Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
Jordan Peterson his second time on this
The Lex fredman
podcast you have given a set of lectures
on ni as part of the new Peterson
Academy and the lectures were powerful
there's some element of the
contradictions the tensions the drama
the way you like lock in on an idea but
then are struggling with that idea all
of that that feels like it's a it's a
nich and yeah well he has a big
influence on me stylistically and
like in terms of the way I approached
writing and also many of the people that
were other influences of mine were very
influenced by him so I was blown away
when I first came across his writings
there're
so they're so uh intellectually dense
that I don't know if there's anything
that approximates that dovi maybe
although he's much more wordy nich is
very succin partly cuz he was so ill CU
he would think all day he couldn't spend
a lot of time writing and he condens his
writings into very short while this
aphoristic style he had and it's it's
really something to strive for and and
then he's also an exciting writer like
dovi and and dynamic and and romantic in
that emotional way and so it's really
something and I really enjoyed doing the
I did that lecture that you described
that lecture series is on the first half
of Beyond Good and Evil which is a
stunning book and uh
that was really fun to take pieces of it
and then to describe what they mean and
how they've echoed across the decades
since he wrote them and yeah it's been
great taking each sentence seriously and
deconstructing it and really struggling
with it I think underpinning that
approach to writing requires deep
respect for the person I think if we
approach writing with that kind of
respect you can take Orwell you can take
a lot of writers and really d again on
singular sentences yeah well those are
the great writers because the greatest
writers virtually everything they wrote
is worth attending to know and and I
think nich is in some ways the ultimate
Exemplar of that
because often when I read a book I'll
mark one way or another I often fold the
corner of the page over to indicate
something that I've found that's worth
remembering I couldn't do that with a
book like Beyond Good and Evil because
every page ends up marked and and that's
in marked contrast so to speak to many
of the books I read now where it's it's
it's quite frequently now that I'll read
a book and there won't be an idea in it
that I haven't come across before and
with a thinker like n that's just not
the case at the sentence level and I
don't think there's anyone that I know
of who did that to a greater extent than
he did so there's other people who whose
thought is of equivalent value I've I've
returned recently and I'm going to do a
course on to the work of this Romanian
historian of religion mer elata who's
not nearly as well known as he should be
and whose work by the way is a real
antidote to the postmodern nihilistic
Marxist stream of literary
interpretation that the universities as
a whole have adopted and ilad is like
that too I I was I used this book called
The Sacred and the profane quite
extensively in a book that I'm releasing
in mid November we who wrestle with God
and it's of the same sort it it it's
endlessly
analyzable I had to walked through the
whole history of religious ideas and he
had the intellect that enabled him to do
that and everything he wrote is dream
dream likee in its density
so every sentence or paragraph is
evocative in an imager Manner and that
also what would you say deepens and
broadens the scope and that's part of
often what distinguishes writing that
has a literary end from writing that's
more merely technical like the literary
writings have this imagistic and
dreamlike reference space around them
and it takes a it takes a long time to
turn a complex image into something
semantic and so if your writing evokes
deep imagery it has a depth that can't
be captured merely in words and the
great romantic poetic philosophers n has
a very good example dovi is a good
example so is mer El they have that
quality and it's a good way of thinking
about it you know it's kind of
interesting from the perspective of
technical analysis of intelligence
there's a good book called the user
illusion which is the best book on
Consciousness that I ever read it
explains the manner in which our
communication is understandable in this
manner so imagine that when you're
communicating something you're trying to
change the way that your target audience
perceives and acts in the world so
that's an embodied issue and but you're
using words which aren't when obviously
aren't equivalent to the actions
themselves you can imagine that the
words are surrounded by a cloud of
images that they evoke and that the
images can be translated into actions
yeah and and the greatest writing uses
words in a manner that evokes images
that profoundly affects perception and
action and that's the so I would take
the manner in which I act and behave I
would translate that into a set of
images my dreams do that for me for
example then I compress them into words
I toss you the words you decompose them
decompress them into the images and then
into the actions and that's what happens
in a meaningful conversation it's a very
good way of understanding how we
communicate linguistically so if the
words spring to the visual full visual
complexity and then that can then
transform itself into action that's and
change in perception and because per
well those are both relevant and it's an
important thing to understand because
the classic empiricists make the
presumption and it's an erroneous
presumption
that perception is a value-free
Enterprise and they assume that partly
because they think of perception as
something passive you know you just turn
your head and you look at the world and
there it is it's like perception is not
passive there is no perception without
action ever ever and that's a weird
thing to understand because even when
you're looking at something like your
eyes are moving back and forth if they
ever stop moving for a tenth of a second
you stop being able to see so your eyes
are jiggling back and forth just to keep
them active and then there's involuntary
movements of your eyes and then there's
voluntary movements of your eyes like
what you're doing with your eyes is very
much like what a blind person would do
if they were feeling out the Contours of
a object you're sampling and you're only
sampling a small element of the space
that's in front of you and the element
that you choose to sample is dependent
on your aims and your goals so it's
value saturated and so all your
perceptions are action predicated and
partly what you're doing when you're
communicating is therefore not only
changing people's actions let's say but
you're also changing the the strategy
that they use to perceive and so you
change the way the world reveals itself
for them see this is why it's such a
profound experience to read a
particularly deep thinker because you
could also think of your perceptions as
the axioms of your thought that's a good
way of thinking about it a perception is
like a what would you say it's a thought
that's so set in concrete that you now
see it rather than conceptualize it a a
really profound thinker changes the way
you perceive the world that's way deeper
than just how you think about it or how
you feel about it what about not just
profound thinkers but thinkers that
deliver a powerful idea for example
utopian ideas of Marx or utopian
ideas you could say dystopian ideas of
Hitler those ideas are powerful and they
can saturate all your perception with
values and they they focus you in a way
where there's only a certain set of
actions yeah right even a certain set of
emotions as well and it's intense and
it's direct and they're so powerful that
they completely alter the perception and
the words bring to life yeah it's like a
form of possession so there's two things
you need to understand to make that
clear the
first issue is that as we suggested or
implied that perception is action
predicated but action is goal predicated
right the act towards goal
and these propagandistic thinkers that
you described they attempt to unify all
possible goals into a coherent
Singularity and there's advantages of
that there's advant the advantage of
Simplicity for for example which is a
major advantage and there's also the
advantage of motivation right so if you
provide people with a simp simple manner
of integrating all their actions you
decrease their anxiety and you increase
their motivation that can be a good
thing if the unifying idea that you put
forward is valid but it's the worst of
all possible ideas if you put forward an
invalid unifying idea and then you might
say well how do you distinguish between
a valid unifying idea and an invalid
unifying idea now was very interested in
that and I don't think he got that
exactly right but the postmodernists for
example especially the ones and this is
most of them with the Neo Marxist bent
their presumption is that the
fundamental unifying idea is power that
everything's about compulsion and force
essentially and that that's the only
true unifying ethos of mankind which is
I don't know if there's a worse idea
than that I mean there there are ideas
that are potentially as dangerous the
nihilistic idea is pretty dangerous
although it's more of a disintegrating
notion than a unifying idea the
hedonistic idea that you live for
pleasure for example that's also very
dangerous but if you wanted to go for
sheer pathology the notion that and this
is Fuko and a nutshell and marks for
that matter that power rules everything
not only is that a terrible unifying
idea but it it fully justifies your own
use of power and and I don't mean the
power nche talks about his will to power
was more his insistence that a human
being is an expression of will rather
than a mechanism of self- protection and
security like he thought of the life
force in human beings as something that
strived not to protect itself but to
exhaust itself in being and becoming
it's it's like a it's like an upward
oriented motivational Drive even towards
meaning now he called it the will to
power and that had some unfortunate
consequences at least that's how it's
translated but he didn't mean the power
motivation that people like fuku or Marx
was became so hung up on so it's not
power like you're trying to destroy the
other it's Power full flourishing of a
human being the creative force of a
human being that well you could imagine
that and and you should you could
imagine that you could segregate
competence and ability like imagine that
you and I were going to work on a
project we could organize our project in
relationship to the ambition that we
wanted to attain and we can organize an
agreement so that you were committed to
the project voluntarily and so that I
was committed to the project voluntarily
so that means that we would actually be
United in our perceptions and our
actions by the motivation of something
approximating voluntary play now you
could also imagine another situation
where I said here's our goal and uh you
better help me or I'm going to kill your
family well the probability is that you
would
be quite motivated to undertake my
bidding and so then you might say well
that's how the world works it's power
and compulsion but the truth of the
matter is that you can force people to
see things your way let's say but it's
nowhere near as good a strategy even
practically than the strategy of that
would be associated with something like
voluntary voluntary
joint agreement of pattern of movement
strategy towards a goal see this is such
an important thing to understand because
it it helps you start to understand the
distinction between a unifying force
that's based on Power and compulsion and
one that is much more in keeping I would
say with the ethos that governs western
western societies free western societies
there's really a qualitative difference
and it's not some morally relativistic
illusion so if we just look at the
Nuance of n's thought
uh the idea he first introduced And Thus
Spoke zaratustra of the Uber mench yeah
that's another one that's very easy to
misinterpret because it sounds awfully a
lot like it's about power yeah right for
example in the 20th century it was mis
represented and co-opted by Hitler to
advocate for the uh extermination of the
inferior non- Arian races yeah and the
Dominion of the superior Aryans yeah and
yeah well that was partly because n's
work also was misrepresented by his
sister after his death but definit but I
also think that there's a fundamental
flaw in that Nichi and
conceptualization so n of course
famously announced the death of God but
he did that in a manner that was
accompanied by Dire warnings like nich
said because people tend to think of
that as a triumphalist statement but n
actually said
that he really said something like the
unifying ethos under which we've
organized ourselves psychologically and
socially has now been fatally undermined
by well by the rationalist proclivity by
the empir empiricist proclivity there's
a variety of reasons mostly it was
conflict between the enlightenment view
let's say in the classic religious View
and and that there will be dire
consequences for that and N knew like
dovi knew that see there's a proclivity
for the human psyche and for human
societies to move towards something
approximating a Unity because the cost
of disunity is high fractionation of
your goals so that means you're less
motivated to move forward than you might
be because there's many things competing
for your attention and also anxiety
because anxiety actually signals
something like goal conflict so there's
an inescapable proclivity of value
systems to unite now if you kill the
thing that's uniting them that's the
death of God they either fractionate and
you get confusion anxiety and
hopelessness
or you get social disunity or and you
get social disunity
or something else arises out of the
Abyss to constitute that unifying force
and N said specifically that he believe
that one of those manifestations would
be that of um communism and that that
would kill he said this in Will To Power
that that would kill tens of millions of
people in the upcoming 20th century I
keep he
he could see that coming 5050 years
earlier and dovi did the same thing in
his book the demons so this is the thing
that the a religious have to contend
with it's a real conundrum because I
mean you could dispute the idea that our
value systems tend towards a unity and
and and Society does as well because
otherwise we're disunified but the cost
of that disunity as I said is goal
confusion anxiety and hopelessness so
it's like a real cost so you could
dispense with the notion of unity
altogether and the postmodernists did
that to some degree but they pulled off
a slight of hand too where they replaced
it by power now n did he's responsible
for that to some degree because n said
with his conception of the Overman let's
say is that human beings would have to
create their own values because the
value structure that had descended from
on high was now shunted aside but
there's a major problem with that many
major problems the psychoanalysts were
the first people who really figured this
out after n because imagine that we
don't have
a relationship with the transcendental
anymore that orients us okay now we have
to turn to
ourselves okay now if we were a Unity a
clear Unity within ourselves let's say
then we could turn to ourselves for that
Discovery but if we're a fractionated
plurality internally then when we turn
to ourselves we have we turn to a
fractionated plurality well that was
Freud's observation it's like well how
can you make your own values when you're
not the master in your own house like
you're a war of competing motivations or
maybe you're someone who's dominated by
the will to force and compulsion and so
why do you think that you can rely on
yourself as the source of values and why
do you think you're wise enough to to
consult with yourself to find out what
those values are or what they should be
say in the course of a single life I
mean you know it's it's difficult to
organize your own personal relationship
ship like one relationship in the course
of your life let alone to try to imagine
that out of whole cloth you could
construct an ethos that would be
psychologically and socially stabilizing
and last over the long run it's like and
of course Marx people like that the the
the people who reduce human motivation
to a single axis they had the
intellectual hubus to imagine that they
could do that postmodernists are a good
example of that as well okay but if we
lay on the table religion
uh communism
Nazism they are all unifying
ethos they're unifying ideas but they're
also horribly dividing ideas they both
unify and divide
religion has also divided people yeah
because in the nuances of
how uh the different peoples wrestle
with God they have come to different
conclusions and then they use those
conclusions or perhaps the people in
power use those conclusions to then
start wars to start hatred to divide
yeah well it's one of the key sub themes
in the gospels is the sub theme of uh
the Pharisees and so the the fundamental
enemies of Christ in the gospels are the
Pharisees and the scribes and the
lawyers so what does that mean the
Pharisees are religious
Hypocrites the scribes are academics who
worship their own intellect and the
lawyers are the legal Minds who use the
law as a weapon and so they're the enemy
of the Redeemer that's the pl that's a
subplot in in in the gospel stories and
that actually all means something the
phic problem is that the best of all
possible ideas can be used by the worst
actors in the worst possible way and
maybe this is an existential conundrum
is that the most evil people use the
best possible ideas to the worst
possible ends and then you have the
conundrum of how do you separate out
let's say the genuine religious people
from those who use the religious
Enterprise only for their own
machinations we're seeing this happen
online like one of the things that
you're seeing happening online I'm sure
you've noticed this especially on the
right-wing troll right-wing Psychopathic
troll side of the distribution is the
weaponization of a certain form of
Christian idation and that's often
marked at least online by the presence
of what would you say cliches like
Christ is King which has a certain
religious meaning but a completely
different meaning in this sphere of
emerging right-wing pathology right-wing
the political Dimension isn't the right
dimension of analysis but it's
definitely the case that the best
possible ideas can be used for the worst
possible purposes and that also brings
up another Spectre which is like well is
there any reliable and valid way of
distinguishing truly beneficial unifying
ideas from those that are pathological
and so that's another thing that I tried
to detail out in these lectures but also
in this new book it's like how do you
tell the good actors from The Bad actors
at the most fundamental level of
analysis and good ideas from the bad
ideas and you lecture on Truth they need
you also struggled with so how do you
know how do you know that communism is a
bad
idea versus it's a good idea implemented
by Bad
actors right right that's a more subtle
variant of the religious problem that's
what the that's what the Communists say
all the time the modern day Communists
like real communism has never been tried
and you could say I suppose with some
justification you could say that real
Christianity has never been tried
because we always fall short of the
ideal Mark and
so I mean my rejoinder to the Communists
is something like every single time it's
been implemented wherever it's been
implemented regardless of the culture
and the background of the people who've
implemented it it's had exactly the same
catastrophic consequences it's like I
don't know how
many examples you need of that but I
believe we've generated sufficient
examples so that that case is basically
resolved now the general rejoinder to
that is it's really something like well
if I was in charge of the Communist
Enterprise the Utopia would have come
about right but that's also a form of
dangerous pretense part of the way see
that problem is actually resolved to
some degree in the notion of in the
developing notion of sacrifice that
emerges in the western Canon over
thousands and thousands of years so one
of the suggestions for example and this
is something exemplified in the passion
story is that you can tell the valid
holder of an idea because that Holder
will take the responsibility for the
consequences of his idea onto
himself and that's why for example you
see one way of conceptualizing Christ in
the gospel story is as the ultimate
sacrifice to God so you might ask well
what's the ultimate sacrifice and there
there are variants of answer to that one
form of ultimate sacrifice is the
sacrifice of a child the offering of a
child and the other is the offering of
the self and the story of Christ brings
both of those together because he's the
son of God that's offered to God and so
it's a archetypal resolution of that
tension between ultimate sacrifice
ultimate because once you're a
parent most parents would rather
sacrifice themselves than their children
right so you have something that becomes
of even more value than yourself but the
sacrifice of self is also a very high
order level of sacrifice Christ is an
archetype of the pattern of being that's
predicated on the decision to take to
offer everything up to the highest value
right that pattern of
self-sacrifice and I think part of the
reason that's valid is
because the person who undertakes to do
that pays the price thems it's not
externalized they're not trying to
change anyone else except maybe by
example it's your problem that like soja
niton pointed that out too um when he
was struggling with the idea of good
versus evil and and you see this in more
sophisticated literature you know in
really unsophisticated literature or
drama there's a good guy and the bad guy
and the good guy guys all good and the
bad guys all bad and in more
sophisticated
literature the good and bad are
abstracted you can think of them as
spirits and then those Spirits possess
all the characters in The Complex drama
to a late greater or lesser degree and
that battle is fought out both socially
and internally in the high order
religious
conceptualizations in the west if they
culminate let's in the Christian Story
the notion is that battle between good
and evil is fundamentally played out as
an internal drama yeah so the uh for a
religious ethos the battle between good
and evil is fought within each
individual human heart right it's your
moral duty to constrain it to constrain
evil within yourself and well there's
more to it than that because there's
also the insistence
that if you do that that makes you the
more most effective possible
like Warrior let's say against evil
itself in the social world that you
start with the battle that occurs within
you in the soul let's say the soul
becomes the Battleground between the
forces of Good and Evil the idea there
there's an idea there too which is if
that battle is undertaken successfully
then it doesn't have to be played out in
the social world as actual conflict
right you can rectify the conflict
internally without it having to be
played out as fate as young put it so
what would you say to n who called
Christianity the slave
morality and his critique of religion in
that way was slave morality versus
Master morality and then you put in Uber
into that well that's that see I would
say that the woke phenomenon is the
manifestation of the slave morality that
n criticized and
that there are there are elements of
Christianity that can be Gerry banded to
support
that mod of perception and conception
but I think he was wrong in he was wrong
in his essential criticism of
Christianity in that regard now it's
complicated with nche because nche never
criticizes the gospel stories directly
what he basically criticizes is
something like the pathologies of
institutionalized religion and I would
say most particularly of
the what would you say
of the sort of casually too nice
Protestant form you know that's a a
thumbnail sketch and perhaps somewhat
unfair
but given the alignment let's say of the
more mainstream po Protestant movements
with the woke mob I don't think it's an
absurd criticism it's something like the
degeneration of Christianity into the
notion
that good and harmless are the same
thing or good and empathic are the same
thing thing which is simply not true and
and far too simplified and so and I also
think n was extremely wrong in his
presumption that human beings should
take it to themselves to construct their
own values I I think he made a colossal
error in that presumption and that is
the idea of uber match that the great
individual the best of us yeah should
create our own values well and I I think
the reason that he was wrong about that
is that so when God gives instructions
to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eve he
basically tells them that they can do
anything they want in the wall Garden so
that's the kind of balance between order
and nature that makes up the human
environment human beings have the
freedom vouch safe to them by God to do
anything they want in the garden except
to mess with the most fundamental rule
so God says to people you're not to eat
of the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of Good and Evil which
fundamentally means there is an implicit
moral order and you're to abide by it
you're Freedom stops at the foundation
and you can think about that I'd be
interested even in your ideas about this
as an engineer let's say is
that there is an ethos that's implicit
in being
itself and your ethos has to be a
reflection of that and that isn't under
your control you can't gerrymander the
foundation
because the your foundational beliefs
have to put you in harmony like musical
harmony with the actual structure
structure of reality as such so I can
give you an example of that
so our goal in so far as we're
conducting ourselves properly is to have
the kind of interestes in conversation
that allows both of us to express oursel
in a manner that enables us to learn and
grow such that we can share that with
everyone who's listening and if our aim
is true and upward then that's what
we're doing well that means that we're
going to have to match ourselves to a
pattern of interaction and that's marked
for us emotionally like you and I both
know this if we're doing this right
we're going to be interested in the
conversation we're not going to be
looking at or watch we're not going to
be thinking about what we're aiming at
we're just going to communicate now the
religious interpretation of that would
be that we were doing something like
making the Redemptive logos manifest
between us in dialogue and that's
something that can be shared to do that
we have to align with that pattern I
can't decide that there's some arbitrary
way that I'm going to play you I mean I
could do that if I was a psychopathic
manipulator but to do that optimally I'm
not going to impose a certain mode
of a certain a priority aim let's say on
our communication and manip and
manipulate you into that
so the constraints on my
ethos reflect the actual structure of of
the world and I can't this is this is
the Communist presumption it's like
we're we're going to burn everything
down and we're going to start from
scratch and we've got these axiomatic
presumptions and we're going to put them
into place and we're going to socialize
people so they now think and live like
Communists from day one and human beings
are infinitely malleable and we can use
a rational set of presuppositions to
decide what sort of beings they should
be the transhumanists are doing this too
it's like no there's a pattern of being
that you have to fall into alignment
with and it I think it's the pattern of
being by the way that if you fall into
alignment with it gives you hope it it
it protects you from anxiety and it
gives you a sense of harmony with your
surroundings with other people and none
of that's arbitrary but don't you think
we both ared to this conversation with
rigid axioms that we have maybe we're
blind to them but in the same way that
the Marxist came with very rigid axioms
about the way the world is and the way
it should be aren't we coming to that
well we definitely come to the
conversation with a hierarchy of
foundation oxums right and I would say
the more sophisticated you are as a
thinker the the deeper the level at
which you're willing to play so imagine
first that you have presumptions of
different depth there's more predicated
on the more fundamental axioms and then
that there's a a space of play around
those and that space of play is going to
depend on the sophistication of the
player obviously
but those who are capable of engaging in
deeper conversations talk about more
fundamental things with more play now we
have to come to the conversation with a
certain degree of structure because we
wouldn't be able to understand each
other or communicate if if a lot of
things weren't already assumed or taken
for granted how rigid is the hierarchy
of axioms that religion provides this is
what I'm trying to understand the
rigidity of that hierarchy is play well
play is not rigid at all no no no no no
no it's got a rigid some constraints it
took me about 40 years to figure out the
answer to that question so it wasn't I'm
serious about that so it wasn't it
wasn't a random answer
so play is very rigid in some ways so
like if you and I go out to play
basketball or chess like There are rules
and you can't break the rules because
then you're no longer in the game but
then there's a dynamism within those
rules that's well with chess it's
virtually infinite I mean I think what
is it there's more patterns of potential
games on a chessboard than there are
subatomic particles in the observable
universe like it's an insane space so
it's not like there's not Freedom within
it but by the it's it's a weird Paradox
in a way isn't it because music is like
this too is that there are definitely
rules and so and there are things you
can't throw a basketball into a chess
board and still be playing chess but
weirdly enough if you adhere to the
rules the realm of Freedom increases
rather than decreasing and I I think you
can make the same case for a playful
conversation as it's like we're playing
by certain rules and a lot of them are
implicit but that doesn't mean that it
might mean the reverse of constraint you
know
because in this seminar for example that
I was referring to the Exodus seminar
and then the gospel seminar everybody in
the seminar there's about eight of us
played Fair nobody play used power
nobody tried to prove they were right
they put forward their points but they
were like here's a way of looking at
that assess it and they were also doing
it genuinely it's like this is what I've
concluded about say this story and i'
and I'm going to make a case for it but
I'd like to hear what you have to say
because maybe you can change it you can
extend it you can find a flaw in it and
that's well that's a conversation that
has flow and that's engaging and that
other people will listen to as well and
that's also see I think that one of the
things that we can conclude now and we
can do this even from a neuroscientific
basis is that that sense of engaged
meaning is a marker not only for the
emergence of Harmony between you and
your environment but for the emergence
of that Harmony in a way that is
developmentally Rich that moves you
upward towards what would you
say well I think towards a more
effective entropic State that's actually
the technical answer to that but it
makes you more than you are and there's
a directionality in that well I would
like to sort of the reason I like
talking about communism because it has
clearly been shown as a set of ideas to
be destructive
to to humanity but I would like to
understand from an engineering
perspective the characteristics of
communism versus religion uh where you
can identify religious thought is going
to lead to a better human being a better
society and communist Marxist thought
it's not because there's ambiguity
there's room for play in communism and
Marxism because they kind of had a
utopian sense of where everybody's
headed don't know it's going to happen
maybe Revolution is required but after
the revolution is done we'll figure it
out and there's an underlying assumption
that maybe human beings are good and
they'll figure it out when once you
remove the oppressor I mean all these
ideas kind of until you put them into
practice you could they can be quite
convincing if you in the 19th century if
I was reading which is kind of
fascinating the 19th century produced
such powerful ideas marks and nich oh
fascism too for that matter fascism so
you know if I was sitting there uh like
especially if I'm feeling shitty about
myself um a lot of these ideas are
pretty powerful as as a as a way to plug
the Ness hole Yeah right absolutely well
and some of them may actually have an
appropriate scope of application it
could be that some of the foundational
axioms of Communism socialism SLC
communism are actually functional in a
sufficiently small social group maybe a
Bible group even like I I also have a
I'm not sure this is correct but I have
a suspicion that the pervasive
attractiveness of some of the radical
left ideas that we're talking about are
pervasive precisely because they are
functional within say families but also
within the small tribal groups that
people might have originally evolved
into and that once we become
civilized so we produce societies that
are united even among people who don't
know one another that different
principles have to apply as a
consequence of scale so that's that's
partly an engineering response but but I
think there's a more a deeper way of
going after the Communist problem so I
think part of the Communist the problem
fundamental problem with the Communist
axim is the notion that the world of
complex social interactions can be
simplified sufficiently so that
centralized planning authorities can
deal with it and I think the best way to
think about the free Exchange rejoiner
to that presumption is no the sum total
of human interactions in a large
civilization are so immense that you
need a distributed network of cognition
in order to compute the proper way
forward and so what you do is you give
each actor their domain of individual
choice so that they can maximize their
own movement forward and you allow the
aggregate direction to emerge from that
rather than trying to impose it from the
top down which I think is
computationally impossible so that might
be one engineering reason why the
Communist solution doesn't work like I
read in Sol nedson for example that the
the central Soviet authorities often had
to make 200 pricing decisions a
day now if you've ever started a
business or created a product and had to
wrestle with the problem of pricing
you'd become aware of just how
intractable that is like how do you
calculate worth well there's the central
existential problem of Life how how do
you calculate worth it's not something
like a central Authority can sit down
and just manage and you you there is a
lot of inputs that go into a pricing
decision and the free market answer to
that is something like well if you get
the price right people will buy it and
you'll survive this is a fascinating way
to describe how ideas fail so communism
perhaps fails because uh just like what
people believe the Earth is flat when
you look outside it's it looks
flat but you can't see Beyond the
Horizon I guess so in the same way with
Communism communism seems like a great
idea in my family and my people I love
but it doesn't scale and and it doesn't
iterate it doesn't that's a form of
scaling too right well I mean whatever
ways it breaks down it doesn't scale uh
and you're saying religious thought is a
thing that might scale I would say
religious thought is the record of those
ideas that have in fact scaled right and
iterated itated does religious thought
it
great so I mean there's a fundamental
conservative aspect to religious thought
tradition yeah there this is why like
mer elad for example who I referred to
earlier one of the things elad did and
very effectively and people like Joseph
Campbell who in some ways were
popularizers of Jose of elad's ideas and
Carl Jung's what they really did was
devote themselves to an analysis of
those ideals ideas that scaled and
iterated across the largest possible
spans of time and so ilad and Yung Eric
neyman they were looking and and
Campbell they were looking at patterns
of narrative that were common across
religious Traditions that had spanned
Millennia and found many patterns the
heroes myth for example is one of those
patterns and it's I think the evidence
that it has its reflection in human
neurophysiology and neuros pychology is
incontrovertible and so these
foundational narratives they last
they're common across multiple religious
Traditions they Unite they work
psychologically but they also reflect
the underlying neurophysiological
architecture so I can give you an
example of that so the hero myth is
really a quest myth and a quest myth is
really a story of exploration and
expansion of adaptation right so Bilbo
The Hobbit he's kind of an ordinary
every man he lives in a very constrained
and orderly and secure world and then
the quest call comes and he goes out and
he expands his personality and develops
his wisdom and that's reflected in human
neuropsychological architecture at a
very low level way below cognition so
one of the most fundamental elements of
the mamalian brain and even in lower
animal forms is the hypothalamus it's
sort of the root of primary motivation
so it governs lust and um and it
regulates your breathing and it
regulates your hunger and it regulates
your thirst and it regulates your
temperature like really low-level
biological Necessities are regulated by
the hypothalamus when you get hungry
it's the hypothalamus when you're
activated in a defensively aggressive
manner that's the hypothalamus half the
hypothalamus is the origin of the
dopaminergic tracts and they subsume
exploration and so you could think of
the human motivational reality as a
domain that's governed by axiomatic
motivational States love sex defensive
aggression hunger and another domain
that's governed by exploration and the
rule would be something like when your
basic motivational states are sated
explore well then and and that's not
cognitive like I said this is deep deep
brain architecture it's extraordinarily
ancient and and the exploration story is
something like go out into the unknown
and take the risks because the
information that
you discover and the skills you develop
will be worthwhile even in sating the
basic motivational drives and then you
want to learn to do that in a iterative
manner so it sustains across time and
you want to do it in a way that unites
you with other people and there's a
pattern to that and I do think that's
the pattern that's we strive to
encapsulate in our deep religious
narratives and I think that in many ways
we've done that successfully what is the
believe in God how does that fit in what
does it mean to believe in God okay so
in one of the stories that I cover in uh
we who wrestle with God which I've only
recently begun to take apart say in the
last two years is the story of Abraham
it's a very cool story and it's also
related by the way to your question
about what makes communism wrong and
dovi knew this not precisely the Abraham
story but the the same reason in Notes
from Underground dovi made a very
telling observation so he speaks in the
voice of a cynical nihilistic and bitter
bureaucrat who's been a failure who's
talking cynically about the nature of
human beings but also very ACC
accurately and one of the things he
points out with regards to Modern
utopianism is that human beings are very
strange creatures and that if you gave
them what the Socialist utopians want to
give them so let's say all your needs
are taken care of all your material
needs are taken care of and even
indefinitely dov's claim was you don't
understand human beings very well
because if you put them in an
environment that was that comfortable
they would purposefully go insane just
to break it into bits just so something
interesting would happen right and he
says it's it's the human Pro proclivity
to curse and complain and he says this
in quite a cynic and CTIC manner but
he's pointing to something deep which is
that we're not built for comfort and
security we're not infants we're not
after
satiation so then you might ask well
what the hell are we after then that's
what the Abraham story addresses and
Abraham is the first true individual in
the biblical narrative so you could
think about his story as the archetypal
story of the developing individual so
you said well what's God well in the
Abraham story God has characterized a
lot of different ways in the classic
religious texts like the Bible is
actually a compilation of different
characterizations of the Divine with the
insistence that they reflect an
underlying unity in the story of
Abraham the Divine is the Call to
Adventure so Abraham has the Socialist
Utopia at hand he's from a wealthy
family and he has everything he needs
and he actually doesn't do anything
until he's in his 70s now hypothetically
people in those times lived much longer
but the voice comes to Abraham and it
tells him something very
specific it
says leave your zone of comfort leave
your parents leave your tent leave your
community leave your tribe leave your
land go out into the
world and Abraham thinks well why I've
got naked slave girls peeling grapes and
feeding them to me it's like what do I
need an adventure for and God tells them
and this is the Covenant by the way part
of the Covenant that the god of the
Israelites makes with his people it's
very very specific it's very brilliant
he says if you follow the voice of
Adventure you'll become a blessing to
yourself so that's a good deal because
people generally live at odds with
themselves and he says God says that's
not
all you'll become un blessing to
yourself in a way that furthers your
reputation among people and validly so
that you'll accomplish things that were
real and people will know it and you'll
be held high in their esteem and that
will be valid so that's a pretty good
deal because social people would like to
be regarded as of utility and worth by
others and so that's a good deal and and
God says that's not
all you'll establish something of
lasting permanent and deep value that's
why Abraham becomes the father of
Nations and finally caps it off and he
says there's a bet there's a better
element even to it there's a Capstone
you'll do all three of those things in a
way that's maximally beneficial to
everyone else and so the Divinity in the
abrahamic story is making a claim he
says first of all there's a drive that
you should attend to so the spirit of
Adventure that calls you out of your
zone of comfort now if you attend to
that and you make the sacrifices necess
necessary to follow that path then the
following benefits will accue to you
your life will be a blessing everyone
will hold you in high estem you'll
establish something of permanent value
and you'll do it in a way that's
maximally beneficial to everyone else
and so so think about what this means
biologically or from an engineering
standpoint it means that the instinct to
develop that characterizes outward
moving children let's say or adults is
the same Instinct that allows for
psychological stability that allows for
movement upward in a social hierarchy
that establishes something iterable and
that does that in a manner that allows
everyone else to partake in the same
process well you know that's a good deal
and like I can't see how it cannot be
true because the alternative hypothesis
would be that the spirit that moves you
beyond yourself to develop the spirit of
a curious child let's say what is that
antithetical to your own esteem is that
antithetical to other people's best
interest is it not the thing that
increases the probability that you'll do
something permanent that's that's a
stupid Theory so God is a call to
Adventure with some constraints a call
to true adventure to true adventure true
adventure yeah and then that's a good
observation because that begs the
question what constitutes the most true
adventure well that's not fully fleshed
out until at least from the Christian
Perspective let's say that's not fully
fleshed out until the Gospels
because the passion of Christ is the you
could say this is the perfectly
reasonable way of looking at it the
passion of Christ is the truest
adventure of Abraham it's a terrible
thing he because it's a it's a the the
passion story is a catastrophic tragedy
although it obviously has its Redemptive
elements but one of the things that's
implied there is
that there's no distinction between the
true adventure of life and taking on the
pathway of maximal responsibility andth
burden and I can't see how that cannot
be true like cuz the counter hypothesis
is well Lex the best thing for you to do
in your life is to shrink from all
Challenge and hide right to remain
infantile to remain secure not to ever
push yourself beyond your limits not to
take any risks well no one thinks that's
true so basically the maximally
worthwhile Adventure could possibly be
highly correlated with the hardest
possible available
Adventure the hardest possible available
Adventure voluntarily
undertaken does it have to be absolutely
how do you define voluntarily well
here's an here's an example of that um
that's that's that's a good question too
when Christ is the night before the
crucifixion which in principle he knows
is coming he asks God to relieve him of
his burden and understandably so I mean
that's the scene in famously in which
he's sweating literally sweating blood
because he knows what's coming and the
the the Romans designed crucifixion to
be the most agonizing and humiliating
Poss agonizing humiliating and
disgusting possible death right so there
was every reason to be apprehensive
about that and you might say well could
you undertake that voluntarily as an
adventure and the answer to that is
something like well what's your
relationship with
death like that's a problem you have to
solve and you could fight it and you
could be bitter about it and there's
reasons for that that especially if it's
painful and degrading but but the
alternative is something
like well that's what's fleshed out in
religious imagery always it's very
difficult to to cast into words it's
like no you you welcome you welcome the
struggle that's why I called the book we
who wrestle with God you welcome the
struggle and Alex I don't see how you
can come to terms with life without
construing it something like construing
is something like bring it on welcome
the struggle and I I can't see that
there's a limit to that it's like well I
welcome the struggle until it gets
difficult well so there's not a bell
curve like uh the struggle of moderation
basically you have to welcome whatever
as hard as it gets and the crucifixion
in that way is a symbol of that well and
it well it's it's worse than that in
some ways because the crucifixion
exemplifies the worst possible death but
that isn't the only element of the
struggle because mythologically
classically after Christ's death he
Harrows hell and what that means as far
as I can tell psychologically is that
you're not only required let's say to
take on the full existential burden of
life and to welcome it regardless of
what it is and to maintain your upward
aim despite all Temptations to the
contrary but you also have to confront
the root of malevolence itself so it's
not merely tragedy and I think the
malevolence is actually worse and the
reason I think that is because I know
the literature on post-traumatic stress
disorder and most people who encounter
let's say a challenge that's so brutal
that it fragments them it isn't mere
suffering that does that to people it's
an encounter with malevolence that does
that to people their own sometimes Often
by the way Soldier will go out into a
battlefield and find out that there's a
part of him that really enjoys the mayem
and that conceptualization doesn't fit
in well with everything he thinks he
knows about himself and humanity and
after that contact with that dark part
of himself he never
recovers that happens to people and and
it happens to people who encounter Bad
actors in the world too if you're a
naive person and the right narcissistic
psychopath comes your way you are in
like Mortal trouble because you might
die but that's not where the trouble
ends if there's a young young man in
their
20s listening to this how do they escape
the pull of zi's Notes from Underground
with the eyes open to the world how do
they select the adventure so there's
other characterizations of the Divine
say in the Old Testament story so one
pattern of characterization that I think
is really relevant to that question is
the conception of God as calling and
conscience okay so what does it mean
it's a description of the manner in
which your destiny announces itself to
you and I'm I'm using that terminology
and and it's it's distinguishable say
from nich's notion that you create your
own values it's like part of the way you
can tell that that's wrong is that you
can't voluntarily gerrymander your own
interests right like you find some
things
interesting and that seems natural and
and autonomous and other things you
don't find interesting and you can't
really for yours