Jordan Peterson & Sam Harris Try to Find Something They Agree On | EP 408

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, along with an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com, as well as access all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on for my forthcoming book, "We Who Wrestle with God," out November 2024. I'm looking forward to this; I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

So, the moral confusion here is that you have many well-educated people who will make very fine-grained distinctions about moral norms in the context of living in 21st-century America. They'll consider words to be violence and the misgendering of people to be a profound microaggression. But you ask them to consider whether someone like Malala Yousafzai was badly treated by the Taliban, and they become tongue-tied.

Hello everyone! Today I have the opportunity to talk to Sam Harris once again. Sam and I have spoken many times, usually publicly in the past, trying to sort out our mutual understanding in relationship to such topics as morality. Fundamentally, both Sam and I are convinced to the core of our beings, you might say, that there is a true and not merely relative distinction between good and evil, although we differ to some degree in how that distinction might be characterized and what the fact of that distinction means with regard to belief.

Every time I talk to Sam, I'm interested in trying to understand, for example, what he really means by objecting to the religious propositions that he does object to as one of the horsemen of the new atheist movement, especially given that Sam is also committed to what you might describe as a religious practice. He's an avid meditator and certainly believes that spiritual experience is not only real but perhaps the most real form of experience that's available to us.

So we're going to hash through that again to try to distinguish between dogma and knowledge, to try to distinguish between religious experience per se or the religious experience that's valuable and a counterproductive totalitarian dogmatism, and to try to lay that all out with a foray into the domains of meditative practice and with the occasional description and discussion of the political.

It's good to see you again, Sam, and I think the first thing that I will ask you about is—I'm just curious, we haven't talked for I think it's almost a year now; I believe that's the case. So the first thing I'm curious about is what you're up to.

Sam Harris: Oh, it feels like two years. I feel like our last conversation was in the depths of COVID, and I was in some basement lair. Things are great! I mean, it's really a nice time of life. It's just nice with the family, and it's nice professionally. I'm really in a good spot. I'm all too aware that things can change, so I'm enjoying my moment in the sun, but it's really a beautiful period of life.

Yeah, so what's good? I mean, in terms of just how I spend my time day-to-day, it's really become a semi-seamless machine for producing well-being. I mean, I'm doing what I want to do moment-to-moment and finding lots of people who want me to do it. There's not much distance between what I have to do, certainly professionally, and what I would do anyway, just because I want to do it. I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have found my path here and that it's working.

Yeah, I just have no complaints. It would be indecent to complain about anything personally at this point, except for the passage of time and the implications of that, which I know all too well.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, well, I would say that you look both younger and happier than you did the last time I saw you. You know, I got quite attuned in my clinical practice to watching people's faces, obviously, but also seeing to some degree the way that they're set habitually, you know, and you look very good. So I'm very happy to hear that.

You said something I think is of particular interest to me: that you have attributed to a good fortune to bring together what you have to do with what you would want to do, and that seems to me a sign of optimality of function, as well as the good fortune that we just described. So what is it that you think you're doing that's enabled you? I mean, I know that you've been concentrating to a large degree on meditative practice, for example. But what is it that you think you've done to your attitude, let's say, to your patterns of attention that have enabled you to bring what you need to do and what you want to do into alignment?

Sam Harris: Well, this has been happening for quite some time. I would say that it's taken me 20 years to fully get my professional life and my core interests to gel, and part of that is having built out platforms where I can just follow my interests and follow the needs of the moment, whether it's responding to something that's in the news or just figuring out what I most want to pay attention to in a given day or week.

As you know, I have both my podcast, "Making Sense," and I have the app "Waking Up," which I started as a narrowly focused meditation app, but it's much more of an applied philosophy app at this point. It's just expanded beyond meditation and well beyond my contributions to it. There are many other people on it, and so I can bounce between those two platforms however I see fit. While superficially they're similar because they're just me pushing MP3 files out to the world, they're totally unlike one another with respect to the kinds of topics I tend to engage and the kinds of interactions with the world that provoke.

It's really quite—it’s almost like I'm living two lives simultaneously. My app, Waking Up, it’s no exaggeration to say it’s almost uniformly just pure positivity coming back at me, you know, apart from the occasional software glitch that crashes somebody's phone, and we hear about that. There's no distance between what I'm intending to put out and the effect I'm hoping to have and the effect that I in fact seem to be having based on the feedback.

This was launched almost exactly five years ago, so for five years I've had this look at this kind of alternate life. It's almost like a counterfactual life to the one I hadn't managed to lead where I could sidestep all pointless controversy and annoying, you know, bad faith criticisms and just meet people at a place where what I have to give is found valuable by them in precisely the way that I would hope.

Right? So it's just like a purely positive encounter with legions of people, which again, because of my experience as an author and as a podcaster, I had lost sight of that even being a possibility. I just had lost sight of the fact that there are people in this world who have careers where they don't get any grief from the world because the world just understands what they're putting out, and they like it. People like it, and they get paid for it. It's just a transaction that makes everybody happy, so it's like opening a bakery where everyone loves the scone. And, you know, there's just nothing bad about it.

And yet, I find, you know—and I’m sure you feel the same way—I can't stay merely in that lane because there are other topics of social importance that I feel a need to comment on. So I have my podcast and public speaking or books or any other channel by which to do that. Mostly, I'm doing my podcast for that, but I still have a foot in the water of controversy, and I'm sure we’ll get into some of those controversies here.

But to have both is such a source of sanity because I can just swim in whatever waters I want to swim in on a daily basis. It's quite wonderful.

Jordan Peterson: So why do you, just out of curiosity—while there's a substantial parallel, I would say, between the situation you're in and the situation that I'm in, given what you just described—because one of the reasons that I continue to tour continually essentially is because it's completely positive, and I engage in almost no political discussion, almost no culture war discussion. Almost all of it is, well, you talk about your waking up system, and I suppose I'm walking on a parallel line in so far as I'm encouraging people to aim up. I don’t know if there's any difference between waking up and aiming up. Perhaps there is, and we could talk about that.

But it is a great relief to be in a domain that's entirely positive, but then it is interleaved for me—as it is for you—with some degree of combat, let's say, on the more philosophical and culture war side of things. How have you concluded sometimes? I wonder, Sam, if it wouldn't be just as well to stay in the positive domain all the time. I know that you are no longer on Twitter, for example, and so that's obviously one of the places where you've detached yourself from the proliferation of, you might say, unnecessary and polarizing conflict.

But you did indicate that you feel either a moral obligation or an intellectual pull towards keeping abreast of the domain of life that constitutes more problems. Why do you think that balance is necessary? Why don't you forgo that entirely and stay within the domain of the positive? I mean, you seem to have concluded that balancing them is actually better for you in some sense or maybe better in general, so why did you conclude that?

Sam Harris: Well, it's a question I continue to ask myself because, you know, you only have one life or you know I would say you only have one life you can be sure of. So why not live it in the happiest manner possible? But I do find that there are certain moments—first of all, my interests are wider than can be encompassed just by things like meditation, and narrowly focusing on questions about how to live the most meaningful possible life. It's not all just about maximizing mental pleasure or even one’s ethical wisdom moment to moment.

There are things that interest me that I want to talk about that really don't belong over at "Waking Up," but they do belong on my podcast, so talking about, you know, physics say—right? That's just interesting, and I like to do that. So there’s that.

As you say, I deleted my Twitter account, which is an important part of the answer to your first question of just what has gotten better for me in the last 12 months. That was, you know, I'm really embarrassed to say what a life hack that turned out to be—to get off Twitter. You know, we can talk about why I did if you want, but the net result has been almost unambiguously positive.

I mean, there’s a slight sense, you know, certainly when the things in the news are really heating up that I could be missing something or, you know, I'm not party to the conversation that's happening at that kind of interval, you know, where people respond to things every 30 seconds.

But the truth is I don’t have to be because what I found is that when you don’t have an opportunity to just blurt out your instantaneous response to something that’s happening in the news or something you saw in your timeline and you have to let your response to it cure over the course of days, in my case—because, you know, I have to decide, okay, is this important enough for me to actually talk about it on my podcast? And I might not be podcasting again for another three days or even a week—and so many things don’t survive that test. They just 98% of things just fall by the wayside because the truth is you didn’t have to broadcast your opinion about that thing that happened on that campus, you know, that indiscretion committed by that stupid blue-haired person, right?

So, it's just like, you didn’t have to weigh in, and you didn’t have to reap all of the attendant poison of having weighed in, and you didn’t have to worry about whether you should respond to that poison and those misunderstandings generated there. I noticed in retrospect that—and I dimly knew this when I was on Twitter but I didn’t fully appreciate it until I was off—that it was no exaggeration to say that basically every bad thing in my life, you know, apart from, you know, the sickness of the people close to me, was a result of something I had done on Twitter or something that I had seen on Twitter related to that that I felt I needed to respond to.

So it was just this kind of hallucination machine that I had invited into the center of my life, and getting rid of it really modified my sense of not just what I have to do on a day-to-day basis and what I should do, but just of my own existence, right? Like, there was something about my digital existence that was claiming too much real estate in my conception of myself as a person.

Jordan Peterson: Well, you might have put your finger on it, at least to some degree there, with something like your observation about whether or not you're willing to put time into it. You know, I've had many discussions with my family about Twitter in particular, and I would tend to agree with you that much of the negativity that I do run into in my life is a consequence of Twitter.

And so now I use Twitter to stay abreast of the sorts of things that you described that you might be able to get access to on Twitter as well, current events, and there is that temptation to respond immediately. But you intimated that maybe a good rule of thumb is something like if you're not willing to sit down and think about it for an hour, let's say, then perhaps it's not important enough to share your opinion with millions of people and reap the consequences, you know?

And Twitter is, although it's a social media platform that facilitates impulsivity, it's also a broad-scale publishing platform, and it's not obvious that you should be publishing all your instantaneous responses to cultural events. And it's a funny thing for me because it's not that easy to dissociate that from responsibility. You know, I feel that I have a responsibility to bring to light, let's say, certain elements of the culture war that are going on at a deep level, and part of the reason that I use Twitter the way that I do use it is to do that.

But then it does have that problem of intense negativity, and I learned from walking through airports with my wife—we had this discussion a couple of times. Airports have bothered me a lot ever since 9/11. I view them as—they’re like the, for me, they're the bleeding edge of the totalitarian incursion into general day-to-day life, and they've always made me very uncomfortable. I don't like lining up for the screenings and so forth, and that made me very hard to get along with in airports.

And you know, I had a conversation with my wife—a fairly detailed conversation—and our decision was if I'm in an airport and something happens that annoys me but isn't important enough to actually sit down and write about, then I have to just ignore it or shut up about it. And this has also helped me calibrate my responses.

It's the same problem with Twitter, right? Something can be irritating and genuinely irritating, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the most appropriate way to deal with it is to share your irritation in the moment. And part of the reason Twitter is so pathological, perhaps, and is such a snake pit of polarization is because it does encourage that kind of impulsive and immediate response to things that are perhaps of sufficient seriousness so that they should only be taken seriously.

It encourages many things that I think are ultimately producing some consequential delusions for us individually and at scale. I mean, it provides a kind of an illusion of conversation because, you know, you’ll tweet something at me, I'll tweet something at you, and we seem to be talking, but as you know, we're primarily talking in front of our respective audiences, which are largely different. Right?

So when I say something to you, you know, it’s my audience at my back, and vice versa. So much communication becomes performative, and that starts to degrade the good faith characteristics of a real conversation, and people just wind up scoring points on each other.

It encourages that—that's the kind of thing, you know, "dunks" are the kind of thing that tend to go viral. It selects for a kind of dishonesty. Like there's an ethic where, you know, very few people feel a real need—I certainly, anyone who's any kind of activist, politically left or right, doesn’t feel much of a need to really get their opponent's position correct before savaging it. They don't mind distorting it, especially if they can use clips of their opponent that have been artfully edited to make them seem to be saying something they weren't in fact saying in context. They will use that as a way of just smearing the person.

You want to hold someone accountable for the worst possible version of what they might have said, however implausible it really is, as long as that can be made to stick, and people just see what can be made to stick and they almost never go back and clean up their—you know, apologize for their errors and go back and clean up their mess.

People do this—you know, when blue check marks meant something, there were a lot of blue check marks who would behave this way, right? And you have journalists or people who are treated as journalists, and I, you know, as a point of principle really have always tried to avoid that. I mean, whenever I get somebody's views wrong, however odious I find their views or how odious I find them as a person, I apologize for that and correct the record. But I found myself continually in dialogue with people who didn't play by those rules.

So it's set up to bring out the worst in us and to degrade conversation way more fully than it's ever degraded in person. I mean, the thing that convinced me to get off Twitter is that I was seeing people behave like psychopaths by the tens of thousands, and I knew there couldn't be that many psychopaths, right? I knew these people couldn't be this dishonest or malicious in their lives, and in fact, in many cases, I knew this because I knew some of the people. I had had dinner with some of the people. You and I have mutual friends and colleagues among these people, and yet I was seeing the absolute worst in them in terms of how they were engaging on Twitter—not just with me, but with other people who they felt they needed to slam.

And I think we’re seeing some of this—I mean, I think there's something like this happening, I haven't really followed it, but over at The Daily Wire, you know, you're very close to—you've got Candace and Ben attacking each other. I would argue that that kind of thing is not only spilling out onto Twitter, it very likely wouldn't happen but for the existence of Twitter. There are many things happening out in the real world that happen in response to something that's seen on Twitter.

But then, you know, like some of many of these protests, these pro-Palestinian protests that have become such a concern to many of us, especially on college campuses, where you have otherwise very educated people expressing solidarity with true ethical monsters, in Hamas, what we're seeing is something's getting provoked by imagery on Twitter, however half-baked.

And then the response to it in the streets is performative because it's meant for the streets but it's really meant to be broadcast back on Twitter, right? I mean, people wouldn't be doing these things but for the omnipresence of cell phones that can be broadcast back onto social media, and so I just think we have built this reinforcement cycle for ourselves—it's kind of a feedback loop that has eroded our capacity to speak rationally to one another and to have good faith debates, and even strong arguments, and it's produced a machine for amplifying the narcissistic tendency of everyone wanting to just manufacture outrage.

Jordan Peterson: So, I think there’s something—and you’re pointing at this—I actually think there’s something technical going on, particularly with Twitter, and maybe it's disproportionate to the degree to which a social media communication system capitalizes on immediacy of response. Like, I'm afraid that we're setting up virtual environments—perceptual environments and communication environments—that aren't well matched to the underlying reality, which means they're delusional.

And the delusional direction of Twitter is in the direction of enabling psychopathic behavior. Now, there's a research literature that's emerging on that. So you see the people who are most likely to troll online—so to post things that they know perfectly well will do nothing but cause trouble—are dark tetrad types. They're Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic. And then, so it does bring those people out of the woodwork to a much greater degree than might be otherwise expected, but I also think, as you pointed out, that it does the same thing to those fragmentary psychopathic tendencies that exist in everyone.

It's a psychopathy facilitator, and the degree to which that is driving polarization in the broader culture is determinate. I think it might be driving almost all of it, right? Because my online life and my real life are so different that they almost bear no relationship to one another.

And I suspect this is something that you've been discovering, particularly as a consequence of working in the waking up space. I mean, all the interactions I have with people in public, in my actual life, are unbelievably positive, with the exception of perhaps one in 5,000. Now, the one in 5,000 can be quite unpleasant, but it's statistically negligible. But if you derived your expectation of my experience from the online world, you'd expect that half the people that I ran into would be people that hated me.

Simply, the lack of concordance is so remarkable that it does look like the difference between a delusion and reality. I think it's unbelievably dangerous. Like, we have no idea what it means to compress people to the point where their communication tilts heavily in the psychopathic direction. We have no idea what the broad-scale social consequences of that might be.

Sam Harris: So I feel, I share your experience. Again, my encounters in public are almost uniformly positive. I think the—obviously there’s a possibility of a selection effect there. The only people who are likely to come up to you are the people who have something nice to say, and then you have other people who are recognizing you who are just, you know, holding their tongues and they don’t like you.

And, you know, we’re both controversial figures, and I have to think that that some percentage of the people who notice us in public are people who are not fans and just don’t say anything. But still, I’ve seen the effect. You know, I’ve joined the two groups, and I know what it’s like to deal with the same person on Twitter in front of their fans versus over dinner. And they’re, you know, they’re miles apart.

And I just see there’s—so it is corrosive even when even in the best case when we’re not talking about anonymous trolls who are hiding behind their anonymity and just savaging you. These are people with real reputations who, you know, you actually know and you’ll likely meet again in person, and yet Twitter brings out the absolute worst in them.

For me, the very large, the 800-pound canary in the coal mine for me is Elon. I mean, look at what Twitter has done to Elon’s life, right? It’s just, you know, Elon used to be a friend. He’s somebody I knew reasonably well. You know, his engagement with Twitter has been catastrophic for him as a person from my point of view.

I mean, it’s just—it’s clearly a compulsion. I mean, he was so addicted to it that he felt he needed to buy the platform. But it is a, you know, his use of it has been so irresponsible and has produced such—forget about the harm he’s produced in other people’s lives. Nothing I’m saying now has to relate to changes he’s made to the platform. That’s a separate thing that we can talk about. You know, I’ve always been agnostic as to whether or not he could actually improve Twitter as a platform, and he may yet wind up doing that.

But I’m just talking about the way he has personally used it as a user of the platform, and the way he’s interacted with people and boosted—signal-boosted massively the profiles of anonymous QAnon lunatic trolls. I mean, he’s been completely cavalier in who he interacts with.

All the while knowing that anyone he boosts suddenly gets, you know, a million followers and has a platform that they otherwise couldn’t imagine having. So I look at him and I think, okay, if someone of his talent, who has so many other good things to do with his 24 hours in any given day, is this derailed by this platform, you know, is this using it this compulsively to the obvious degradation of his reputation in most circles that count?

I mean, he’s—you know, he can’t be canceled because he’s produced so many useful things. You know, and he’s just too embedded with things that everyone still wants, but man, if he were a little less productive, you know, in space and on the ground, we would never—you know, he’d be the next Alex Jones in terms of the way mainstream culture would view him, and it’s been terrible to see. Right? It has been very depressing to see.

Jordan Peterson: So, and I, you know, I guess I can blame him, but I blame the stimulus more. I blame Twitter. I blame—I mean, for whatever reason, he has found this to be the most addictive thing in his life, and he’s been willing to totally torch relationships over his use of it.

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Sam Harris: Yeah, well, it's definitely the case that one of the cardinal dangers of Twitter is its propensity to bring out the worst in people and the worst in the culture. I mean, I guess it's an open question whether or not Musk's takeover of Twitter will result in the dramatic improvements to the platform that might justify the risk inherent in engaging with it. So let's leave that a bit.

I want to turn my attention—our attention if you don't mind—to some of the deeper issues that you and I have discussed, and I have a bunch of questions for you. So the first thing I want to do is clarify something. My recollection of particularly our last conversation was one that I found clarified my understanding of your thought to a greater degree than our previous conversations.

I had—we had probably—because I listened to you more—was that, and so correct me if I get this wrong, because I want to use it as a platform to ask you some other questions. My understanding after that conversation was that you were driven to search for an objective foundation for moral claims primarily because you had become convinced of the existence of, for lack of a better term, evil in the world and were looking for solid ground to stand on in your attempts to both understand and combat the most malevolent proclivities. We could leave it at that.

Now, is that a reasonable conclusion? Have I got that right?

Sam Harris: Yeah, I think my motive will be pretty familiar to you. This came largely out of the collisions I was having with people after I wrote my first two books, "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation," where I was noticing disproportionately on the left, specifically, that we’ve come full circle now to this moment, you know, in the news cycle.

But, you know, mostly in response to my criticism of Islamic extremism and, you know, the urgency with which I was saying that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are sincerely believed by millions of people, and these beliefs have real consequences in the world, and they're not good ones, right? We should talk about that honestly.

What I was getting mostly from the left was, you know, what struck me as pure masochistic delusion, but it was on its own side a very sophisticated philosophy of, you know, postmodernist truth claims about the relativity of everything. In the minds of its adherents, it left us with no solid ground to stand on when making claims about right and wrong and good and evil.

So, you know, the point where it became—and this is something that I detailed in my third book, "The Moral Landscape," which is where I laid out my argument on this topic. I was at the Salk Institute at a conference that had been organized. It was either in 2006 or—I believe it was 2006—and I had said something disparaging about the Taliban in my remarks about the relationship between moral values and our growing scientific understanding of the human mind and human well-being.

I said something, you know, that should have been uncontroversial in that context. I'm at the Salk Institute, this, you know, preeminent scientific institution down in La Jolla, which is, you know, one of the nicest places on Earth, and, you know, with an auditorium filled with, you know, well-heeled people who are appearing to enjoy their political freedom and freedom of speech and freedom of everything.

I said something about, well, you know, we just know—whatever remains to be discovered about the nature of morality and human value and human well-being—we know that the Taliban don’t have it perfectly right, right? So, if whatever the optimal way of living is, we know that the Taliban haven't found it, right? We know that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out is not an optimal strategy for maximizing human well-being.

Then a woman academic—she actually happened to be or was later a scientific adviser to President Obama for medical ethics—came up to me and said, "Well, that's just your opinion," right? And so then this led me to realize just how far the rot had spread. You know, here is someone who is, you know, a woman academic who's enjoying all the freedom of, you know, however hard that can be found in Western society, presumably this is a person who would have responded to the #MeToo movement and all its moral urgency with alacrity.

Yet she was still open-minded, at least in the context of talking to me about the treatment of women and girls under the Taliban, right? And I detail our further conversation, again verbatim, in my book because I literally was so astounded by the exchange that I turned on my heels, literally in mid-sentence, and walked straight back to my room and wrote down exactly what the two of us had said because I just could not believe what had happened.

So, the moral confusion here is that you have many well-educated people who will make very fine-grained distinctions about moral norms in the context of living, you know, in 21st century America. You know, they'll consider words to be violence and, you know, the misgendering of people to be a profound microaggression—Halloween costumes that culturally appropriate, etc. This is how finely calibrated their moral scruples are over here, you know, in the quad of an American university.

But you ask them to consider whether someone like Malala Yousafzai was badly treated by the Taliban and they become tongue-tied, right? They will even say things like, "Who are we to criticize another culture?" So, anyway, this motivated me to say, "All right, the smartest, most well-educated people in our society have become unmoored to any vision of objective moral values," right?

Worse, they have become anchored to a belief that objectivity with respect to moral values is impossible, and certainly science will never have anything to say about it. So they've ceded this ground to dogmatic religion. Someone like Stephen Jay Gould did this when he had this conception of the non-overlapping magisteria between religion and science. Right?

So science talks about facts and what is, but religion talks about what should be, and all—and the totality of human values, and I think that's never been a tenable way of dividing the pie. It has this obvious defect that where people who lose their religious convictions are then left standing on apparently nothing when it comes time to say something like slavery is wrong. I literally have professors saying, "Well, you know, I don’t like slavery. I wouldn’t want a slave. But, you know, I can't really say it's wrong from the point of view of the universe."

I mean, that’s not what science does! And my point is that morality—and this is perhaps something you’re going to want to disagree with, but in my view, morality has to relate to the suffering and well-being of conscious creatures—not even limiting it to humans, but just whatever can possibly suffer or be made happy in this universe is a possible theater of moral concern.

We know that conscious minds must be arising in some way in conformity to the laws of nature. I mean, so whatever is possible for conscious minds is a statement about, at bottom, a final scientific understanding of what minds are and what consciousness is and how those things are integrated with the physics of things.

There have to be right answers to the question of how to navigate from the worst possible suffering for everyone to places on the moral landscape that are quite a bit better than that, where there’s beauty and creativity and joys of a sort that we can only dimly imagine. The question of how to do that and what that landscape looks like, those are fact-based discussions about science at every level that could be relevant to the conscious states of conscious minds.

So it’s a statement—it’s a discussion about genetics and psychology and neurobiology and sociology and economics and any—and sciences as yet uninvented with respect to causality in this place. So that’s my argument: we need a spirit of consilience across this domain of facts and values.

Yeah, there’s more to say there, but I’ll stop.

Jordan Peterson: Okay, okay, well, I’m going to pick up a couple of themes there. So one of the things that you pointed to was the incoherence manifested by this woman, and like people in relationship to micro-narratives and macro-narratives. So, you said that it was your opinion that she or the people who she might represent would be perfectly willing to be upset about some relatively minor issue that might arise on a university campus, like the wearing of inappropriate Halloween costumes, but are incoherent in relationship to making broader-scale moral claims.

Now, one of the claims of the postmodernists—this was put forward most particularly by—who was it now, who said that there were no meta-narratives? The postmodernism is fundamentally the disallowance of the idea that any uniting meta-narratives are possible. I’ll remember his name momentarily—it could be Derrida or Foucault.

Yeah, no, it’s—it’s—it's not—it’s not he. He’s the guy who generated simulation theory—a Frenchman. It’s Lyotard.

Okay, so here’s the problem with that. Well, the problem with that in part is that there’s no united action and perception at any level without a uniting narrative. So for example, if I just move—if I pick up a glass to move my cup from the table to my lips, I have to organize all those extraordinarily complex actions, right, which cascade up from the molecular level through the musculature of my body.

I have to organize that into something that’s coherent and unified in order to bring about any action whatsoever. And what that implies is that there’s a hierarchy of uniting structure. And what the postmodernists do is arbitrarily make that halt at a certain level. It’s like, so you're allowed a uniting narrative or structure up to a certain level, but beyond that, you're not allowed it at all.

And that's the point at which the meta-narrative emerges, and those are now forbidden. I don’t understand that because I think that it’s an arbitrary distinction between a narrative and a meta-narrative is an arbitrary distinction, and you can’t attend or act without a uniting narrative.

So now you seem to be pointing to something like that. So let me walk through your argument. You pointed to one. I’ll add one other which I think is a simpler defeater, which is that the claim is there can be no universal values, right? And a universal truth claim for the respect of right and wrong and good and evil, and yet they tacitly make the universal claim that tolerance of this ethical diversity is better than intolerance.

Right? So the demand is we need to tolerate—we need to find some space in our minds to tolerate the difference of opinion offered by the Taliban or Hamas, or some other group of that sort. But that doesn’t make any sense. That’s an appeal to tolerance, one that they, you know, the Taliban and Hamas don’t share, right? So we’re tolerating their intolerance.

But it’s also the tacit claim that tolerance is better, you know, tolerance on our own side is the uniting narrative, sure.

Sam Harris: Yeah, well, you see the same thing with the postmodern insistence—this is particularly true of people like Foucault—that nothing rules but power, right? Because Foucault saw power making itself manifest everywhere.

The fundamental postmodernist claim is that there are no uniting meta-narratives, but that didn’t stop the postmodernists for a second in making the claim that you could find power relations underlying every single form of human action and social interaction.

So, but this now, this meta—this uniting narrative—so you point to it in a way that I think that points out to me a very fundamental element of agreement between the positions that you and I have taken, even though we’ve had so much apparent disagreement. You point to the Taliban and you say, at minimum, we can say with some degree of certainty that what the Taliban are doing is not optimal.

And you said that’s a claim that’s so weak in a way that it should just be self-evident. Right? You know what I mean by weak—it’s like isn’t that obvious? Well, you know, I started in my investigations at a more extreme point. I would say I looked at the camp guard in Auschwitz who enjoyed his work and thought, “I don’t know what good is, but at minimum it’s the opposite of whatever the hell that is.”

And so, that was a starting point for me. And it seems to me that partly what you’re doing is that you put your foot firmly on the head of evil and say, well, this is a starting point. And even though we can’t define good, we can define it as the opposite of whatever this is.

So, does that seem like a reasonable point of agreement between us?

Sam Harris: As far as you’re concerned, yeah, although I think this is perhaps a different topic, but it’s certainly adjacent to what you just said. I think there are some ethical paradoxes here which would be interesting to consider because I think most of human evil of the sort that you and I are now describing doesn't require the presence of actually evil people, right?

I think there are evil people. I think there are true psychopaths and sadists, for whom it’s, you know, it is true to say that if evil means anything, it should be applied to their conscious states and their psychology. But so much of what we consider to be evil and so much of what produces needless human misery is the result of otherwise normal people psychologically behaving terribly because they believe fairly crazy and unsupportable things about, you know, what reality is and how they should live within it.

You know, I would by no means ever want to suggest—in fact, I’m at pains to say otherwise whenever I can remember to—that, you know, all jihadists or even most jihadists or all Nazis or even most Nazis were psychopaths, right? I mean, that the horror of these belief systems is not that they act like bug lights for the world psychopaths and you attract a lot of people who would be doing terrible things anyway, and they just happen to start doing it in this new context, let’s say, under the Islamic State.

No, certain ideologies attract totally normal people who would otherwise be totally recognizable to us psychologically and socially as good normal people, but for the fact that they became convinced that, you know, whatever the relevant dogma is, you know, in the case of the jihadists or whatever it is, that you know, in the case of Nazis, right?

Jordan Peterson: Okay, okay, well, so I would say that’s another point of agreement. It seems to me that the pathological systems that produce rapid movement toward social and psychological pathology both facilitate psychopathic behavior and attract the psychopaths. I would say it’s both of those operating at the same time, right?

And so then we have people, we have systems of ideas working in the background, and those systems of ideas draw people into their orbit and motivate them to do things that under the influence of other systems of ideas they might not be inclined to do.

Sam Harris: Seem reasonable?

Jordan Peterson: Yeah. And also, I just note in your—you might want to leave this aside, but your description of a guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work, I think it's tempting to imagine that that guard is incapable of all the ordinary forms of happiness and life satisfaction that we would recognize in ourselves because of what he is spending his time doing.

And I would say that’s obviously not the case. I mean, so the—and there can be virtues expressed toward evil ends. I mean, just unpack the meaning of that phrase: the guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work, right? So like there’s—the—you know the—I think it’s just called the Auschwitz album. Did you ever see the photographs that were taken—they were found in an attic? I mean, it’s one of the most amazing documents…

Sam Harris: Nostalgic for Auschwitz, yes, that's for sure. Absolutely!

Jordan Peterson: Well, and I think you’re—in your insistence that we can’t merely write off that pathological behavior as a manifestation of a kind of human psychopathy is extraordinarily important, right? Because we have to contend with the fact that these systems of ideas are capable of, I think, possessing— is the best metaphor.

And that’s something I want to get into with you—that those systems of ideas are capable of possessing people who are in no way indistinguishable from normal people, and sometimes not indistinguishable from people with all sorts of laudatory traits.

Sam Harris: I think you mean not distinguishable, you said, sorry.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, sorry, not distinguishable. Yes, yes.

Sam Harris: So, yeah, but just—sorry to keep derailing you, Jordan—but I would just add one more piece here. That one thing this suggests is that mental pleasure, though it is often taken as a sign of the kind of moral rightness of our current preoccupation, isn’t such a sign.

I mean, there’s such a thing as pathological ecstasy, right? You can feel bliss—

Jordan Peterson: Sadism is a great example of that.

Sam Harris: Yeah, and so I would just say that you can imagine the suicide bomber who, before he detonates his bomb, if he’s like many of them, he’s doing that with the sincere expectation that in the next moment he will be in Paradise. There is a kind of exaltation and even self-transcending quasi-spiritual positive affect there that you just have to grant that the human mind is capable of being pointed in the wrong direction ethically and feel very good about it.

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Sam Harris: Well, the positive emotion of the incentive kind, mediated by dopamine, is associated with movement towards a posited goal. And so what that means is that false goals produce false enthusiasm, essentially by definition, right?

And so that’s actually, by the way, as far as I can tell, the moral of the story of the Tower of Babel. By the way, is that you can build pyramidal structures that reach to the sky that are predicated upon either false goals or false assumptions, and the consequence of that is the creation of a state of disunity and misery so comprehensive that people can no longer communicate with one another.

So now these systems—see, Sam, the reason I brought this up in part is because I’ve been meditating on the influence of systems of ideas. I thought about these as systems of animating ideas, and I saw a very strong concordance between the action of systems of animating ideas and archetypes.

And so that’s why I started to become interested in archetypes. And so I would say that one way of conceptualizing the possession—the ideas that possess people that motivate them in a pathological direction is that they’re possessed by ideas that are archetypically evil.

And so here’s the question I have for you, and my sense is that you—and this is the same as Richard Dawkins—you guys identify the spirit that motivates people to act in a pathological direction, the Taliban. You identify that with the religious impulse.

Now, is that a fair characterization?

Sam Harris: Well, I would say that it’s not exclusively religious, but insofar as it is religious it gets even more leverage in that context. And to worse ends.

So for instance, you know, what is worse about jihadism than, you know, ordinary forms of terrorism, in my view, is the religious top spin it all has based on its motivating idea.

So the fact that it is in principle otherworldly, the fact that it is just anchored to prophecy and belief in the supernatural, all of that potentiates it in the, you know, further in the wrong direction.

So like, you know, the troubles in Ireland would have been made worse had the Irish Catholics also been suicide bombers expecting to go straight to heaven because there was a passage in the New Testament which said, “You know, if you die while killing pagans or Jews or any other non-Christians, you’ll find yourself at the right hand of Christ in the next moment.”

So like that—it’s better that there’s not a passage like that in the New Testament, and it’s better that that quasi-religious political source of terrorism in the UK was not potentiated by a clear connection to religious belief and religious expectation.

Jordan Peterson: Okay, so your claim is something like the possibility of religious justification for an unethical act has the side effect of elevating the status of that claim to morality associated with that evil act to the highest place.

So let me put that in context. So there's an injunction in the Ten Commandments—it's either the second or third commandment, I can't remember which—that you're not to use the Lord's name in vain.

And it’s the same injunction that pops up a couple of times in the gospels where Christ tells his followers to not pray in public and to not be like the Pharisees, where their good deeds can be seen in public.

And so the first injunction, the commandment, is pointing out a deadly sin, and the sin is to claim to be acting in the name of what is most high when all you're actually doing is pursuing either your own motivations or, even worse, your worst possible motivations.

And your claim seems to be that the intrusion of religious thought into the ethical domain allows for those claims to be put forward, thus magnifying their dangers. Is that a reasonable way of putting it?

Sam Harris: Well, I think it depends on the specific instance we’re talking about, but I think what I’m saying is even more pessimistic than that. It’s that given the requisite beliefs, it’s possible to create immense harm—consciously create immense harm—without even having bad intentions toward anyone.

I mean, it’s not that your bad intentions and your hatred of others somehow gets a sacred framing by religion—that also happens and that’s a problem—but in the worst case, you can actually be feeling compassion while creating terrible harms, right?

Like you can feel nothing, certainly no ill will at all, for the people you’re killing. So, I mean, to take the extreme case, there are cases where jihadists have blown up crowds of children, you know, Muslim children, on purpose for a variety of reasons.

I mean, there were cases in Iraq where Western soldiers were handing out candy to crowds of children during the war in Iraq at one point, and a suicide bomber would blow that whole scene up. The whole point is manifold, but it’s obviously to kill the soldiers and produce those casualties, but it's also just to create the horror and apparent untenability of the whole project in Iraq.

I mean, it’s just like, these are people who are going to blow up their own children. What possible good could we do here trying to build a nation, right?

Jordan Peterson: Okay, okay, but just to close the loop there, I’m not imagining that the people who did that actually hated the children, right? They just believe that there’s absolutely no possibility of making a moral error here because the children they know are going to go straight to paradise. They’ve actually done the children a favor by the light of their beliefs, right?

Sam Harris: Yeah.

Jordan Peterson: Okay, so I’m perfectly willing to accept that modification. So you’re basically saying that not only can you use the most high as a justification for your actions and as a consequence produce all the terrible dangers that are associated with that, but that that can actually twist your moral compass so that acts that are truly high are seen as manifestations of what’s best.

Okay, so here’s the problem as far as I see it, Sam. The contradiction here that I’m trying to work out is that on the one hand, we have this situation where if there is no reference to a higher good or a lower evil—because I'm going to assume those are basically the same thing—you end up in a situation where you can't do anything but take a postmodernist stance in the face of, let's say, the Hamas atrocities or the atrocities of the Taliban or the atrocities of Auschwitz because there's nothing higher to point to against which to contrast those patterns of endeavor.

But if you do paint something that's of the highest, then you run into the problem, as you just pointed out, that you can use your hypothetical alliance with what is now deemed to be highest to justify your own evil actions, but also to skew your moral sentiments so that you take positive pleasure in, let's say, in the suffering of others, even the suffering of innocent children.

So, but now on the one hand, if you drop the notion of the highest good, you end up in the morass of moral relativism. And on the other hand, if you accept it, then you end up in a situation where you can justify the worst behavior in reference to the highest possible good. Is that a reasonable portrayal of a conundrum?

Sam Harris: I don’t find—it’s a needle that we can easily thread. The way I would do it is just to say that there’s obviously a higher good, and it’s also obvious that we don’t know fully the character of it, right?

So like we know that things can get better and they get quite a bit better and quite a bit worse, and we know that better and worse—maybe that’s as multi-dimensional as you want it to be, right? It’s not just a matter of more pleasure, say. It’s not just a matter of more physical health. It’s not just a matter of more love. It’s not just a matter of more—so we can, you know, extend your list of desirable things as long as you want.

But we know that this universe offers, in the space of all possible minds and all possible experiences, there are places of unimaginable suffering without any silver lining. There’s no good that ever comes of it. It’s just a functional hell, right?

We know, even within the context—and conversely, we know that there are experiences of beauty and creativity and inspiration and love and gratitude that, you know, those of us who have had them, you know, either in meditation or on psychedelics or, you know, in other peak moments in life, you know, we just find ourselves tongue-tied in the aftermath trying to capture what was going on there.

So we know that these extremes exist. We know that there are things that we can do individually and together to maximize the likelihood of one versus the other. So if good means anything, if right and wrong mean anything, it means navigating into this space of better and better possibilities, for not just individually but together.

And so what I would say is that we don’t need to know exactly what the highest possible good is. We just have to know directionally that it’s—you know, the implications of moving right or left or up or down, right?

So if I told you, “Well, there’s a button we could press now. We have a new technology—there’s a button you can press that makes everyone on Earth a little less happy, right, with nothing that—nothing good ever comes; there’s no silver lining to this.”

It’s just everyone just gets a little crankier, a little dimmer, a little less satisfied, a little less creative, a little less appreciative of their good fortune—a little—you just go down the list, and we just decrement, you know, all the good things just by a little. Right now, we just know that it would be bad to press that button, right?

That would be a bad thing to do if we could engineer some neurotoxin to spread all over the world that would make people a little bit less good in all kinds of ways and a little bit less happy. That would be a bad thing, right, directionally, right?

And we don’t have to know the ultimate negativity or the ultimate positivity. We don’t have to know just how good human life could ultimately get without any possible residue of improvement. We just know directionally that, you know, from where we stand, the Taliban are making things quite a bit worse, even though they think they’re making them better, right?

So, we know that it’s possible to look at a specific human project, you know, standing on the outside of it and say, “Okay, these people don’t know what they’re missing, right?”

And by extrapolation, we know that there must be some place to stand to look at our current projects by which it would be valid to say, “Okay, these people—now talking about you and me and all of our most enlightened friends—these people don’t know what they’re missing.”

Right? There’s something—there are things that they could be taught that they could learn, technologies that they could invent, intuitions that they could suddenly have, that would orient them in a direction that would be propitious, that would make things better in ways that they have not even begun to imagine, right?

And so I think that the horizons into which we need to press, again, individually and collectively—these ethical and psychological discoveries—they’re all around us.

Again, this is a multivariate landscape, but I just think we don’t need to know what the perfect looks like or even that the perfect exists to know directionally that claims about better and worse are real and that they matter.

Jordan Peterson: Okay, okay, okay. So let me take you up on that because there is a line of mythological speculation that’s very tightly in keeping with the process and the vision that you just laid out.

Okay, so first of all, you made the case that you—we used the metaphor of a jewel, and then you—you said I would recast this in somewhat symbolic terms, and you can see if this is a metaphor that captures what you were expressing.

You could imagine that there are jewels of beauty and value that are as of yet unknown to us, right? So we could agree that there is a unity of good that’s transcendent and ineffable and that the goods that we see arrayed in front of us are proximal echoes of that ultimate vision.

Now, your point is that maybe now and then a descent is necessary in order to make the next ascent possible.

Okay, so there’s also a—of course, you know this idea is central to hero mythology—that dragons hoard treasure, and that the larger the dragon, the larger the treasure; and the idea there is that the more daunting the unknown territory that you are presuming to traverse, the more possibility there is for discovery.

And that the proper attitude is therefore the one that enables you to encounter that source of unknown wisdom in the most forthright and courageous manner possible.

And so then there’s a very interesting notion lurking in these stories that, let’s see, how would I put this? The most valid source of the most valid pathway towards discovering that jewel beyond compare is a pathway that’s marked out by the voluntary willingness to confront suffering and malevolence in all of its forms.

Now, at that point, these ideas—these ideas, to me, these ideas start to become indistinguishable from religious presuppositions.

And so there’s a dovetailing here—I mean, you are hypothesizing that what’s good has the metaphoric quality of a jewel; it’s multifaceted, and it’s the things that it reflects are more tangible experiential phenomena like beauty, truth, love, gratitude. They’re all reflections of a higher order good.

You made the case that that higher order good may be higher order to the point where, in its extremes, for extreme forms, it’s ineffable, right? It’s beyond our ability to comprehend and describe. You made the case that we may be able to approach that in something approximating fits and starts, and some of those fits and starts may involve a descent.

Well, the religious injunction—you see this in psychotherapy too—is that the descents that are the precondition for a more profound ascent have to be undertaken voluntarily, right? Because you see this in exposure therapy, for example.

You know, if people are stressed accidentally by something that they’re phobic of, their phobia gets worse. Right? But if they voluntarily expose themselves to the stressor, then their bravery grows, and their fear decreases in a commensurate manner.

So one of the things that I’ve been—well, so I guess the first thing I’m going to do is ask you what you think about that. So there is a—here’s another example, Sam. You tell me what you think about this. So there’s a story that’s derived from the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

So King Arthur is sitting with all the knights at the round table and they decide they’re going to go look for the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail is the container of the ever-replenishing liquid—that’s a good way of thinking about it, so it’s either the glass that Christ uses to represent his blood at the Last Supper or it’s the goblet that catches his blood on the cross—that’s the background story.

Now, of course, the Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur have no idea if the Holy Grail exists, which is a reference to its ineffability, let’s say, or of where it’s possibly located.

And so each knight leaves the round table and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him, and that’s where the quest begins.

And so there’s an idea lurking in these stories that if you want to envision that jewel, the metaphoric jewel that you described, then the pathway to that is through the darkness.

Now, you also said—and you correct me if I’m wrong about this—that your journey to whatever enlightenment you’ve managed to find and distribute was a consequence, in some ways, of entering the forest at the darkest possible point.

I mean, you were grappling with the problem of evil and looking for a solution to that.

And it is not possible that that’s a reflection of this underlying idea that it is the case that you retool your conceptions of morality itself by contending with the things that most trouble and that are most troubling—be tragedy and malevolence, the things that are in that realm.

Does any of that seem reasonable to you?

Sam Harris: Yeah, so a few—you raised a few separate points there. First, on the notion of exposure therapy being an example of a descent into a valley so that you can ascend some other peak. So, I think speaking individually for a person doing that sounds totally plausible to me.

There are all kinds of things we do that make us uncomfortable, but under a larger framing, we understand that they’re good for us, and they’re leading us to grow in ways that will redound to our advantage in the future. So, yeah, so that’s a—you know, there are dozens of things that people do and should do that make them less than comfortable in the present but are nevertheless good for them, you know, whether it’s a medical treatment or it’s just getting in good shape or dieting or whatever it is, right?

So there’s that. The place where I break from religion, I mean, certainly a religion like Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam, is just in the—it’s on many points, but the crucial point is just on the claims about the unique sanctity and divine origin of specific books, right?

I mean, the moment you're going to talk about all books as the products of human creativity and ingenuity, then we're just talking about the utility of specific books and specific ideas in whatever context attracts our interest.

So we can talk about the Bible; we can talk about the Quran; we can talk about the wisdom to be found in those books, and we also can talk about the barbaric injunctions that we want to ignore in those books. And we must talk—we must evaluate the wisdom or the barbarousness using our own 21st-century intuitions about what constitutes wisdom now, given all the challenges we face and what constitutes obvious barbarism that we want to leave behind us.

And so, the crucial—the thing that makes me an atheist with respect to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, despite all of the other things you think I agree with that make me a good candidate for being sympathetic to those traditions is that the claim about the books is so preposterous, given how easy it would be for an omniscient being to have proven his omniscience in those books.

I mean, if you just think of how good a book could be had an omniscient being written it—all the things that wouldn’t be in there that would be embarrassing now—like, you know, advocating slavery, like he—the creator of the universe certainly could have anticipated that we at one point would have found slavery to be wrong, right?

And given us moral guidance on that point, but he failed to do that. But even more importantly, it would be trivially easy for an omniscient being to put a page of text in there that would even now be confounding us with its depths of inspiration scientifically, ethically, in every other sense, right?

Jordan Peterson: Let’s see.

Sam Harris: So—

Jordan Peterson: So, let me ask you about that moment. So I’m going to throw a spanner into the works, maybe we’ll see. I’ve been spending a lot of time writing in the last three years.

Again, I’m writing a new book, and I’ve been trying to extract out the gist of the biblical corpus, let’s say. So I have a proposition for you, and you tell me what you think about this.

So as far as I’m concerned, what the biblical corpus points to is a practice of sacrifice devoted to atonement. And so the idea, we’ve already talked about this a little bit, Sam, is that, you know, there are often things you have to give up in the present in order to make the longer term more functional.

That’s a sacrificial offering, you might say, and so—and that’s the same theme in some ways as that descent we talked about prior to ascent.

And so there’s a pattern of sacrifice that emerges as the corpus progresses, and the pattern of sacrifice culminates in a proposition, and the proposition is this: that salvation and redemption as such are dependent on the voluntary willingness to confront the worst of tragedies and the deepest of possible acts of malevolence.

That that’s the universal pathway to salvation and redemption, and that’s exemplified, as far as I can tell, in the passion story.

So, I’ll give you an example. I went to Jerusalem with Jonathan Pelt, and we walked the Stations of the Cross, and I was—and that culminated with a trip to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which in principle, at least in its inception, is erected on the site of the crucifixion.

And so what seems to be happening psychologically—and I think this is something that you can assess multi-dimensionally in a consilient manner—is that the passion story walks people through the necessity of encountering the worst forms of tragedy that can beset you in your life.

And so that would be the—the worst form of tragedy is unjust suffering, fundamentally. And the worst form of unjust suffering is the most vicious possible punishment delivered to someone who’s the least possibly deserving.

And you know the times in your life, Sam, where you’ll suffer the most, I would say—and you can dispute this, but you can tell me what you think—is when you’re going to be bitterly punished even for your virtues.

And if that’s accompanied by betrayal and the baying of the mob, so much the better. And so the passion story is a representation of the proposition that in order to move towards the discovery of what’s highest, you have to voluntarily accept the conditions of unjust suffering that constitute human existence.

And then there’s a mythological corollary to that, which—so of course, death by crucifixion is a particularly unpleasant form of death, especially when it’s brought about by betrayal and at the hands of tyrants and the mob, which is what the story encompasses.

But there’s also an insistence that the pattern that that Christ acts out involves the harrowing of hell, which is confrontation not only with tragedy but with malevolence itself.

And so the idea there is that—and maybe this is what’s asserted dogmatically if it’s understood—is that there is no pathway to redemption and salvation without being willing to hoist the world’s tragedies onto your shoulders and to confront evil.

And so I mean that’s the conclusion that I’ve derived from walking through these stories and trying to understand what they might mean, and that’s pretty damn compelling, that idea.

And I actually think it’s in some ways in keeping with your experience because you—and I mean it’s taken me a long time to understand this in repeated conversations with you—but it seems to me that a huge part of your motivation has been a consequence of your willingness to contend seriously with the reality of evil and to try to set up what would you say, at least to investigate the nature of a morality that might mitigate against that.

So, well, I’ll leave that at your feet for the time being.

Sam Harris: I mean, I’ll give you a response which will indicate, I think, the what I consider to be the provisionality and perhaps even mistaken nature of that Christian framing you just gave.

Because I think it’s possible and perhaps even more useful to view evil—and it’s unavoidable to talk about evil, you know, just as a matter of shorthand in talking about current events—and I think we don’t want to lose the term because I think it’s—I think moral outrage is the kind of fuel we need at certain moments, and that’s invoked by questioning framing things in terms of good and evil.

But I think it’s at least plausible to think of evil at bottom as being more a matter of ignorance than anything else. And this certainly would be the Buddhist framing of evil.

I mean, Buddhists don’t tend to think about evil—and certainly the Buddhist teachings about this weren’t really a matter of evil versus good—it’s more a matter of ignorance versus wisdom.

And even, you know, Greek philosophers—I believe Socrates made this point—that, you know, no one consciously or very few people consciously do evil.

I mean, but you have a lot of people thinking they’re doing good in their own way despite how much harm they’re creating. So, the deeper problem may in fact be ignorance, and one way of seeing this—you can ask yourself, you take somebody—take a quintessentially evil person, you know, do you have a candidate for like the most evil person you can think of psychologically?

Who's—can you give me a name?

Jordan Peterson: Stalin.

Sam Harris: Stalin’s kind of—Stalin would be up there, I would say. So, you take Stalin. Now, at a certain point in his life, he was just a little kid, right? He was just this, you know, the four-year-old Joseph who was—in my view, I mean, he could have been a psychopathic kid. I don’t know enough about his biography, but you know, presumably he wasn’t a terrifying infant, you know, but at a certain point you had, you know, at a point young enough in his timeline, you have to just acknowledge that he really is unlucky.

I mean, he’s the kid who, for whatever reason, you know, genetic and environmental, is going to become the evil monster Joseph Stalin, right? So at what point along the way does he actually become evil?

Well, that’s hard to spe—if— I mean, there will be moments in his story where we can recognize, right, he’s now not a normal, much less normative personality, right? He’s treating people sadistically, and so I don’t know when that started. But there’s a point before that where you think, well, listen, if there would be any way to have helped this kid not become this evil monster, we should have helped him, right?

We would have helped him if we could, and that would have been the right thing to do, right? So merely hating him and killing him would not have been the ethically normative thing to have done there because he’s not yet the person who created all the harms he goes on to create.

But—but I would say that even if you go forward—even if you get him in his truly malevolent form, you know, toward the middle and end of his life. Imagine what it would be like if we had Joseph Stalin at his worst in custody and we had a much more mature science of the mind available to us, and we actually had a cure for evil.

I mean, just imagine what it would be like to deliver this cure. We can actually just modify all of the receptor sites and densities and connections in the brain so as to turn this malevolent sociopath into an entirely normal person with the normal pro-social attitudes, etc.

But keeping intact his biographical memory and the other aspects of his identity, right? So imagine being able to engineer the following experience for Joseph Stalin where you deliver him the cure for all that ails him ethically.

And he has still his memory. He has knowledge of what you’re doing, you’ve told him what you’re doing, and he has the memory of all the stuff—all the malevolent stuff he did in his past.

Imagine what it would be like for him to wake up from the dream of his sociopathy and experience for the first time what it was like to be a normal, well-intentioned, decent human being, right?

Imagine what that would be like. Imagine if you just woke up tomorrow recognizing that you had in this fugue state of psychopathy over the previous year killed, you know, 60 million people and done other, you know, odious things.

Just imagine the—the feeling of of, uh, regret to have been at all entangled with that causality; however, you know, little purchase you have on it in the present because, again, you’re no longer evil.

But imagine the gratitude of feeling of just being rescued from that, the kind of mind that would have been, you know, so cavalier about the deaths and the miseries of millions of people, right?

So that suggests, I think, a kind—that ignorance is more the problem here. It’s like evil people, because of the brains they have, because of the lives they've had, because of the—if you want to add, you know, a religious dimension to it—because of the souls they have, the souls they didn’t pick, they’re unlucky to be evil and unavailable to, you know, much of the human goodness you and I experience.

And if we could change that, they would be standing with us in a position of astonishment that they could have ever been those sorts of people.

And so I think—I do think, you know, at some level the question of good and evil is amenable to a different framing, which is more along the lines of wisdom and ignorance.

You know, people don’t know what they’re missing. That's—that crosses every possible dimension of both intellectual and ethical and relational, you know.

And whole societies know what they're missing, and figuring out what we're missing and what we’re missing is is all of our work.

Jordan Peterson: Yeah, well, I would say we’ll have to leave that for a different discussion. I would say in response to that two things, I guess. One is I think this is from the Gospel of Thomas. Christ said to his followers, “The kingdom of God is spread upon the Earth, but men will not see it,” or cannot see it, depending on the translation.

And then the other germane comment might be with regard to ignorance: this is one of the things that complicates it morally, is there are none so blind as those who will not see.

And I mean, I agree with you, by the way, Sam, is that the intermingling of ignorance and malevolence—that’s a very thorny problem, right? And which precedes the other is a very difficult thing to determine.

So, we’re going to have to stop. I’d like to talk to you the next time we talk, Sam. Maybe we could concentrate more on issues pertaining to free will and ignorance. That might be very interesting.

Sam Harris: Yeah, happy to do so.

Jordan Peterson: All right. So, yeah, well, that’d be good. Sam, for everyone watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention. I'm going to spend another half an hour with Sam behind the Daily Wire Plus paywall, and so if you're inclined to join us there, please do. That gives you the opportunity, I suppose, to throw some support in the direction of the DW Plus people who are trying to put forward, you know,