Iceland: 12 Rules for Life Tour: Lecture 2

Give him a warm welcome.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson:

Thank you, thank you very much. It's very nice to be here and to see you all come out to spend a couple of hours thinking about difficult things. There seems to be an appetite for that, which is really something, so let's exploit it.

So, I started working on the ideas that I outlined in "12 Rules for Life" a long time ago. It really started when I was about 13. I was a junior high school student and I met this librarian who was kind of an eccentric person, a very well-educated person. I used to hang around with my delinquent friends in the library, which tells you how eccentric the librarian was because that's not normally the place where delinquent kids hang out, you know.

But she talked to us like we were adults and that was a refreshing experience. She knew that I'd like to read, and she started giving me real books. She gave me "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," which was the first book published by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union. It's a story about the day of a political prisoner in a work camp. And "Brave New World," and "1984," and "Animal Farm," and Rand's books, which was quite interesting because she was the wife of our Member of Parliament, who was the only member of the Opposition in our province. He was a socialist, an NDP—New Democratic Party leader, as a matter of fact.

But despite that, she gave me Rand's books because she thought that I should be exposed to the other side of the argument. So I read "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Well, she was the first person who helped me discover literature, let's say. At the same time, I got interested in what had happened in Nazi Germany, and I wrote an essay about that when I was about 13 or 14 about Auschwitz and what had happened there.

I never read that; it really never left my mind, I would say. I think I read Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" at that point, which is a book I would highly recommend. I have a reading list on my website, by the way, at JordanBPeterson.com. There was a variety of books there that have really influenced me, and I put them up for other people's use.

Anyways, I never—what I learned about Auschwitz and Nazi Germany never really left my mind because I couldn't understand how people could act that way, how they could not only be possessed by an ideology to the degree that the Germans were—a very civilized country, Germany, you know. So it was I suppose even a more spectacular shock that something so catastrophic happened there.

There wasn't just the ideological possession; it was the cruelty, the gratuitous cruelty in the service of that ideological possession that I couldn't understand. I couldn't establish a relationship between my own being and those patterns of action. As I got older, that concern transformed itself into an obsession, I would say, not so much with what had happened in Nazi Germany but with what was happening as a consequence of the collectivist philosophy per se, which you might think of as something that manifested itself both on the right in Nazi Germany and then on the left in all the multitudinous and catastrophic communist regimes that characterized the bulk of the 20th century and their insane murderousness.

That probably culminated for me in the 1970s when I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago," which is another book that everyone should read because in some sense, it might be the defining document of the 20th century. The fact that everyone in the West isn't familiar with that book is actually a signal of our catastrophic moral failing, I would say.

I started writing this book called "Maps of Meaning" in about 1985, although I had been working on variants of it before that. What I was trying to understand were the psychological motivations for the Cold War, something like that. Many of you are old enough to remember what it was like in the 1980s. We just went and visited the house in Reykjavik where Gorbachev and Reagan met, which was quite something to see when they decided they were going to bring at least some of the insanity to a relative halt. Thank God.

The '80s were a very contentious time. You know, the Cold War sort of peaked during two times: it peaked in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I don't know if you know this, but I visited a nuclear missile site in Arizona about ten years ago. It was a decommissioned missile site. Intercontinental ballistic missile—intercontinental ballistic missiles are very large rockets that can go halfway around the world. They are ballistic, which means they have the same function as a bullet.

The bullet is ballistic because, once you fire it, it's gone; you don't control it after it leaves. So once you launch a ballistic missile, it's launched—there's no calling it back. They told us they did a simulation launch, which was a very eerie thing.

To launch a nuclear missile is a big console that sort of looks like the Star Trek control module, let's say. One person stands here, and one person stands about 20 feet away; each have a key around their neck, and they put the key in the lock simultaneously and turn it for ten seconds. At the end of ten seconds, the missile is gone, and that's that—they both have their keys in the lock.

In 1962, we came close again in 1984 when, I don't know if you know this, a Soviet missile detection system signaled the launch of four or five missiles from North America, and a single Russian soldier decided that it was a false alarm and refused to push the button that would have resulted in major retaliation. He just died about a year ago; you can read about him on Wikipedia.

Anyways, I read Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s, and that made me even, I would say, more obsessed with what was happening on the world stage. I was trying to understand why it was that the systems of belief that we inhabited, let's say, one typifying the Soviet Union and similar states—Maoist China, North Korea, wonderful places like that—versus the West.

We each had our own way of construing the world. The ways of construing the world were set at odds with one another, and the fact that they were set at odds with one another appeared to be so significant that we armed ourselves with 50,000 hydrogen bombs on each side. Something like that, I don't know how much you know about a hydrogen bomb. You know about atomic bombs; you know that a hydrogen bomb has an atomic bomb for the trigger, right? So like the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, that was something that was a fission bomb, not a standard atomic bomb—first generation—but hydrogen bombs are incontestably more powerful than that.

We were producing them in the tens of thousands. It's not like we don't have any now, but it was really some insanity in the 1980s, and people seemed to have a very itchy trigger finger. So I was very confused about this in two ways. One, from a psychological perspective, because by that time, I did study psychology instead of political science, which was my original major. I got disenchanted with political science because I didn't believe that people were fundamentally motivated by economic issues. I still don't believe that that's true.

They're motivated by whatever they're motivated by; it can't be captured by economics, not precisely. I was very curious about what it was that was so important about a belief system that people would risk putting the entire planet to the torch to ensure that their particular mode of construing the world prevailed.

It was an interesting psychological problem: what was so important about a belief system that would justify destroying everything here, risking destroying everything? Because that was certainly the situation we put ourselves in. More to the point, I guess, or equally to the point, I was interested in two other things. One was were these differences in belief systems just arbitrary?

That's actually a postmodern question; I didn't know that at the time. No, because you might say—postmodernists do say there's a very large number of ways of interpreting the world, and it isn't obvious how you determine which of those ways are correct. So perhaps you can't determine that any of them are correct. As a consequence of your inability to determine if any of them are correct, then you have to turn to something like a power dispute to establish which interpretation is going to take precedence.

I would say in a nutshell that's a postmodernist theory now that’s tainted to some degree with Marxist preconceptions, but we won't get into that. But that's basically the idea, and it's an idea with a certain amount of justification. There are a very large number of ways of interpreting the world, and it isn't obvious which way or ways are right or why they’re right, so it's a complicated problem.

I was curious—was this merely a difference of opinion? The West had a certain set of axioms that it was acting out in the world, and the Soviet bloc and the rest of the communist countries had another set of axioms, and they were both arbitrary? Or was there something deeper at stake?

So that was question number two. Question number three was was there an alternative to brutal combat? Was there an alternative way of solving the dispute to brutal group combat, something like that? I always believed that if you understood a problem, you could solve it.

In fact, if when you analyze the problem, a solution didn't emerge from the analysis, then you actually didn't understand the problem. I thought if I delved into the problem deeply enough, then maybe I could figure out what might constitute a solution, assuming there was such a thing, because I could—I knew after writing a fair bit of it—there was a real problem.

You can get belief systems that are locked in combat, and then obviously the terrible consequence of that is the combat. But then I also knew, and this was probably from reading Nietzsche more than anything else, that if your belief system collapses, you might say, "Well, I don't want to fight with you about whose belief system is correct; I'll just let my mind go."

But the problem is if you let your belief system go, then you're swamped by nihilism and hopelessness, and that's not helpful. First of all, it's very unhelpful psychologically because it produces emotional pain and anxiety, and maybe at unbearable levels. You can't have a pointless life; it’s a suffering—a pointless life is pointless suffering. People can't sustain that without becoming demoralized.

That's only where they start: demoralized, bitter, cruel, resentful, angry, hostile, murderous—genocide alike—those things follow one from another if things are sufficiently hopeless. You can't just let your belief system go, but if you're locked into it and there's another one that you're competing with, then the consequence is war. It's like, so what is it? Nihilism on the one hand and war on the other. Neither of those seemed, especially given the outcome of, say, the Third World War, acceptable alternatives, but I couldn't see that there was anything else other than those two alternatives.

So that's what I tried to lay out in this book, "Maps of Meaning." Most of the thoughts that I expressed in "12 Rules for Life"—not all of them—were developed during the fifteen-year period that I worked on that book. I worked on it, I would say, obsessively really; I wrote about three hours a day, and I thought about it for pretty much twelve other hours.

I was thinking constantly. It's not obvious why, but well, I told you why. For some reason, all that manifested itself to me as a cardinal problem. But I concluded—and tried to lay out the rationale for this—that the fight between these two belief systems, let's look at the belief systems: it's not communism versus the West. It's not communism versus the free market. It's different than that.

It's collectivism in its far-right form, let's say—the far-right form of the Nazis—and the far-left form of the radical leftists, the Communists. That's collectivism versus individualism. That's the fundamental conflict. There are variants of the collectivist viewpoint, but it doesn't matter; they can be grouped under the rubric of collectivism.

There are important differences, but we don't have to get into that. The Western take wasn't collectivist; it was individualist. The central idea of the West was that although people obviously aggregate into groups—many different groups, because all of you are members of many different groups: ethnicities, genders, sexes, races, family groups, community groups—you can be grouped a very large number of ways.

You tend towards the adoption of something approximating a group identity because you take care of your family, and you're a member of your community. You have a certain amount of justifiable patriotism in relationship to your state. The group identity is definitely part of who you are. The question is what's the fundamental defining characteristic of who you are, and the collectivist definition is that you are the avatar of a collective, and that's fundamentally who you are.

But the Western perspective is not that. The Western perspective is that despite the fact that people have an individual level and a collective level, the individual level is to be regarded as paramount. You're to be treated above all as an individual.

Now, I looked into that very deeply, and I thought that isn't arbitrary; it's actually correct. That's the right way of looking at the world. You might say, "Well, what do you mean the right way?" And of course, that's the right question because that is the question: if something's the right way of looking at something, why is it the right way of looking at it?

But I want to put a little spin on that too because usually when we talk about individualism in the West, at least in the modern world—maybe let's say for the last 50 years or something like that—maybe it's after World War II; I don't know exactly the parameters. It doesn't matter. Certainly, since the 1960s, when we think about the tradition of individuality in the West, we think about the tradition of individual rights.

And there's a problem with that because the fundamental individual tradition of the West is not individual rights, and rights have a problem. Rights are sort of like your privilege compared to other people. "I have these rights, and don't tread on them." That walls me off and makes me privileged in some sense. It means that I have the right to do things. I have the right to pursue my own interests. I have the right to pursue happiness, for example—that's explicitly laid out in the American system.

The rights are what is special about me, and so when you look at individuality or individualism from that perspective, you can think about it as a selfish idea, and it's often criticized by collectivists precisely for that selfishness. But the fundamental idea of the individual in the West isn't predicated on rights, even though that's important. It's predicated on responsibility.

Right, so your role as an individual in the West isn't to be the bearer of rights or intrinsic rights, even though those are important. Your responsibility as an individual in the West is to bear the responsibility of an individual, and it's in bearing that responsibility that you set yourself right and your family right, and you keep the state on track.

It's not from expressing your rights; it's from shouldering your responsibility. I would say that the reason that you have rights in the West is so that you can shoulder your responsibilities. It's not the other way around—it’s so that you can do what's best on your behalf and, in that manner, do what's best on your family's behalf and, in that manner, contribute to the degree that you can to the community.

If you do all those things simultaneously, which means accepting the responsibility for that, then things move ahead as well as they can move ahead, which doesn't necessarily mean well because life is very difficult, and there’s no sure way through it.

There are only less-bad approaches that might be a way of thinking about it, and the least bad approach you can manage is to shoulder your responsibilities as an individual. It's— I would say that one of the things that drives the collectivist ethos, which is often formulated in terms of compassion for the oppressed, which is something we'll talk about a little bit later, is actually a deep desire to, at all costs, avoid that responsibility.

It's no wonder because the responsibility is overwhelming. Say the world fundamentally is a tragic place—right? It's a place in which each of us is broken, and it's contaminated by the ever-present reality of trial and malevolence. To shoulder the responsibility, first for even admitting to that, and second for assuming that you are duty-bound, let's say, to do something about that.

Well, that's a task that anyone who has his or her eyes open should be leery of accepting. I would say, well, perhaps there's no credible reason for accepting it, except that every other alternative is worse. And so that's a brutal fact. The antidote to collectivism is individualism but it's not the individualism of the privileged person with rights; it's the terrible burden of the individual who determines that he or she will shoulder their responsibility.

I developed that idea in "Maps of Meaning," and I made a lot of lectures about that, many of which are on YouTube, some of which have become widely viewed, I would say, by hundreds of thousands of people now. That course always had a dramatic effect on my students, and their most typical comment—there are two classes of typical comments that I got from students about my "Maps of Meaning" courses.

It's the same comments that I get from people now when they come and talk to me about my lectures. The first comment is, and this is about maybe a quarter of the people—watching the lectures or taking the course enabled them to put words to things they knew they knew but didn't know how to say.

That's fine because that was an explicit purpose of the writing and the course. The second is that it helped people straighten out their lives. That's also not that surprising to me because a lot of what I integrated into that book and the lectures, and then the lectures that were also associated with my personality course, were ideas from the great clinical psychologists and psychiatrists of the century—there were a dozen of them or so, or maybe 20—who were all outstanding geniuses of slightly different types who learned all sorts of things about how people could put themselves together properly as individuals.

If you learn about those things, they're actually really helpful. That's not surprising because they sit at the core of an entire domain of science and art, let's say, devoted to improving people's individual lives. I wove the responsibility idea into "Twelve Rules" because that's really what it is in some sense—it’s a call to the voluntary adoption of maximal individual responsibility.

It’s a psychological work, not a political work. Now, I think the reason that it's attracted so much political attention, let's say, some of which Gunlogger referred to in the introduction, is—well, there are two reasons. One is because I took what might be regarded as a political stance about some compelled speech legislation in Canada.

I never regarded that as a political move because I regarded the legislation itself as something that wasn't a political move. I regarded it as an attempt by the politicians to jump outside their domain of acceptable conduct into the philosophical or even the theological realm because you don't mess with the idea of free speech in a Western country. There are very sophisticated reasons for that, and it doesn't matter what your reasons for doing it are; you don't go there.

But it happened to be the more radical leftists who were pushing this forward, and because I objected to it, then it was in their interest to assume that I must be the worst sort of right-wing diehard, I suppose, because otherwise they'd have to contend with my actual arguments.

It's simpler just to shoot the messenger than to contend with the arguments. You know, if you stand up and say there's something wrong in a place like Canada where most things aren't wrong, it's reasonable also for people to assume there must be something wrong with you because most of the time there isn't anything wrong with the country, and so a certain amount of testing is a reasonable thing for people to do, I guess.

The other element of this that's political in some sense, though, is that within the collectivist viewpoint, this is something that's very interesting with regard to free speech. I didn't really figure this out until a couple of weeks ago. Although the radical leftists—and you see this particularly in the United States now—although the Americans have a very strong tradition of free speech, the radical leftists are opposed to freedom of speech, but that's not really right; it's not the way to think about it.

In the radical leftist collectivist view of the world, there's actually no such thing as free speech. It's a worse criticism than opposing it because the collectivists believe that you're nothing but an avatar of your group. First of all, there is no you; you're defined by your group membership.

Then the world is a landscape of groups, each vying for predominance, and that's what there is. So when you say that you’re speaking your mind, that isn't something that you can do from the collectivist viewpoint. What you're doing is acting as an unconscious avatar of the power demands of your group. There’s no you; there’s no free speech; there’s no your opinion, there’s no facts for that matter. Everything is to be viewed in relationship to the power struggle between groups that, even in principle, cannot communicate.

The other reason that I detest, let's say, the collectivist viewpoint is because I see that it leads nowhere but to conflict because if people cannot speak as individuals between groups, then all they can do is submit or fight. Those are the options, right? Negotiation, capitulation, or warfare; those are the options.

The only process that allows for negotiation in the absence of capitulation or conflict is speech, because we can talk over our differences, and that discussion is going to be contentious because we actually have differences. But compared to the contentiousness of not talking over the differences, it’s a walk in the park.

You know, I saw something quite remarkable when I was in London a month and a half ago. I was on this political show, and one of the things they did in a section that didn't have anything to do with me was to show a bunch of clips from the—there's a question period that the British have evolved where the opposition can go after the Prime Minister.

The woman that was appearing with me on the show had written a book about that called "Punch and Judy," if I remember correctly, and they showed a bunch of clips of English MPs attacking the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister's response, all the way from Thatcher forward, it was absolutely vicious in the way that well-educated British people can be vicious, which is a very impressive form of viciousness.

It was no-holds-barred verbal combat, and you might think, "Well, isn't that horrible?" because it's certainly rife, let's say, with microaggressions, but it's not horrible because none of them had their hands around each other's necks, right? It was all civilized; it was everyone was standing where they were supposed to stand, and they were hurling invective and making criticisms and making accusations and defending themselves, and all of that, but it was all contained within the peaceful confines of the House of Parliament.

That's a miracle, really; it's a miracle, and the British are particularly good at that. So you leave free speech alone because the alternative to free speech is capitulation or conflict. Unless you want one of those or both, and you might, then you don’t interfere with the mechanism that enables people to state the nature of their reality and clarify that and negotiate with others.

Even though that negotiation is painful and emotionally demanding, threatening, and anxiety-provoking and aggression-instigating and all of those things, the alternative is far worse. I wove the idea of individual responsibility through “12 Rules.” Well, we might say, we might begin by thinking about how that’s related to the idea of free speech.

It's like you have to find your way in the world, let's say, with all of your peculiarities, your idiosyncrasies, and your differences, and the way you do that is by acting in the world. But the way you prepare to act is by thinking.

Really what you're doing when you're thinking—a philosopher named Alfred North Whitehead, who said something very intelligent about thinking—he said that the reason we think is so that our thoughts can die instead of us, right? It's a Darwinian idea. The way animals adapt to the world across time is that animals produce variants, variant offspring, many of them, and most of them are unsuccessful and die. But a few of them are successful enough in that time and place to reproduce and so the animal keeps living across the millennia, varying slightly as it does so to adapt to the transformations of the environment.

Human beings do the same thing, but we also have figured out how to abstract that. So what we do when we think is that we produce a fictional world that's a simulation of the real world, and we populate that simulated world with simulations of us. Then we let those simulations play out in the simulated world, and the ones that are successful we embody and act out, and the ones that are unsuccessful we abandon and let die.

We do that when we're thinking, in dreams, and we do that when we think in stories, and we even do that when we think in words, although it's not as obvious when you argue internally—which is what you do when you think. You have an avatar that manifests itself as one point of view and then an avatar that manifests itself as another, and you let them engage in conflict, and the one that loses you let go of. That's a sacrifice.

If you're discussing something with someone, and it's important, then you both put your viewpoints forward, and you analyze the consequences of the dispute, and then you walk away with, any luck, wiser than you were. So that you can embody a mode of being that’s more likely to be successful.

You do that in part, in large part, by exercising your freedom of speech. You might think, "Well, why freedom of speech and not freedom of thought?" and the answer to that is don't be thinking that you think because thinking is very hard, and most people can't think at all.

Even if you can think, you're not very good at it. I mean, think about what you have to do technically to think. First of all, you have to formulate the problem—that's hard enough—and you have to formulate it precisely. Then you have to generate multiple potential solutions to the problem, and then you have to let those solutions argue themselves into a hierarchy internally. So you have to be able to tolerate that stress, right?

You can't just be one thing if you're going to think because thinking isn't just saying, "What I think is right.” That's not thinking at all. Thinking is questioning whether or not what you think is right is right, and that's really hard. It’s very demanding.

You can do that to some degree, but you’re not as good at it as you think. Even if you're a pretty good thinker, mostly the way you think is by talking, and you talk. Mostly when you talk and think it's contentious, as you know if you've ever had an intimate relationship with someone.

Because an intimate relationship, if it has any worth at all, is a place where there's tremendous contention. But it's bounded within something approximating mutual respect and the willingness to continue to play the game across time.

The reason that an intimate relationship is contentious is because life is very, very difficult, and people are different, and we face extraordinarily complex problems together, like how to make a living, and how to operate properly in our careers, and how to rank order the importance of our careers, and how to manage our domestic economies, and how to discipline our kids, and whether or not to have kids, and how to enter middle age, and how to grow old gracefully, and how to live productively, and where to vacation—all of these things which are extraordinarily difficult problems, and the only way that we can solve them is by butting heads to some degree and communicating freely about what the possibilities are, negotiating a solution.

That’s thinking, and in order to do that thinking, you have to be able to speak freely, and you certainly have to be willing to offend someone. I mean, of all the stupid questions I've ever been asked by journalists, the question, "What makes you think you have the right to offend someone by what you say?" is by far the most miraculously ignorant.

And I say that because, well, you know, it just sets me back on my heels to some degree because I think, well, what's your claim here? Your claim is—your first claim is, “We could hypothetically discuss something important without one of us getting upset.” It's like, that’s not gonna happen. If you ever discuss anything important with anyone, including just discussing it with yourself, not only are you gonna get upset, you're gonna get so upset that you probably won't even do it.

You think, "Well, I have a difficult problem." What's your first reaction? "Well, I'm gonna sit right here and think about that." It's like, no, that isn't your reaction. Your action is to go play a video game or watch a YouTube video or vacuum your bedroom or do the dishes or whatever you can do not to think about that. That’s what you're going to do.

So, you know, and then if you're gonna have a discussion with your wife or your husband or your kids and it's about something important, it's like if you're a normal person, your heart rate goes up and it's demanding, and then you have to think it through, and then you're probably wrong, and you're gonna stumble over your words, and God only knows if you're gonna reach a solution. You can't tell if it's gonna mean the end of your damn relationship, and like the catastrophe lurks everywhere when you're discussing difficult issues.

And the rule is something like, but you can't offend anyone. It's like, well then, okay fine, then you never get to talk about anything that's important with anyone, including yourself. It's like that's supposed to be the rule. Then you think, well even if it's not quite that bad, it's like let's say so here I'm addressing about 850 people, something like that—what's the probability that I could talk about anything that any of you would ever want to listen to for more than about 15 seconds?

You know, that would grip your interest without me offending at least one person in this room with each sentence? There are a thousand people in here, you know, and some people are unbelievably easy to offend. They're just looking for a reason to be offended, so there's that problem.

But if we’re gonna deal with things that are that solid and contentious, why talk about things that we already all agree on? We’ve already solved those problems. We can only really talk about things we don't agree on; it's the only thing worth talking about. Well, of course, everyone's gonna be offended.

So for a journalist to ask that, it's like, what the hell's with you? What planet do you inhabit? Don't you understand that your entire discipline is predicated on not only your right to offend someone but the responsibility that you have to offend people? It's like that’s thinking.

Isn’t offensive, which is why tyrants hate it, right? Because one of the rules in tyranny is "Don't think." Why? Because I already know all the answers, and you're supposed to accept my answers as the tyrant. So there's no need for your thinking.

You might be saying, "Well, my life isn't going as well as it could." And the tyrant says, "Well, you don't get to think that." Because in my utopian tyranny, everything's perfect, and if you're suffering, that means you're politically suspect. Because your suffering—your inability to recognize that the Utopia has already manifested itself—your unhappiness is actually a political crime. But if you just keep it to yourself, well, we'll let you keep your head.

But if you have the—if you're driven to the extreme where you have to express the fact that you're unhappy, perhaps that your child doesn't have enough to eat, then it’s off to the gulag with you and all your family as well because there'll be no thinking here.

And even if there is, there'll certainly be no talking. Here’s something that happened recently in Venezuela. This is worth thinking about for all the people who harbor collectivist utopian dreams. Venezuela—the Venezuelan government about two months ago, this was reported in The New York Times, which is not a newspaper I would say that would be intrinsically biased against Venezuela—said that it was now illegal to diagnose the cause of a child's death in a Venezuelan hospital as starvation because the Venezuelans—Venezuelan government's answer to the problem of children starving was to make it illegal to notice it in hospitals.

And that’s a tyranny, right? That’s a place where thought is not allowed; that’s a place where free speech is not allowed. So it seems to me that that’s not a good place to go to, to say the least, and we've gone there many times in the last hundred and fifty years, and we should perhaps think very hard about whether or not we ever want to go there again.

The first rule in "12 Rules for Life" is “Stand up straight with your shoulders back.” I want to tell you a little bit about the world in which that rule applies, and it's our world, but it isn't necessarily the world that you think of when you think of our world, although it's the world you know. That's funny because it's a world you know, but you don't know you know it.

It's a world that presents itself to you in literary form, in mythological form, and in symbolic form, and you all understand it, but you can't articulate it. But I can articulate some of it. How many of you have seen "The Lion King"? Okay, how many of you haven't?

Okay, so that's a better question. Hardly— you guys should see "The Lion King" because obviously there's something wrong with you. So anyways, I want to tell you about the world of "The Lion King." Now, one of the things I want you to notice is that when you go see that movie or when you show it to your kids—when you watch it at home, I don't care what—you fall into it, and that's very strange.

Because first of all, it's not a world; it's drawings, right? It's animated drawings of a world. It's very low resolution, and the creatures aren't human; they're animals. You've all noticed that, no doubt. The world is magical because things happen in it that aren't the sorts of things that obviously happen in the real world, but you don't care about any of that.

You don't care that the animals talk. You don't care that the lions are kings. All of that makes perfect sense to you, and that means that—which is a very strange thing—which means that the manner in which the characters are represented and the world that they inhabit is somehow familiar to you because otherwise, you wouldn't fall into it, and you wouldn’t even—and you'd notice that what you're doing is so strange because it really is so strange.

So imagine the opening of "The Lion King." So what happens is that the camera pans over the great African plain, and you see all the animals gathering, right? They're all coming together, and there's this kind of thrilling black gospel music going on in the background with an African beat. It's really well done—the opening of that movie.

Then the camera pans up like it's revealing something, and you see this structure that's known in the movie as Pride Rock. It's this structure that rises up above the plain, and it's shaped like a mountain, essentially, although it's not; it's just a rock. But it's a high place; it's a place that you can view everything from, right?

So it's a place from which you can get an overview; it’s a place from which you can see, and you're introduced to the king's little bird, whose name I don't remember at the moment. And he's the eyes of the king, and so the king obviously is something that has eyes because he has a bird, and the bird can fly around from up above and see everything and report to him.

So whatever the king is is associated with the bird, just like Horus, the ancient Egyptian god was associated with a falcon, in fact for exactly that reason—falcons can see better than any other creature, by the way, better even than human beings. So the king is the creature who can see, and the king is a lion, and the reason the lion is a king is because the lion's at the top of the food chain—that's part of it.

But the lion is a solar beast; he has a mane; he’s associated with the Sun; he’s associated with the daytime—he’s associated with power and majesty and strength. And it’s not a mouse that's king, right? It's not a rat; it's a lion, and you think, "Well, obviously the lion is king." You know, everyone knows that, even though animals don’t have kings, in case you didn't notice.

So it's not self-evident that it should be the lion, and then the lion is on the rock in the Sun, right? So the rock sticks up above everything else, and the lion is there, and the lion is a paternal lion, and he has a mate. The scene opens with them giving birth, and so it’s a nativity scene, and that's painfully obvious if you watch it with a little bit of detachment.

It's a nativity scene, and Rafiki, who's the shaman priest, lifts up the new Messiah to the sun, and when that happens, the music swells, and all of the animals go down on their knees, and it’s very—and then there's a drumbeat, and the words "The Lion King" come up on stage, and it's beautifully done.

They pan up to the revelation of the lion cub to the sun two or three times, and it’s really—it’s a really emotional moment. It’s because all these levels of symbolism lock in at the same time. You have the environment—the field where all the animals gather—so all the animals are gathering to review the revelation of something transcendent, and the revelation of what's transcendent is the birth of the new hero to the king and queen on the rock above the plain.

There’s a universal truth in that, which is why the animators worked as hard as they did to make that scene and why it opens what was one of the most spectacularly successful movies of all time. The way the filmmakers do it is when Rafiki holds up the infant Simba, the clouds break and the Sun shines on, and that’s the culminating moment.

That’s the revelation of the identity of the newborn hero with the consciousness of the Sun. And so we’re light creatures; we're daytime creatures; we’re visual creatures, right? We’re not—we don’t—we’re not nocturnal. The night is when we’re unconscious; the day is when we’re conscious.

The terminology that we use that’s associated with the furtherance of our consciousness is illumination and enlightenment, and there’s a tight relationship between waking up and letting the light shine in and developing in consciousness. The association between the rays of the sun and the lifting up of the infant is the association—the ancient association—between the hero who defeats the forces of darkness and the Sun itself, and you all know all of that, which is why that opening works and why it sets the scene for the rest of the movie.

What’s the rest of the movie? Well, we could think about the landscape. First of all, there’s a scene where Simba's father takes him up on top of Pride Rock and tells him that his kingdom—that he’s the king and that his kingdom extends as far as the light touches.

So the landscape is a place with a pyramid in it. There, at the top of the pyramid, on a plane that's circumscribed by the light, outside the light is darkness. The mythological landscape in which this story reveals itself is light versus darkness or order versus chaos.

The reason for that is because that is our landscape. We inhabit pyramidal structures; those are hierarchies of hierarchies, I think, in our society—those are mostly hierarchies of competence. We inhabit hierarchical structures on a plane that's defined by our understanding, surrounded by what we do not comprehend, and that's the universal human world.

That hierarchy itself is a cooperative structure that enables us to live with a certain amount of peace and productivity together and also to establish a value system with whatever is at the pinnacle of the hierarchy regarded as whatever is most valuable. Now, think about what happens in "The Lion King."

It’s a voyage into what's most valuable; it's an examination of what's most valuable. Now, the Old Kingdom is threatened by Scar. Scar is the evil king of the evil brother of the king—the king is the parrot—the entity that inhabits the pinnacle of the pyramid. The king always has an evil brother, and you know that as well.

The reason for that is that there's no hierarchy that's so pristine that it isn't threatened by corruption. Scar is presented as a resentful intellect, and that’s a very common trope as well; that's the evil scientist idea.

It’s not the only—only the evil scientist idea; it’s the mad scientist; it’s the evil genius. God, how many movies with a mythological substrate have come out in the last 20 years that prominently feature an evil genius? There's dozens of them; there's an inexhaustible hunger for that representation.

I mean, in the last Avenger movie you had Thanos, right? He’s basically the spirit of death who's an evil genius who thinks that mass extinction is the answer to the population problem of, let's say, the world—something to think about very seriously.

Well, the reason for that is that this state is always threatened by malevolence. Always, the hierarchy can always become corrupt and tyrannical, and the forces of malevolence, let's say, that are conspiring behind the scenes tend to tilt every hierarchy towards tyranny.

The proper attitude to take towards that universal truth is to stay in the light and keep your damn eyes open. So, well, what happens in "The Lion King" is that the evil brother overthrows the rightful king, and that again is an unbelievably common idea. You see that idea echo throughout the mythological landscape for centuries, and the reason for that is it happens all the time.

That's what happened in Nazi Germany; that’s what's happened in most of the tyrannical societies of the world, and most societies in the world are tyrannical. There's always the possibility that the hierarchies that we live in will become corrupt and counterproductive.

There are multiple reasons for that, but they're summed up in the malevolence of the arrogant intellect. It's something like that; that’s a very common idea. That's the character of Milton's Satan, by the way, because he's the ultimate in arrogant intellect. Milton's Satan is the figure who believes that his knowledge is sufficient to do without the transcendent—to do without the idea that there’s something beyond or that there’s still something to learn.

All I know is all that I need to know, which is exactly the belief of the fundamental tyrant. The evil brother of the king kills the king; Simba loses his father. Well, that’s another common idea because everyone loses their father in some sense. People grow up and become cynical as teenagers, and the reason they become cynical as teenagers is because they see that the corruption of the state is sufficient to undermine their confidence in the benevolence of the state.

They get cynical prematurely because what the hell do you know when you’re a teenager, but you’re encouraged in your cynicism frequently in our culture, which is a very bad idea. I mean, even though it is the case that the structure is always threatened by malevolence, let’s say an inhuman weakness—Simba ends up fatherless and lost and alienated from his kingdom just like King Arthur.

It’s the same story: the king—the rightful king—is often dissociated from his kingdom and forced to occupy a domain that's outside the kingdom. That’s what happens to Simba: he loses his father. And what happens? He adopts the lifestyle of an impulsive adolescent.

That’s what happens, and so he’s out there in no-man’s land with his useless teenage friends, doing nothing of any good except living for the moment. That’s the nihilistic retreat from the corrupt state, and no wonder.

You might say, "Well, if the state is corrupt, why should I participate in its maintenance? Why should I do anything that's useful if all I'm doing is furthering the development of a corrupt state?" I would say, the message in the most pathological university disciplines—the activist disciplines—that's exactly the message that they're particularly putting out to young men, which is, you live in a corrupt patriarchy—

And that means any attempts that you make to further yourself in this life as an individual with regard to your family—another corrupt patriarchal institution. With regards to marriage or career—that all that is, is furthering the corrupt patriarchy. Everything you do that you think is good in the productive sense is actually doing nothing but contributing to this catastrophic tyrannical patriarchy.

Very demoralizing, but this also opens the door for you to be as useless as you possibly can because—and there's always a temptation in that direction—because it’s easier. You can justify it by saying, "Well, if I did anything productive, all I would be doing is furthering the dominance of the corrupt system anyways."

If you haven't met people who think that way, then you haven't met very many people because that's an unbelievably common way of thinking, and it's an excuse, but it’s also a logical reaction to the confusion of competence with power. That’s part and parcel of the collectivist landscape.

So Simba grows up, so to speak—gets older at least playing this impulsive, day-to-day game. Rule seven in my book is "Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient." And of course, Simba's lifestyle outside the rightful kingdom is nothing but expedience; it's impulsive pleasure, and that lasts until—until what? Until his old girlfriend shows up, Nala.

And she'd been dealing with the catastrophe of the state. Maybe that's because women—the demands of family fall heavier on women, at least initially, and so they're more sensitive to the catastrophe of the state. Nala shows up and says to Simba, "What the hell do you think you're doing? You're useless! I liked you when you were a kid. Here you are; you're completely useless, and everything's falling apart, and the state has become corrupt, and there isn’t enough to eat and there are things that need to be done."

And he falls in love with her, of course, probably because she criticizes him, and then he’s deeply ashamed of himself because she rejects him—because he’s useless—and so she should reject him because he’s useless. If she didn't, then he'd never figure out why he was useless and do something about it.

And that’s when he meets his father. Remember, there’s an initiation scene there—the wise old baboon who was supposed to be a fool—and in the early drafts of the movie, guides him down underground so that he can reflect upon himself, which is what he does in the pool down in—in the underworld.

What he sees reflected at his own face is the spirit of his dead father—mature face. Simba looks like this, right? He looks like a deer caught in headlights; the animators have done a really good job of capturing that naive and sort of rotten old adolescent innocence, you know—that's outlived its utility.

But his father has a very set face, which means he’s integrated his aggression, and he sees his father in the water, and then he sees his father in the sky, and his father says, "You've forgotten who you are! Wake the hell up! Grow the hell up! There are things to fix!"

There are responsibilities to take on. And so, Simba’s rather shocked by this encounter and decides to leave his false adolescent paradise and to go back to the catastrophically demolished state, and he takes his friends, and he sees this place where there’s nothing but starvation and cruelty and malevolence and tyranny.

He fights a battle against evil, and he reclaims his kingdom, and as soon as that happens, the rain falls, and the plants grow, and harmony is restored. That’s fascist mysticism, by the way, so it seems to appeal to a very large number of people given the popularity of that movie.

And what is that? What’s a call to responsibility? It’s a fundamental call to responsibility, right? It is the case that we live in a field that’s defined by the extent of our vision; it is the case that we live in a hierarchical structure on that plane; it is the case that there's a kingship at the top; it is the case that that's always threatened by malevolence and sin.

It is the case that that can make you corrupt and cynical and irresponsible; it is the case that that's the inappropriate response, and that it’s your responsibility to repair the damage structure of tradition despite the fact that it veers towards corruption.

It is the case that if you take that responsibility on yourself that the rain falls again and everything flourishes. It’s correct. It’s the right way of looking at the world, and if we didn't know that deeply, everyone in this room wouldn't have watched that movie.

You think, well, it's so strange that we can watch that movie without understanding it, right? You can fall into it because you do—you might wonder, well, do people have religious experiences? Because people wonder about the truth of religion, let's say.

And I’m not going to go very deeply into that issue, but I can tell you that what you're doing when you go to a movie like that that has that mythological structure and you fall into it, which is what you do—is absolutely indistinguishable from a religious experience.

It's the revelation of knowledge that you know but you don’t know you know, and there’s something about it that’s so deeply engaging and meaningful that you will line up and pay for the privilege of being exposed to it. This is not an easy thing to understand.

If you bring your child, you'll be very excited about the possibility of going to "The Lion King," right? And maybe you'll want to watch it 20 times. My son watched the whale scene in "Pinocchio"—I bet he watched that 115 times when he was four or five years old. He just watched it over and over and over and over; I thought, what the hell are you doing, kid?

I mean, it was so interesting to watch; he was so obsessed by it, but there’s a tremendous amount of information in that movie, like an almost unlimited amount of information, and he was gripped by it and was trying, however it is that a child's imagination tries to come to terms with what the movie was representing.

And it wasn’t like he enjoyed it—not at all, not in the least. You know, and if you watch the scene—how many of you have seen the movie "Pinocchio"? Okay, so it’s the same thing. It’s one of the 10 most highest-grossing movies of all time, by the way.

There's a scene where Pinocchio, who’s turned in—he's a wooden puppet who's been turned into a jackass for some— which is supposed to make sense to you, and apparently does—and he goes to the bottom of the ocean to rescue his father, who was somehow swallowed by a whale.

So think about what you’re watching: you’re watching a drawing of a puppet turned into a jackass go to the bottom of the ocean and rescue his father from a fire-breathing whale, and you’re perfectly okay with that, right?

So, it's very peculiar, and it’s very frightening. The whale is a—it does breathe fire because it’s actually a dragon, not a whale, and they used locomotive noises to add the audio background, and the whale is hell-bent on destroying the hero of the story, Pinocchio, and also Geppetto, and it's a very tense scene.

My son was just like this the whole time watching it. It wasn’t—you wouldn’t think that he would—you know, he’s like these terrified, like a rabbit who’s being watched by a wolf, and then it makes his heart beat. He’s all exhausted, and it goes, and then the first thing he wants to do is to do it again. It’s like, what the hell’s going on?

Well, what’s going on there is not like it’s a cakewalk. It’s not that at all. It’s like he can hardly even stand to watch it. It’s so tense, especially when you’re four. It’s bad enough when you’re an adult, and you’ve seen a thousand things like that. At least in principle, you're a little tougher and a little wiser, but when you're four, that just blows you away like everything in the world does.

And yet, all he would do is expose himself to it over and over and over and over and over. In "The Lion King," like if you watch children when they go see that, they're just demolished when Simba's father dies. It just tears them apart; they can't believe that the king has disappeared. And yet, they'll watch it over and over and over and over, just like you do.

And it’s because, well, the whole story—we used to tell our son when we took him to movies because he’d get all shorted out by what was happening—and unsurprisingly, watch the hero. Keep your eye on the hero because that’s the pathway through.

And that’s exactly right because you’re supposed to keep your eye on the hero because that is the pathway through, and there isn’t anything that’s more true than that. That’s a true story. You think, “Well, it’s fictional.” It’s like, fiction presents abstractions. Abstractions aren’t falsehoods; they’re abstractions.

Think about numbers; numbers are abstractions—they're abstracted away from individual entities in the real world. But if you know the numbers, you know abstractions of tremendous truth.

Well, the abstraction of the idea of the individual hero from the collective of human action is the abstraction of—it’s more true than true; deep fiction is more true than truth. That’s a way of thinking about it: it’s more real than reality itself in the same way that an abstraction can be more real than the thing that it’s abstracted from.

All of the landscape in a mythological tale like "The Lion King" is an abstract landscape. What's common across all landscapes? Well, wherever you go, there are things that you know and there are things that you don’t know, and that's the human world.

It doesn’t matter who the human being is: you might know more than you do, but it doesn’t matter because your knowledge is still bounded by your limitless ignorance and the possibility that that domain of limitless ignorance will make mockery of what you know at any moment.

It’s a reality, and it’s a universal reality, and you have to orient yourself in that landscape, and so does everyone else. You have to deal with what you know and what you don’t know everywhere, and the way you do that is by straddling the divide between what you know and what you don’t know.

You do that by staying firmly grounded to some degree in what you understand but by putting a tentative foot outward into what you don’t understand so that you can remain stable but you can stretch yourself and challenge yourself simultaneously, right?

And that’s the proper place to stand, and that’s actually a real place. That’s the line between chaos and order, and that’s the place of meaning. Rule six again—rule seven is “Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.”

When you do what is meaningful, you stay in the kingdom that you've established, but you don't stay completely in it because you need to challenge yourself and grow, and so you put one foot tentatively out into the domain that supersedes your competence and you maintain stability and grow at the same time.

When you’re doing that properly, then the psychological consequence of that is that you're immersed in a meaningful experience. It’s a deep instinct.

So when you know—if you watch yourself, you say, “Well, I had a particularly good day at work,” and what does that mean? Well, it means that you lose your sense of time, right? Because when you’re having not a good day at work, it’s like first it’s one minute to three, and then it’s 45 seconds to three, and then it’s 30 seconds.

That’s what school was like for me. It’s like, clique, so funny. You know, I went to—I went to my daughter’s school. I used to get in trouble for talking all the time—surprise, surprise—when I was a kid, and I was bored stiff in school.

And so I would misbehave upon occasion out of pure boredom. About 21 years ago, I went to my daughter’s school to sit for a class; it was about an hour long. I was sitting there and the teacher had all the kids on the floor and was having some of the kids read to the others, and some of the kids who were reading couldn’t read at all.

I had exactly the same experience; I was sitting there, and it was like being—it's like being seven years old again. I could see the clock going tick, tick, and I thought, you know, if I was in this classroom for three days I would misbehave; at 40 years old, I would misbehave exactly like I did when I was six.

No, well, that’s no place to be, right? Because you don’t want to be in a place that’s stultifying. You don’t want to be in a place where there’s no challenge. You might even quit your job if there’s no challenge. Say, “Well, that's a good job; it gives you security,” and you think, “God, I can’t stand this; it’s eating away at my soul.”

It's all security, and no challenge. So why do you want to challenge? Because that’s what you’re built for. That’s what you're built for. You’re built to take on a maximum load, right? Because that’s what strengthens you, and you need to be strong because life is extraordinarily difficult.

And because the evil king is always whittling away at the structure of the state, you have to be awake and sharp to stop that from happening so that you don’t become corrupt and so that your family doesn’t become corrupt and so that your state doesn’t have to become corrupt.

You have to have your eyes open and your wit sharp and your words at the ready, and you have to be educated, and you have to know about your history, and you have to know how to think, and you have to know how to read, and you have to know how to speak, and you have to know how to aim, and you have to be willing to hoist the troubles of the world up on your shoulders.

What’s so interesting about that, so remarkable—and this is something that's really manifested itself to me as I've been doing these public lectures.

I’ve been talking about responsibility to people, which doesn’t seem to happen very often anymore, and the audiences are dead quiet. I lay out this idea that life is tragedy tainted by malevolence. Everyone says, “Yeah, well, we already always suspected that, but no one has ever said it quite so bluntly.”

It’s quite a relief to hear that I'm not the only person who has those suspicions. Then the second part of that is the better part, and it's the optimistic part, which is despite the fact that life is a tragedy tainted by malevolence at every level of existence, there’s something about the human spirit that can thrive under precisely those conditions if we allow that to occur.

As difficult as life is, and as horrible as we are—our capacity to deal with that catastrophe and to transcend that malevolent spirit is more powerful than that reality itself. I think that's the fundamental issue; I think that's the fundamental issue of the Judeo-Christian ethic, with its emphasis on the divinity of the individual.

As catastrophic as life is, and as malevolent as people can be—and that’s malevolent beyond belief—fundamentally, the person has in spirit the nobility to set that right and to defeat evil. More than that, the antidote to the catastrophe of life and the suffering of life and the tragedy of life that can drive you down and destroy you is to take on exactly that responsibility and to say, “Well, there’s plenty of work to be done, and isn’t that terrible?”

There isn’t anything so bad that we can’t make it worse and certainly try very hard to do so; but I have it within me to decide that I’m going to stand up against that. I’m going to strive to make the world a better place; I’m going to strive to constrain the malevolence that’s in my own heart and to set my family straight and to work towards the betterment of anything, of everything that's in front of me.

The consequence of that—the immediate consequence of that is that when you make the decision to take on all of that voluntarily—which is to stand up straight, by the way, with your shoulders back—to take on all that voluntarily, as soon as you make that decision, then all the catastrophe justifies itself in the nobility of your striving, and that’s what it means to be an individual.

Thank you.

Audience Member:

This one is good. The first one here—what's your take on universal income? Is it a fast track to new communism, capitalism killer, or a possible way out of starvation for humanity? Thank you.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson:

Well, I don't think it addresses the fundamental problem. I think it's a—I think it's a mirror of the rights-responsibility problem. You know, you might say, well, everyone has a right to the basics of life. First of all, that's a debatable proposition because the question is who's going to provide those necessities.

The answer shouldn't be "someone else under compulsion" because each right comes at the expense of someone else's responsibility. You don't want to multiply rights beyond minimum necessity because you also multiply diverse responsibilities beyond tolerance. But more importantly than that, I would say—is, let's make it more concrete.

So, let's imagine that as the technological revolution progresses, more and more people will be in danger of being replaced by intelligent machines. Now, we don't know if that's true because it hasn't happened yet, right? Everyone has been predicting that that was going to happen since, like, 1960, and it hasn't happened, and so there may be an infinite amount of work, and we're never going to run out of work. I suspect that's probably the case.

But let's assume that people do get dispossessed as technologies transform, and then we have the problem of the development of people who have no viable means of making a living. The question might be, well, what's the fundamental problem there?

One answer is, well, they don't have any money. But I actually don't think that that is the fundamental problem. I've had many people in my clinical practice who were unemployed and had money. Now, they didn't have a lot of money, but they had enough money—enough money to keep private at bay, let's say, and enough money to—well, that was the rub—enough money to get themselves into plenty of trouble.

So one of my clients, for example, was a—I liked him quite a lot, and he had worked in a hospital, and he'd been hurt, and then he got onto painkillers because he’d been hurt, and then he got addicted to painkillers, and then he got addicted to cocaine. His life took a bad nosedive, and he was actually pretty good unless he had money.

But as soon as he had a check, it was he was gone; he was in a ditch; he was in a bar; he spent all his money. He was facedown in the ditch, and that’s where he woke up the next day. The reason I'm telling you that story is because it wasn’t that he didn’t have money; that wasn't the problem, really. The problem was that he didn’t have a purpose; he didn’t have a place anymore.

He got thrown out of the structure that would have enabled him to find productive meaning. You know, you might have said, "Well, he should have been able to conjure that up on his own," and perhaps that's the case, although he wasn't the world's most sophisticated person.

You know when people vary substantially in their sophistication, and he didn’t have a good family; he didn’t have a support network around him. He was kind of a lost character in many, many ways, and so it was easy for him to fall out of the world, which is what he did. Providing him with money was not going to fix that.

What is going to fix that? Well, that's a good question. I mean we have a program—some of you might be interested in it. It's called—it's part of a suite of online writing programs called the Self Authoring Suite. It’s at selfauthoring.com, and one of the programs is called Future Authoring.

We've experimented with this program in an attempt to address this problem. So I want to tell you tonight the idea that we live out a story, and we need a purpose to live out that story properly, and what that implies is that you need a purpose; you need a point; you need a name; you need a precise aim; you need a name that’s of sufficient nobility—I can't think of any other word—sufficient nobility to justify your miserable existence even to yourself, and you need to develop that aim.

And so we built this program. I started working on it about 15 years ago when I was giving my students exercises to do at university. One of the exercises I had them do was that they had to pick a small problem, maybe in their family or with their room, and fix it—not try to fix it, you know, but actually pick a problem that was small that they could fix.

Clean up the cigarette butts in the yard outside the residence; clean the room. We had one kid whose mother had died, and the family got kind of fragmented, and he decided that he was going to take over the maternal duties in the household.

Kids were supposed to write about what happened when they tried to put this into practice because doing things like that is way more difficult than anybody ever realizes. He tried to become mother, and the family needed a mother, and he encountered all sorts of terrible resistance, which is completely unsurprising.

I mean, first of all, people in his family were annoyed that he would dare to try to take their dead mother's place, you know, even though he was trying to do it for the best of reasons. We played with that for a couple of years, and that was very interesting. Then I realized that I was teaching students all these stories about purpose, but nobody had ever had them write a story about their purpose, essentially.

So I thought, wasn’t that interesting? Here are these kids; they've been in university; they've been in school for 15 years, and no one has ever sat them down and said, “Well, what sort of character do you want to develop? Who should you be? Why don’t you write that out and justify it?” You know, six pages, something like that, with the same amount of care and attention that you might spend—or even more—on an essay about the War of 1812 or something like that.

I thought, well, more. I thought about that, the more flabbergasted I would say I became because I thought, well, how is it possible that we could set up a system and run people through it for 15 years and never have them force to figure out who they wanted to be and to justify it in an articulate manner?

And so, I built this program with my colleagues to help people do that. I used it in my classes first. So I thought, okay, well, here's the game. This is like rule two: treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping.

That doesn't mean be good to yourself; it doesn’t mean let me be nice to yourself; it doesn't mean give yourself an easy life. That isn’t actually what you do to people if you care for them. You actually present them with something like an optimal challenge. That’s what you do with kids if you love them, as you present them with an optimal challenge so they can develop and grow.

So that’s what you should do for yourself if you're taking care of yourself. So I thought, okay, well here’s the game: First of all, assume that you're worth taking care of and that it's your responsibility to do so, even if you don’t like yourself very much.

Lots of people don’t, and they have their reasons. Because everybody is very aware of their own flaws, right? Unless you're narcissistic, you’re more aware of your own flaws than of anyone else’s flaws, and maybe you’re not very happy with yourself, and you don’t think that you deserve to have an okay life.

So you punish yourself, and you set yourself up for failure, and that happens all the time. Or you just don’t aim or you don’t have any goals or you know—you're guilty and resentful and feel that you should be punished, so you have to abandon all that. Treat yourself like you're someone you're responsible for helping.

Imagine yourself three to five years into the future; you get to have what you need if you’re taking care of yourself—you can have it—but you have to figure out what it is because you’re not going to get it unless you aim at it, and that’s rule ten: be precise in your speech.

The reason I wrote that rule is because you can be bloody sure that you’re not going to hit a target unless you aim at it, and the more precise you make the target, the higher the probability that you'll aim at it—that you’ll hit it when you aim at it.

So what do you want? You think, “Well, I don’t want to even think about what I want.” Because as soon as I figure out what I want, then I've made clear my conditions for failure, and it’s the last thing I'm gonna do. These people enveloped themselves in vagueness so they don't have to confront their own failure.

But then they fail and just don’t notice, except for maybe, you know, two decades later when it’s too bloody late, and then they’re all catastrophically hurt because they wasted their life. That’s a very bad plan; it’s better just to figure out what you want and to tell yourself and then to tell your partner and to tell the people around you, and maybe you can get it.

Or maybe, at least while you're struggling towards it, you'll come up with a better plan, which is more likely the case. What do you want from your family? If you could have what was good for you, what do you want from your intimate relationship?

How are you gonna educate yourself because you don't know enough? What do you want for a career or a job because not everyone has a career? How are you gonna spend your time outside of work in a productive and meaningful manner?

How are you going to resist the temptations of drugs and alcohol and sexual misconduct, let’s say? Because those are the big three. How are you gonna maintain yourself physically and mentally? Well, those are seven good questions; you can have what you want.

What do you want? It's an operational realization of the New Testament principle: ask and you will receive; knock and the door will open. You think, well, no, there’s no possibility that that’s the case.

It’s like, actually, it is the case. If you don't specify what you want, you won't get it, and if you specify what you want, and you want it—which means you're willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get it—then the probability that you’ll get it expands immensely.

Miraculously, in some sense, now of course, it assumes that what you want is within the bounds of appropriate reason, let's say, but you could also dream big, and there’s always the possibility that it'll work out too.

So, people ask those questions, then they write for 15 minutes. “Okay, your life is the way you want it to be in four years; what does it look like? Write as much as you can. Don’t worry about being too accurate; don’t worry about grammar, spelling, don’t worry about getting it right because you're not gonna get it right anyways; just sketch the damn thing out.

If you have what you wanted, what would it be?” And then we have them do the opposite, which is, “Alright, take stock of yourself for a minute; all your weaknesses and inadequacies and resentments and sinful tendencies, let’s say. Now, imagine that you let all of that go and occupy you; just where—which little corner of hell would you occupy in three to five years? Why don’t you write about that?”

Everyone knows where they go if they let themselves. So then you have something to avoid, and you have something to strive for, and that makes you optimally motivated because maybe you’re afraid, you know?

You find out you don’t like your job, and you’re afraid to change your job. Then you think, “Oh, well, if I don’t change my job, then I’m heading for this little corner of hell that I outlined.” You think, "Well, that’s not a very good plan."

It’s very threatening and stressful to change my job, but it beats the hell out of ending up there. And so then you have your anxieties behind you pushing you forward instead of in front of you stopping you cold.

Then we ask people to write a plan to implement their positive vision to justify it—to come up with a strategy for making it into a real-world realization. We tested that on thousands of university students now, and the upshot was that it decreased the probability that they would drop out of university by 30%.

In fact, in Canada we did it for 90 minutes before kids went to college in the fall. They came to their summer orientation, and they either wrote for 90 minutes about something that required writing, but that wasn’t so relevant, or they wrote out a plan, and it dropped the dropout rate among young men 50% in the first semester.

It had the biggest effect on young men who didn’t do that well in high school and who weren't oriented towards a professional career. The consequence of that was that the university used it for one year and then stopped doing it, which was not surprising in the least.

But the reason that I'm laying out this long story for you is because that’s what people need. They need a differentiated and delineated purpose; it's way more important than the money. I know you need money for God's sake; I'm not ignorant; everybody needs money; that's not the point here.

It's the provision of money without purpose that's not helpful. People need a purpose, and they need that to develop for themselves, obviously because it's something you have to participate in, but it's something that society has to foster.

The reason they need that purpose is because that's what gives their life meaning. Think, well, do you really think that you would be satisfied if you had money without responsibility?

So what? Okay, God, no responsibility because that's what everyone wants. It’s like I had a client; he wanted to retire when he was kind of young and he—and I said, “Well, what’s your retirement dream?” He said, “Well, I envisioned myself on a beach in a tropical island with a margarita in my hand.”

What the hell is that? It’s like, “Okay, let’s play that out. Let’s be adult about this.” Okay, so you go down to your—this guy, like redheaded white guy—you go down to the Caribbean, and you sit on a beach, and you're sitting on the beach, and you have like six margaritas, and you're there for like three hours.

What happens the next day? Okay, you're sunburned to a crisp, right? So you can't even go out of your hotel room, and you’re hungover, okay? So now you hide in your hotel room for three or four days and you recover.

Then you repeat that every day for three months. It’s like you go outside, and all the locals get away from you because you’re the new drunk lecher who’s come down from the north, and that’s your vision for retirement. It’s like, okay, so you have all the money you want—no responsibility.

You don’t have to take care of yourself; you don’t have a partner, so you don’t have to take care of them. You don’t have any kids; you don’t have to take care of them. You don’t have a job. It’s like what