for him, it had made him in some ways more acutely aware of the finitude of life, obviously, but that also made him more conscious of, you know, of each day, of the passing of each day. And, you know, that might be one of the things that's salutary about facing your own mortality. It's like, waste time. Like, here's, here's a good question for you guys. How many of you waste more than four hours a day?

Okay. Okay. So, so I would say the reason you do that is because you haven't really faced the reality of your own debt. If you had done that, you would stop doing that. You would not waste time, you know. And we could do a quick economic analysis. I like to do this with people. So, what do you think your time's worth? An hour. Guess we know it's at least $10, right? Because that's minimum wage. [laughter] Well, so the minimum value society puts on your labor is $10 an hour. Okay. But, you know, you're, you're smart and healthy and young, and so each hour is an investment in the future. So it has to be considered in that manner because you're one of your hours is worth more to you than one of my hours is worth to me because you have so much of your future life still depending on it. So that's a big deal. So, I would say $50 an hour is probably reasonable for what you guys are worth. It's somewhere between $10 and $50, anyways. So, you know, let's assume $50. Okay, it's $200 a day. It's $1,400 a week. It's $5,600 a month. $65,000 a year. It's like, you want to waste it, go right ahead. But that's what it's costing you at minimum, you know. And, you know, you might think, well, no, because I'm not getting paid. It's like, wrong. You're paid for your studies. You just get paid 10 years from now. It's just deferred income. And there's a huge difference between people who have B's and A's, you know, like B's, doors shut, A's, doors open. And so, you know, you waste that time, you will bloody pay for it. And you don't get it back either. So, you know, if you're, if you're awake and you know that this is waiting for you and that there's only so much time you have, that can bloody well wake you up and stop you from wasting your time because you don't have that much of it.

I used to study people who were sons of male alcoholics. Okay. Now, there was a reason for that. We didn't have women. Why might that be? We didn't use women. Why?

>> Why? Why would they be confounding? Apart from the fact that they're women?

>> That's supposed to be a joke, you know. Jesus, it's a better joke than that. Okay. It could be that there's some sort of like emotional coping mechanism that differs between the way that men deal with, because a father-daughter relationship is different than a father.

>> Okay. Well, so that, that's a good, that's not a bad answer, but it's, it's not the answer that was appropriate for our research. And I'll tell you why, because you couldn't infer it from the question. We were interested in what factors made alcoholism hereditary because it does seem to have a strong hereditary component. And what we basically concluded after doing a tremendous amount of research was that people who are prone to alcoholism, at least one type of person who's prone to one type of alcoholism, got a very, very powerful stimulant effect from the alcohol during the time that their blood alcohol level was ascending in the 10 or 15 minutes after they took a drink, especially if they took a large drink fast or multiple large drinks fast. You can probably tell, by the way, if you're one of these people, if you want to go do this in the bar the next time you go, go on an empty stomach, take your pulse, write it down, drink three or four shots fast, wait 10 minutes, take your pulse again. If it's gone up 10 or 15 beats a minute, look out, because that means alcohol is working as a psychostimulant for you. And we found that for many of these people, that was an opiate effect. What seemed to happen was that when they drank alcohol fast, they produced probably beta-endorphin, although we were never sure. We could, it can be blocked with naloxone, which is an opiate antagonist. Anyways, the other characteristic of that pattern of of of alcohol consumption is that the the real kick only occurs when you're on the ascending limb of the blood alcohol curve. So, you know, first of all, your blood alcohol goes up, and then it goes down. And generally, when it goes down, it's not pleasant. That's when you start to feel hung over. And a hangover is actually alcohol withdrawal, by the way. So, it's like heroin withdrawal, except it's alcohol withdrawal, and it's generally not pleasant for people. So, they usually sleep through it, or it puts them to sleep. But if you're one of these people who get a real kick on the ascending limb of the blood alcohol curve, then you can just keep pounding back the alcohol, and it'll keep hitting you and keep you in that position where you're, you know, on the on the ascending part of the blood alcohol curve. And you can probably tell if you're one of these people if you can't stop once you get started, you know. So, if it's like you have four drinks quick, and it's like, man, you're gone until the alcohol runs out, or till it's 4 in the morning, or till you've spent all your money, or you've been at the last bar in town, or that you're sitting on your friend's bed after everybody's gone home from the party and you're still drinking, you might suspect that you're one of those people. And if you are one of those people, well then you should watch the hell out, because, um, alcohol is a vicious drug, and it, it gets people in its grasp hard, and it's hard for them to escape once they do. People also drink to quell anxiety.

So now the problem, because we were looking at the genetics of alcoholism, it wasn't easy to study offspring of alcoholic mothers. And the reason for that is they might have consumed alcohol during pregnancy, in which case, and that's a bad idea, especially there's certain key times in pregnancy where even a few drinks are not good. And that turns out, if I remember correctly, that turns out to be the times when the fetus is producing the bulk of its hippocampal tissue. And so, anyway, so if it turned out that daughters or sons of female alcoholics were markedly different from the general population in some manner, we wouldn't be able to tell if that was a consequence of alcohol consumption during pregnancy or if it was, it was a genetic reflection. So what we wanted to do was study sons of male alcoholics. And so their mothers actually couldn't be alcoholic. And we wanted their fathers, the best subjects had an alcoholic father and an alcoholic grandfather and at least one or more alcoholic first or second-degree male relatives, and they couldn't be alcoholic, and they had to be young. So, because obviously if they were 40 and they still weren't alcoholic, then they probably weren't going to be alcoholic. So we wanted to catch them, you know, between say, well, it had to be 18, which was, it was in Quebec, that was even a little late, probably, but that, you know, that's best we could do from an ethical perspective. So we used to bring these guys into the lab and get them quite drunk. Um, [snorts] the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse pretty much put a stop to that research because we used to bring them in and, you know, we'd get their blood alcohol level up to 0.12 or 0.1. It had to be pretty high. Actually, looked like the real physiological effect seemed to kick in when, uh, when people hit legal intoxication. So you don't really get the opiate effect till you pop yourself up about 0.08, which was the legal limit for driving at that point. Um, so we used to get, some of these guys were pretty big. They come in there, maybe 230 lb guys. And to get them up to, you know, 0.1 or 0.2, you had, or 0.12, you had to give them quite a bit, quite a whack of alcohol. And then what we usually do is we'd let them sober up till 0.06, about that, and then we'd send them home in a cab. Well, when the NIA got all ethical on the whole situation, they wouldn't let us send them home until they hit 0.002. Was like, well, if you're 240 lbs and we've just nailed you with enough alcohol so that your blood alcohol level hit 0.12, you're going to be sitting in our bloody lab bored to death, feeling horrible for like 6 hours or 7 hours. And you'd be pretty damn irritated about it. It's like, wasn't obvious how we were supposed to keep the people there. It's like, what can I leave? No, I'm not paying you if you leave. It's like, that's going to produce real positive outcomes with like, drunk people in the lab. That's going to work really well. Of course, then they'd never come back either, because it was such a bloody awful experience. So, I stopped doing that research partly because it became impossible. Anyways, [snorts] we did find out a lot. We found out that there was this one particular pattern of of alcohol abuse that seemed to be hereditary. So, and we couldn't study it in women anyway.

So, people learn almost everything they learn that's important in the face of fear. And although that's slightly more pessimistic viewpoint than it might be, because you can optimize the rate at which you expose yourself to things that would otherwise cause you to be afraid, and then they tend just to captivate you and make you intensely interested. So, but as you're progressing through life, what you're doing continually is either interacting with things that you understand well, which means that you know how to behave in the face of, or you're interacting with things that you don't understand at all. And your body and your mind are prepared to respond to things that you don't understand at all. And they basically respond by putting you on alert. And being on alert is a sign from your, from the deep unconscious recesses of your mind and, and your body, for that matter, that you don't know what you're doing in this particular space. And as a consequence, you have more things to learn. And so the way you learn when you're encounter something that you don't understand is by progressing voluntarily into the space and time that's unknown. And so you're always learning as a consequence of facing the unknown. And the unknown is something that can be frightening, although it can also be interesting if you, if you calibrate your exposure properly.

Now, this is just as true for psychotherapy as it is for any other form of learning. And that's because psychotherapy really is a form of guided and structured learning. And one of the things that you continually do with people who are seeking psychotherapeutic help is to determine what it is that they're afraid of, or what it is that they don't understand, and then to break it down into what you might describe as manageable doses, and then get people to expose themselves to that situation or set of situations voluntarily. And the consequence of that is that people become less afraid and more able. And the original hypothesis was that was because you were doing some form of counter-conditioning, that people had learned to be afraid in in a particular circumstance, and you were teaching them to, to not be afraid. That's wrong, that viewpoint. What, what you're really doing with people when you expose them to situations that they're afraid of, or that they don't understand, is expanding their range of competence. And you either do that by literally teaching them how to behave in those circumstances, which is what you would do with children, or maybe with friends, um, or by helping them observe their own reactions when they're placed in a situation like that. Because lots of people who are afraid of things think that when they confront something they're afraid of voluntarily, that they'll be absolutely terrified and unable to cope. But they often find that if they do place themselves in the situation carefully and voluntarily, that they're nowhere near as paralyzed by the encounter as they might have thought. And so partly what you're teaching them then is that there's more to them than they thought.

Generally, when you're teaching people about the world, given that the world is a frightening place, if you're a psychotherapist, there isn't a lot of utility in trying to convince people that the world isn't as dangerous as they think, because the world is just as dangerous as you think it is. It's actually quite a remarkable fact that we're all not paralyzed with anxiety all the time, but, but we're not. But part of what you have in your armament against the terrors of the world is the possibility that you hold within you. And people are unbelievably tough and resourceful creatures. And even if you think that you're not up to the challenge, you can be sure that encoded in your bodily structure somewhere are abilities that you don't really understand that would come to the forefront if you put yourself in a situation where they were necessary. So, and that's a lot of psychotherapy is precisely that. It's helping the person learn that there's more to them than they think. Not so much that the world is less frightening.

So, to be exposed to something you're afraid of often means to reconfigure your own preconceptions because if you're afraid of something, it usually means that you've coded it or understand it in a certain way. And so that when you encounter it, not only do you have to learn something new, but you also have to let go of your old presuppositions. Maybe that's what you do, for example, if you overcome some kind of prejudice that you might have to to people or things or places. Because you don't, you don't approach the the object that you're afraid of in a conceptual vacuum. You have presuppositions. And what that, what that also implies is that when you're learning, even when you're learning incrementally, there's a process of letting go and a process of building. So when you learn something new, you have to let go of an old presupposition of some sort. And those presuppositions are are alive because they're part of you. And part of what that means is that every, every element of learning in the face of something novel is often also an undoing of previous learning. And that's partly why the motif of death and rebirth is such a powerful one throughout human history. It's a primary mode of human, um, what would you call it, of the human story. It's certainly of human mythology. And the, the experiences that people have in psychotherapy are often similar to death and rebirth experiences in part because they come in damaged and fragmented and hurt, and often have to encounter even more of the material that caused them trouble to begin with. But the consequence of that is that they can shake the the structures that are inhibiting their further development, even though that might cause some pain, and then hopefully they can come back alive.

And, you know, that when you encounter something that's truly unknown, you go through a process that's similar to that too. In that, if you, if you, if you've ever been in a situation, for example, where you deeply desired something, but you failed to get it for one reason or another, there's a tremendous amount of pain associated with that. That could be a person, or or a goal, or a dream, or something like that. It, it's extraordinarily painful not to be able to attain a a valued goal. And the failure generally produces literally produces pain. It's, it's, it's cognitive pain, but many of the same pathways are involved. And when, when you have to give up something that you value, you're giving up a part of yourself, the part of yourself that's predicated on that, on that vision. And not only is that painful, but it can really throw you for a loop. Um, the phenomena that we're going to talk about today are representations of that process, as well as attempts to experiment with it, because people have known for a very, very long time that there was something about partial death and rebirth that was also akin to the revivification of the human spirit. And that's knowledge that human beings have had for, we really don't know how long. It's certainly tens of thousands of years, and it might be longer.