Responsibility, conscience and meaning

Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to Amsterdam. My name is Timon Diaz and I'm an editor for Hain Style, which is the largest Dutch weblog in the world. Today, I'm once again joined by a man who no longer needs any introduction, Dr. Jordan Peterson. How are you doing? Thanks for sitting down with us again. Nice to see you again.

The last time we sat down for a talk in our studio, in two weeks that will be exactly one year ago. And then what else? It was the first time you responded on video to the aftermath of the Kathy Newman interview. We also did a discussion of my distillation into five points of your philosophy. For the people at home, for the people watching, you can find the link in the description if you want to check it out.

Today, I again want to do five things, and I'm going to run through them before we start. We're going to do a year review of 2018 in which I just want to hear how you look back on last year, what you've been through, what were the defining experiences.

Then we're going to discuss how in identity politics, a collective narrative substitutes the individual experience. And then we're going to leave the physical world and go metaphysical. We're going to discuss the movie Gladiator and why it is so ingrained in my generation's psyche, more so than any other movie of its sort.

And then we're going to discuss how to become—sorry, how to become something approximating the male archetype. We're going to focus especially on the Jungian notion of individuation. We're going to really delve into that. And five, and final point, we're going to discuss the idea—it's a Jungian idea—that the artist is a portal between the dream world and the collective unconscious on one hand, and consciousness on the other hand.

I wonder if we should reverse the order of the fourth and the fifth, so start with art and then individuation?

All right, I can do that. Note it. Yeah, I think that'll make a better narrative flow. All right, we'll do that.

Okay, well without further ado, let's delve into it. Year review, I've always wanted to do that. I'm sorry. 2018, what were your defining experiences for you? How do you look back on it? You visited over 100 cities. I can't even name 100 cities, so that's impressive.

Well, I did visit a couple of them twice, so—but I think it was 115 lectures and so sums to 100 cities.

Yeah, the defining features of it? Well back in January, that's when my book came out, and it was at that point that I started to thoroughly realize that there was enough of a market for what it was that I was talking about, to risk experimenting with large-scale venues.

And I found that out because of my experience—two experiences, the year before. I had done a series of biblical lectures on Genesis, and I rented a theater in Toronto more out of curiosity than good sense, let's say, to see if there might be an audience for such a thing. The theater held about 500 people, and I did 15 lectures over the course of a couple of months, and every—it sold out every time.

Yeah, and so that, well that was—you might call that a data point. It was interesting because it wasn't obvious that a discussion of something as arcane and archaic and hypothetically outdated as the book of Genesis would draw an audience.

And the audience was also primarily composed of the people who you would think least likely to come and attend such a thing, and that was mostly men. And they healed you like a rock star; it was like loud applause when you entered the stage.

Yeah, well I guess it's such a strange thing to see, actually, that's for sure, especially in the context of the discussions, you know?

Yeah. And so, well then I went to London. I think I've got the itinerary—the timeline correct; I might have mixed up a couple of things. But I went to London to talk about the launch of my book because it was published there first.

And I think it was published on January 23rd, so that's almost a year behind us now as well. Yeah, and the publishers there wanted to arrange a public talk, and so they first rented that 300-seat auditorium theater, and it sold out ins...