Beyond Order: Rule 1- Don't Carelessly Denounce Social Institutions or Creative Achievement | EP 260

Well, so this book, the first chapter is "Do Not Casually Denigrate Social Institutions or Creative Achievement." And I picked that quite carefully because again, the liberal types are more likely to criticize social institutions. So you don't want to do that casually because they structure things and protect you in a way that you're likely not even aware of. The conservative always says, "Look, be careful when you change something because you're changing a bunch of things and you don't know what's going to happen, so be careful." But social institutions can become corrupt even just as a consequence of aging, and so they have to be updated. They can't stay static, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't respect them. On the other side, creative achievements—conservatives, for example—they have a harder time with open people, creative people. You know, the best personality predictor of liberalism is high openness, which is a creativity dimension. Well, it's easy to dismiss art, for example, especially if it doesn't exactly speak to you. But it's through artistic endeavors, through creative achievement, that the process of update occurs.

So regardless of your political temperament, you need to see these forces. You need to see the value in these forces and have some respect for them. I think what happens if you get educated, hopefully, is that you get educated beyond the confines of your temperament. So that's why I thought your ordering is so interesting that you said—you intentionally did it, of course—but that "Do Not Carelessly Denigrate Social Institutions or Creative Achievements." So that's chapter one, and I thought it was interesting because, you know, one of the things that I've been talking about for the last couple of years, especially in the last year—and our friend Ben Shapiro wrote a whole book about it—is the disintegration of so many of our institutions.

I think the great debate right now is can some of these institutions survive, or do we need all new institutions? Now, I know you're talking about social institutions, not just academic institutions or, you know, we're talking about cultural institutions. What do you feel in that argument? Can some things just be left to disintegrate, and we rebuild, or do we constantly end up in a destruction and a rebirth? Because right now, we're watching so many institutions just crumble.

Well, I tend to start local when I'm thinking, you know, because it simplifies things. Well, the first institution is the sovereign individual. We don't want to let that crumble. The more that you're able to live in a relationship with truth, I would say, the better job you're doing of protecting your integrity as a sovereign individual. Start with that. It would be a shame to lose the family; people derive a tremendous amount of the meaning of their life from their family and those intense relationships. I don't think we can get beyond that. I think you have to knit your family together to the best of your ability, and I know that people often have terribly fractured families, but we don't have a good substitute for that.

You need to exist in relationship to your culture. You need a job or a career, something like that. We need political institutions. I think part of the problem, of course, is that everything is changing so rapidly that it's very difficult to say what should be kept and what shouldn't be. We're not in control of it, to some degree, as well. I mean, there's an all-out assault on the integrity of cultural structures, but there's also a technological assault on everything. So what do you do in a situation like that?

Well, I think my sense is you revert to the individual. How much of this—try to make better people. How much of this do you think has to do with the speed? Because actually, I remember on sort of the last maybe quarter of the tour, one of the things that you talked about a lot was how the internet was changing us, how the speed of information was changing us, how you as a random person, no matter where you are in the world, you might be able to send out a tweet or create a meme that could change the world like that. So how much do you think the speed is part of this in ways that were literally unimaginable three decades ago?

I think it's a tremendous part of it. We don't know what to do with any of the new technologies that we've produced, and by the time we adapt to them, they'll have transformed into something completely different. So you know, my kids are in their late 20s, and they're more a part of the internet generation than I am, but they're being supplanted in their knowledge by younger people already. They can both feel it; it's changing unbelievably quickly.

So that puts a tremendous amount of stress on everyone. When you talk about the creative achievement part of this, one of the things I've been thinking about lately is that I don't remember the last time I heard a new musician that I really loved or saw a piece of art that was new that I really loved. You know, it seems so rare. Because of what's happened with cancel culture, the people that should be showing us things are not showing them.

What do we do about that? How do we make the artists brave again? How do we make the people who will give us the creative achievement—how do we make them see that star again? Well, you do whatever you can by example; that's the best you've got. You know, so hopefully you try to bring integrity to your endeavors, and hopefully that has a salutary effect. You don't have it—you don't have a better option than that.

The first rule that you talk about, Jordan, is not to carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement, and here this is really a post-partisan message. It's a recognition that conservatives' respect for tradition, respect for the past, is really a respect for institutions that have been built up over the course of thousands of years in conjunction with an increasingly good understanding of human nature. That has to be balanced with a recognition that we can't get so tied up in these rules that it becomes impossible to extricate ourselves from them.

We can't fossilize these rules and turn them into something that is unchangeable in any way. In essence, we should be cautious about changing the rules of society; they should be changeable. So we shouldn't obliterate them, but we also have to—you have to know the rules of the game before you can change the rules of the game. If you're playing Calvinball—in Calvin and Hobbes—the rules of the game change every second. That's not a game anymore; that's just an exercise of power.

But you also have to recognize that sometimes the rules do have to change. How do you balance those two things? Well, I think the first thing you do is vow to tell the truth so that you don't follow yourself up, and then I think you pay attention to what manifests itself to you as meaningful. Because I think that meaning—I literally think, and I think this empirically as well as spiritually, let's say—I believe that the instinct of meaning signifies the optimal information processing function of the nervous system.

So when you're balanced properly between order and novelty, or order and chaos, that manifests itself to you as deep engagement. That's a signal, and it's not merely cognitive; it's way deeper than that. It's a signal that you're in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time, and everyone wants that. Everyone wants that all the time. Like images of paradise are representations of that state of being.

So it's there for you, but they're preconditions. One of the preconditions is that you strive to do the best—to aim at the best—and that has to be your fundamental ethos. It's a decision that, despite all the calamities of being, your primary ethical obligation is to work for the betterment of yourself and others. That's a very complex decision because there's so much of you that's twisted and turned against existence itself because of its suffering and complexity. It's very hard to get your head straight about that, and so you get warped and twisted by resentment and deceit and temptations of various sorts.

So that has to be straightened out so that you're aiming in the right direction, and once you manage that—or perhaps in conjunction with that—you have to watch what you say. You have to say what you believe to be true, not because you're trying to accomplish something specific with what you're saying, but because you're attempting to represent what's happening in front of you as accurately as you possibly can and let go of the consequences.

And then you search for this; you search for the engagement that produces. This is one of the things I love about long-form podcasts: when a conversation takes off properly and it's dynamic and unscripted, both of the participants are striving to keep that sense of engagement constantly at play. If they do that, then the conversation is engaging and deep and gets as deep as the people involved can manage, and they'll pull the entire audience along for the ride. Everyone is thrilled about that; that's logos. That's the manifestation of logos, and it's deeply meaningful.

There's nothing more meaningful than that, and that's just a sign that you've got that balance right. You want to be there all the time; that's the goal is to be there all the time. Of course, that's a lofty goal and very difficult to attain, but that's the end game.

Well, first of all, let's not get too casually critical about the idea of conformity. I cover that in chapter one: "Do Not Casually Denigrate Social Institutions or Creative Achievement." It's really hard to get everybody on the same page, and it's really hard to get everybody to conform, especially when they're doing it voluntarily. There is not much difference between that and peace, and if you don't think that that's a good thing, then you should think really hard about failed states where no one's on the same page and you get an instant proliferation of warring gangs of armed thugs.

If you think the utopians are going to win the armed thug battle, you've got another thing coming. Yeah, because they'll be the first ones on the chopping block. You're a comedian and an open person and not likely to have a great taste in some ways for pure conformity. And I'm someone who enjoys artistic creation and revolutionary ideas, but by the same token, I'm not someone who despises conformity.

Well, you said in the book, I mean, you said that we're always going to have, as humans, we're always going to be searching for revolutionary ideas. It's something that is constantly the way that we've always been. And it's the way of, like, just a liberal way of thinking, to keep moving forward and progress and try things that are new and want to do that. But I just feel like you have to have a foundation of comfort to be able to do that from, because some of that is a luxury of being comfortable, or at least a tremendous amount of enough—and to feel at all. When things get really uncomfortable, that feels a lot scarier place to be creative from almost.

Well, the first thing we should point out is that being a conformist isn't the highest of moral virtues, but being unable to conform is worse. Now, refusing to conform—that's in a different category. You might have valid reasons for it, especially if you're exceptional. You could say, well, virtually everyone is exceptional in some regard and should perhaps not be conformist there, and we could say fine, but the rest of the 95% of them should go along with the crowd because that's going along with peace.

We also don't ever want to confuse the inability to conform with the ability to produce revolutionary ideas, because just because you can't conform or are rejected doesn't mean you're a genius. What it most likely means is that you're just incapable, and then you're going to be highly motivated to confuse your incapability with creativity, and that's not helpful. Then you pointed out something that's also very important—just how many dimensions do you want to be exceptional on anyways?

You know, you're a comedian, and you have to take substantial risk to do that, and it's quite threatening. It wouldn't be such a bad idea if the rest of your life was, well, maybe secure enough to allow you to tolerate that.

Yeah, I guess I worry—on a bigger picture as a nation—that like if we start to—like if the fabric of some of the textile of the past, if some of the tapestry kind of—I guess the tapestry of the past starts to come apart. Like, I'm all for making a new tapestry, but I just feel like—I just get scared. I don't know if I feel, but it's more a fear. I get scared that if we do that, that things could just tear, and I just don't know what's going to happen. I guess I'm just a bit scared; I don't know what the future of this country that I live in looks like.

I used to feel like I had a little bit better idea, but I don't know if the idea of what I thought it looked like was just a comfort based upon, like, my skin tone and growing up with at least food in my house. You know, I don't know some stuff. Like, I just don't know if—I don't know if maybe my idea was just a luxury or something. I don't know. Do you know what I'm kind of saying a little bit?

I'm just kind of—

Yeah, well, I think that's a question that everybody's being driven to answer, partly because there's intense moral pressure to ask yourself that question. You know, to what degree was your privilege unearned? Well, there's an easy answer to that, actually: lots of it. But the same holds true with virtually everyone else. And so, who’s got privilege depends a lot on what group you're willing to use as a comparison.

Yeah, yeah, so even impoverished people in North America are rich by world standards. Yeah, yeah, they're in the top one percent generally speaking, and they're certainly in the top one percent by historical standards. The problem with hammering home the idea of undeserved privilege is that there's no one who can't be crucified on that particular cross. Right, right. You know, unless you're born naked in the middle of a field with nothing.

Yeah, everyone is the undeserved recipient of the fruits of the past. The fact that you have a mother is a privilege; you didn't earn that. And so, when you say you deserve nothing because of your privilege, what makes you so sure you're not saying that to everyone for all time? In which case, no one ever gets anything that they are—that they can have for their own. So it's a very dangerous game.

Well, I don't see where it can end. It's not obvious because imagine each person has multiple identities—that's intersectionality. We all have multiple identities; you're privileged along some of those identities and relatively speaking, and less along others. So if you're young and black and female, well, you're young, right? So that's not deserved; it's not like you earned being young.

Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. There is always going to be some form of privilege in every regard. Yeah, I certainly didn't feel privileged growing up. I mean, I feel like a lot of what I've had in my life has certainly been earned. I felt disadvantaged in a lot of ways. You know, emotionally—there's always—yeah, I think everybody would have their own discussion, their own, like—not their own parameters, but yeah, I could see how everybody would have pluses and minuses.

Well, that's why I think the right level of analysis is the individual. You know, when you move away from that, it gets dangerous—it gets dangerous quickly, and it gets dangerous for everyone. The reason why is the reason that you just laid out; you take any individual person, you can point to the advantages that they had. Now look, I understand that some people— I mean, I was a clinician for a long time, and I saw people who had lives that were so hard that you could barely even imagine it.

You know, I had one client who was impaired intellectually—she lived with an aunt who was schizophrenic, who had an alcoholic boyfriend who was extremely violent and also schizophrenic, who used to bother her about being possessed by Satan. She was so—I hate saying this—ashamed that she couldn't look anyone in the eye. She would walk down the street with her hand like this, sort of bowed down, because she felt so unworthy. She wasn't an attractive person; she looked like a street person. So people treated her badly, all things considered.

Now look, I saw her at this hospital that I was working at, where the inpatients were people who were in even worse shape than her. They were people so hurt that they couldn't be de-institutionalized. I saw her because she had decided that she wanted to take one of these institutionalized people for a walk when she was out walking her dog. So despite all her catastrophes, which were plenty, you know, she could still see outside of herself to someone who had it even worse. It was really something, you know?

Well, and so this privilege game—it's like, well, look to your own privilege. And I'm not saying that there aren't historical injustices, but of course there are many of them, right? There are for everyone, in a lot of ways. Yes, but if we only look at the victim side of things—anyway, even as a human, if I only see myself as a victim, I'm really going to have a tough time. I can see myself; I can respect that I'm a victim of some things, but if I only see myself as a victim, it's going to make the rest of my life pretty tough, I feel like.

Well, I know it also enjoys—it matters what you want to do about the fact that you're a victim. You want to take away from other people, you know? Right, it isn't that, and that—I don't know. I kind of put us on a lot of different planes here at once.

Oh, that's okay. Well, that was a very complicated problem, and it's one that, you know, I think is particularly relevant to your particular country at this particular time and place because the tapestry is under assault. The thing is, it's a lot easier to burn something up or to cut it up than it is to knit a new tapestry. It's really hard.

And has there been—I mean, is it okay where we are right now from an outsider's perspective? Is it scary, based on historical civilizations and stuff? Do you think we're in a place that is still kind of safe, judging from an outside or from a, you know? I mean, you're still in Western civilization; Canada's not extremely different than the U.S. Do you feel like we're in a scary place or do you feel like it's just a lot of pomp and circumstance and at the root of things, we're still at a very realistic place?

I think there are always dangers that threaten the stability of societies. I think that those dangers are real, but I think they're always there. I think that I have faith in the robustness of, say, American institutions, all things considered. It seems to me that your country has weathered crises of at least this magnitude—often far worse—many times in the past, and that's worked out.

So I think there's reason to be alert but not hopeless. I mean, on the broader scale, the world scale, let's say, it's hard to make a case that things were ever better than they are now. It's almost impossible to make the case that there was ever a time in the past where things were getting better faster than they are now. So it's reasonable to assume that everyone on the planet will be out of abject poverty, as defined by the U.N., by the year 2030.

Wow, it's half. Well, it already has—from 2000 to 2012. That was the fastest transformation in human history by a huge margin. Yeah, I've been seeing less poor people, I feel like, honestly.

Well, there's variance because in the Western countries, the working class hasn't kept up as well as they were in the 60s, let's say, in some ways. But globally speaking, there's lots of reasons for optimism. But it's a difficult problem to settle because there's always the possibility that any given problem will get completely out of hand. You know, that's the case that people make with regards to climate change. You know, well, there's a small percentage of complete—a small percentage probability of complete catastrophe.

Well, we don't know what to do with a problem like that because it's impossible to calculate how many resources you devote to something that's absolutely catastrophic, but that has a small probability of occurring. Right, right, you know, like what if the Greenland ice sheet melts, right? Well, then the oceans rise, you know, multiple feet, and that's a catastrophe. Well, how much is it worth to stave that off? It's very, very difficult to calculate.

Yeah, and plus, we're still—a lot of people are still surviving a lot of—I think there's still that heavy survival instinct in a lot of people where it's more of short-term survival. I don't even think it's our fault for thinking that way; it's just built into, like, our limbic system or our brainstem or something. It's hard; it is.

Yeah, I agree with you; it's an archetypal story. That's the apocalypse. You know, the end of the world is always upon us. You know, I said—well, go on, sorry, doc.

Well, it's because things can fall apart for us completely, and they do in our own life. There's illness waiting; there's death waiting. Like, we have a built-in sense that things can come to a cataclysmic end, and that also makes us prudent and careful and able to look at the future and foresee all catastrophes. But the problem is, is that we can also generate false positives and be unduly worried about things that are very unlikely to occur.

Yeah, so what is the template for constructive criticism of a social institution? In other words, if there is a wrong way to do it, where you're creating a void and not offering a better solution, what is the better approach or what might be, you know, I got—well, known, I suppose in part because of my injunction to people that they clean up their room. My closet, by the way, is a mess. I haven't been able to clean it up for like three years, so there's this English common law principle with regards to the distribution of power. I think it's English common law, that there are certain responsibilities of the family and the community in the town and the state and the federal government and the international organizations.

But you want to have the most proximal level possible take responsibility for a given enterprise, and I think that's a good philosophy personally. You want to make changes? Start with what's under your control. Start with changing those things that will hurt you if the changes go wrong. There's a good one, you know? It's better, I think, to put your life together than to go worry about parading around and being a social activist. I think most of that's fraudulent, and I think it's appalling that students learn or people learn to do that mostly at universities.

I think it's appalling. Fix up your own life, and that doesn't mean you shouldn't be involved in the community, but I believe that you have to earn that right. Not only—not because there’s something more wrong with you than wrong with anyone else. It's just that you don't want to—if you operate at a level that's beyond your competence, all you're going to do is make catastrophic mistakes. Practice locally till you're competent, and then if you dare, move out a little bit, you know, as you mature and you gain some—when I used to work for the NDP, the socialists, back when I was 14 or 15, one of the things I came to realize, I think I realized this when I was 16 and went to university, it's like I woke up one day and I thought I had this ideology in my mind, you know, about how the world should be structured.

I woke up one day and I thought, "What the hell do you know? You don't have a family; you don't have any experience; you don't have a job." Like, you're a—pop! I mean, I was smart enough; I verbally could hold my own, and my head was full of ideas. I could defend them, but you know, at the same time that I was a socialist kid, I sat on the board of governors for the local college, and almost all the people on that board were local businessmen, most of them immigrants, because northern Alberta was an immigrant—like, it was only 50 years old. Everybody had moved there; it was a new place. It was the end of the frontier, literally. We were at the end of the railway, the northernmost tip of the North American prairie, and there were all these conservatives sitting on this board, and me.

What I found was I actually respected these people. Like, I didn't—I wasn't—my ideology, my explicit ideology was antithetical to theirs. But when I interacted with them one-on-one, I thought, "These people have made something of themselves." When I talked to the activists, I never got that impression. I thought, "You guys are resentful as hell, and you don't know anything! You've never done anything, but you're noisy and self-righteous." So that put a lot of cognitive dissonance—that filled me with cognitive dissonance.