2015 Maps of Meaning 10: Culture & Anomaly / Part 1 (Jordan Peterson)

All right, wait. It's good. Oh, okay. Because whenever someone just drops a village. So, we stopped last week just before I stopped talking about Stalin and Mao. One of the things that happened in the 20th century was that—or what appeared to happen—was that as soon as the classical religious substructures in the way became sufficiently undermined, they were very rapidly replaced with political utopian dreams. And what appeared to occur as a consequence of that was generally nothing but disaster.

It's not exactly a straightforward matter to figure out why. I think the case of Communism is probably the most instructive because it's the most complex. You know, you still see—it's kind of interesting on the campus—you still see people handing out the Communist newspaper from time to time. You know, which I think is very interesting because if there were Nazis out there handing out Nazi newspapers, there would be hell to pay. You know, so why is there is no hell to pay when you see Communists handing out Communist newspapers? It's not self-evident given that the catastrophic outcome of communist ideology was. I don't see how you can make the case that it was any less devastating than what happened in Nazi Germany.

I've been trying to puzzle that out for a long time—why people have different attitudes towards those two different utopian catastrophes. And I think there's two reasons. I think the first one is that the Nazi movement was definitely not universalist, right? It was for a certain kind of person and that was that. So it was for Aryans and not for the world, whereas the Communist ideology promised like universal redemption. And so, it's conceivable that it appears and appeared and still appears more fundamentally benevolent than the other.

The interesting twist, I think, is that the radical left-wing philosophies were very appealing to intellectuals. I wouldn't say that was so true about the fascists in Germany. Now, I wouldn't—I would also not say that the academics in Germany and in other countries comported themselves with a tremendous amount of courage when the fascists came to power. But for one reason or another, the Communist propositions appeared to be more acceptable and even—not only acceptable—but attractive to people who— to academics and intellectuals who were on the left.

Now, when George Orwell wrote about that—and I think he wrote more effectively about that than anyone else—because he was also—he was sort of a socialist by inclination, even though he was an aristocrat by birth. And he had a fair bit of sympathy for the working class, let's say, even though he had a very difficult time spending time with people from the working class. He said that he had to overcome a fair bit of class-based disgust before he could truly consider himself an advocate for the working class.

And he took some pretty extreme steps because he traveled around Europe as a more or less and also worked in very low-status jobs, including a stint as basically a dishwasher, a low-level kitchen employee in restaurants in Paris. And one of the things that Orwell said about the kind of socialists or the kind of left-wing thinkers that he met in Europe—who seemed to have nothing to do whatsoever with the working class except from an intellectual perspective—is that they were driven in large part by resentment.

And so one of the things that Orwell said about this particular kind of left-wing individual—so that would be the privileged intellectual left-wing who's actually part of the ruling class whether or not they would like to admit it—was that they weren't driven so much by sympathy for the poor as they were by hatred for the rich, which is a completely different phenomenon.

One of the things that I wrote about in my introduction to "Maps of Meaning" was my experiences working with the New Democratic Party in Alberta when I was a kid. You know, I was about between 14 and 17—or 14 and 18, I guess. I had privileged access in some ways because the person who was the Member of the Legislative Assembly for our riding was the only member of the opposition in Alberta at that time. If I remember correctly, it was all conservatives and one NDP.

He was in our riding, even though I wouldn't say our riding was left-wing by propensity. It's just that people where I lived actually admired this guy. He was the leader of the NDP; he was a good guy. And the reason they were voting for him was because he was a good guy. It certainly wasn't because he was a member of the NDP.

In the few years that I was involved with the NDP, I got to know him quite well and his wife, and then peripherally I got to observe the sorts of things they were doing at provincial conventions and national conventions and that sort of thing. Because when those conventions came up, he would be associating with some of the premiers of provinces at that time, like Roy Romano and the leader Ed Broadbent and then a number of the leaders of the sort of national labor unions.

And it was pretty interesting to observe them because a lot of them were committed people and they did have the interests of the working class person in mind, I would say. But then when I was just associating with the party hacks, I suppose in general, it was a whole different issue because most of them, as far as I could tell, weren't driven by care; they were driven by resentment.

My experience as a clinical psychologist has taught me that the two most pathological emotions are the two most destructive emotions, I think you can—or attitudes because I'm not sure they're exactly emotions—is resentment and arrogance. Resentment seems to be something like the observation that the world is not a fair place. But worse than that, that it's not a fair place in a manner that's particularly unfair to you because it's obvious that the world isn't a fair place. It’s predicated—you know, the world is a tragic place.

And if there's any justice, it's imperfect justice. You might think, "Well, how can you not be resentful under those conditions?" But I can tell you that all it does is make it worse. And it’s an interesting—it's a very interesting form of worse because people justify their resentment against the system or against being itself, for that matter, by rationalizing to themselves the fact that it's so clearly unjust that having any admiration or support for it verges on the pathological.

But the problem with that is that as soon as you adopt that attitude, you start to act in ways that make the conditions that you were originally objecting to much worse. So, instead of being at least neutral with regards to the problem, you're accelerating and strengthening the original issue. And I really think that's true with resentment.

Nietzsche actually wrote a fair bit about resentment. He called it "ressentiment,” I think, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Yes, and May someone feels like, you know, the world to get them; everything's for them. Like, how do you reframe that? Or like, help them understand, "It's so much worse for you than for any other."

How to get around that? How would you get around that with a patient?

"Well, it's a good question because you know that definitely happens. That's a problem in psychotherapy. You often have someone who has a chip on their shoulder, which is one way of thinking about it, you know. And part of it is to disabuse them of the notion that anyone escapes from that, you know. Because one of the things that I think drives class hatred, in so far as that's still a relevant phenomenon—I think it's still quite relevant—is that people have strange ideas about who is rich and who's poor, first of all, especially in North America.

Because most North Americans think that anybody who has more money than them is rich, right? When the fact of the matter is that everybody in North America is rich beyond belief compared to any reasonable historical standard. And that almost all the problems that can be solved with money, like with magnitude of money, have already been solved in North America.

Still problems of relative poverty, but that's a completely different issue. Relative poverty and absolute poverty are not the same problem because relative poverty has to do with dominance hierarchy position and absolute poverty has to do with privation. The argument that there are people in North America who are in privation because they don't have money—I think that's an incredibly unsophisticated and weak argument.

They might be in privation, but the probability that that's because they don't have money or the probability that money would fix that is virtually zero. So, for example, if you give—I've had plenty of clients in my practice, and the best times of their lives were when they had no money. Because as soon as they had any money, man, they were in serious trouble.

Those were often people who were addicted to something or other, you know, like alcohol or cocaine. As soon as they got their unemployment check—or even their employment check, for that matter—they're gone for like four days, you know? And they spent every bloody cent of it, and that was the end of that. And giving them more money was not going to fix the problem.

And there's lots of people for whom having more money would not fix their problem at all. It's not that easy to figure out how to do sensible things with money, and it also makes you a target for people to take advantage of you virtually instantaneously. You know, so the idea that the kind of poverty that characterizes North America is there because some people don't have money is just—it's so unsophisticated an assessment.

First of all, it assumes that poverty is homogeneous, and it's by no means homogeneous. You know, I also grew up with working-class kids, and hardly any of them graduated from high school, and virtually none of them went to university. A lot of them went off to work in their oil rigs, which was, you know, pretty damn spectacular from a perspective of money. They never had any money; they spent it all.

You know, they'd go work in the bush for two weeks and they'd come out for four days or five days and spend, you know, $4,000 in the bars, and that was the end of that. And then they were back in the oil rigs. You know, maybe they'd buy a car after working for a year or two, but they usually, you know, ended up losing their license because they were driving while impaired or wrecked the thing around a tree or something like that. There was no—the money in some sense had almost no utility for them because money isn't all that useful unless you know what to do with it.

So, back to the resentment issue, you know, Orwell's comment on—and it's like a psychoanalytic comment in some sense. One of the things that psychoanalytic thought is really, really useful for is that it always makes you ask a question, which is, "Where's the other half?" So if someone says, "I'm doing this, and here's—and I'm doing it for good reasons, and I'm a good person," then the psychoanalyst always asks, "Well, okay, where's the—where's the other half of that?" Like, is it projected onto someone else, which is almost always the case, or is it lurking around underneath, causing some sort of trouble that the person doesn't want to admit to?

Well, that's very, very frequently the case as well. And so Orwell's diagnosis for the moral insufficiency of left-wing socialists—utopian left-wing socialists—in the United Kingdom was that they were just resentful, especially the intellectuals. And the reason they were resentful was because even though they were smart and privileged and well-placed, say, in universities and so on, there were lots of people around who had more money and theoretically more power than they did, and that was annoying.

And so what they did to reconcile themselves to that was to pretend to be advocates for the working class, but all they were doing was masking their own resentment about being improperly rewarded by the power hierarchy. And when I read that—and I wasn't very old; I was probably 17 or so when I read that—I thought, "That's exactly right. He got it exactly right."

Now, he wrote that book—the book was "The Road to Wigan Pier," which is a great book. And Orwell spent a bunch of time, I believe in the '30s, with coal miners in the northern UK. And I mean, those people, man, they had a hard life. You know, the coal miners would go out in the morning, and then they would have to crawl down a tunnel way the hell underground to work. They couldn't stand up in the tunnel because it wasn't tall enough.

So they started their workday, which was very long and arduous—like 12 hours long—by crawling 3/4 of a mile on their hands and knees just to get to where they were going to work. And they didn't get paid for that; that was just like the morning exercise before you got to, you know, take a pickaxe and hack coal out of the walls for 12 hours and then crawl back home, breathing in coal dust the whole time, so that you were, you know, an old man by the time you were 45 and had black lung.

And the working conditions were absolutely appalling. The companies owned all the houses; they charged the workers as much for rent and food as they made, except a little bit more, so that not only were they paying all the money they were making back to the companies, but they were falling into debt at the same time they were doing it. So, you know, it was no joke. And so it wasn't like Orwell was blind to the basic horrors of that. He wrote a phenomenal book detailing out their working conditions, you know, as an on-site observer.

But then he followed it up with an essay, and the essay was, "Well, given the undeniable misery of industrial working-class life, why is it so difficult for the Socialist philosophy to become prevalent and widespread—prevalent enough and widespread enough in the UK so that it has some permanent power?" And his answer to that was, "Well, it's because most of the people who are leading the working-class political movements don't care one bit about the poor—they're just mad about the rich."

And I thought that's dead on. And I also think that if you ever do an analysis of any sort of political movement without factoring in the effect of resentment, you're just not paying any attention at all. The question isn't who do people like, who are they supporting. The question is who are they attempting to oppress with their support of someone else. That's just as true on the right as it is on the left.

I'm not making any comments at the moment about the right because at least on university campuses we've already decided that the radical right is morally intolerable—they can't even show their face. Whereas we're perfectly willing to accept the radical left, and that's something that never fails to amaze me. It also never fails to amaze me that people don't even know that it's amazing.

You know, because I know because I've asked students this year after year after year. The number of students who know what happened in the Soviet Union or in China during World War II pales in comparison to the number of students who know about the Holocaust, for example, even though they might not know that much about the Holocaust.

Yeah, I was wondering—don't get—that's what I'm trying to explain. Like, it's well, then I'll go a little further with it. I mean, part of the reason that Orwell wrote what he wrote—he was really the first Western intellectual who woke up to what was happening in the Soviet Union, and he basically woke up in the 1930s. Now, it got complicated too because in the Spanish Civil War, just before World War II, the good guys were the Communists. Right?

Because there was a split essentially between the radical left and the radical right, right, in Spain, and the radical right won. And so Spain was basically fascist until 1982 under Franco. And Franco was an ally of Hitler and Mussolini and so forth. So during the 1930s, it was considered quite heroic if you were, I would say, a young intellectual to go to Spain and fight on the side of the left.

And I think that kind of set the moral tone, in some sense, because I think you could make a case that in Spain, the left-wingers were the good guys in that particular struggle, even though it's not obvious by any means that they would have stayed the good guys if they would have won the war.

So, I think part of it is that among intellectuals, the idea of the left as freedom fighters took on quite a strong hold in the Spanish Civil War. I know that's where Orwell, in part, for example, was exposed to it, and the romance of that continued. But so that's one possible answer.

The other one I think is the Communist universalism. I think that fascism was an anti-intellectual movement to its core, whereas Communism wasn't. And it was often led by intellectuals, and it was really an intellectual doctrine, whereas fascism, I would say, was fundamentally an emotional doctrine or a dramatic doctrine or something like that. It was a lot more primordial because it was race-based fundamentally, you know.

So, Jung believed that the fascism in Germany was a reawakening of pre-Christian paganism, roughly speaking. Like, you know, really, like blood-based tribalism. And so he thought of it as a regressive movement, and I think that that's certainly a position that's worth considering.

The Communists, you know, they laid out a rational description of their upcoming Utopia, and it actually made quite a bit of sense from a rational perspective. You know, because when you start with a proposition like, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need," first of all it sounds attractive, you know.

Because the proposition is, "Well, you should obtain what you need from society." So if you're in trouble or if you're sick or if you're hurt, then there should be a backup for you so that you just don't fall out of society and perish. And by the same token, why not ask of people what they can contribute, so that the stronger people and the more able people contribute as much as they can, and the less able people contribute as much as they can. And in some sense, there's something that's universally fair about that.

Well, you know, as a set of logical propositions, it's not self-evident that it's wrong. So, I would say that certainly in Russia, for example, which was basically serfs and aristocrats, you know, at the point of the First World War, because the Russians were just crawling out from beneath a tsarist monarchy that was basically medieval in nature, you know, that was pretty attractive.

The question is—the problem was who attractive to who and the way it played out in practice. And you can just imagine this—for example, so imagine that there's a village. One of the things that happened in Russia in the Soviet Union was a process called dekulakization.

And the kulaks—they were given the name to the farmers in the Soviet Union who were, say, in a given village who were reasonably prosperous. And so, those might be people that have a brick house and who have been running their farm for whatever reason well enough so that they could have a few employees. Now, one of the propositions of the radical left in the Soviet Union was that if you had any capital—so that basically if you had any excess money at all, and that would be enough money maybe to buy a brick house and to improve your machinery and to hire a couple of people—that fundamentally what you had done was stolen that from the labor of the proletariat, of the working class.

And so then—and you can understand that because that's a Marxist idea. The Marxist idea was that labor produces excess value and that what capital does is vacuum up that value and basically steal it. And so, there's never really any appreciation in the Marxist doctrine that there are creative things that can be done with capital itself.

And that labor is actually rather difficult to define. You know, like a good example of that is, say, think about Bill Gates. You know, I mean, it's not easy to make the case that Bill Gates made $70 billion by exploiting his workers or his customers. It doesn't seem to me that that's an accurate description.

Now, you can argue about the details with regards to certain monopolistic practices and so forth, but you know what I saw happening with Microsoft—'cause I'm older than you guys—and I watched what happened—the computers really kicked in in about 1993, although we were using them fairly extensively by 1985.

As the net kicked in in 1993, what happened before Gates was that programs were sold one by one, and they were unbelievably expensive. You know, so a typical word processing program at the dawn of the computer age would have been approximately as much as the computer was, which was way more expensive than they are now.

And what happened with Gates was he bundled programs together—that would be the Microsoft Office Suite—and dropped their prices by a factor of probably 20. So all of a sudden, poof! Everybody had Microsoft Office. It was a brilliant marketing idea. I mean, what happened was that he noticed that the price of software rapidly plummets towards commodity level. And he just accelerated the process.

So my point is, is that regardless of what you think about Bill Gates, the idea that he got his money by stealing it from the labor that produced his products is not—it's an unsophisticated approach. It's not self-evident in the least.

It's also the case that large pools of capital—you know, you've got to ask yourself. If capital was distributed equally among the population, well, the first thing you can be sure of is that it wouldn't stay equally distributed for very long— not very long at all. And the second thing is it also begs the question: do you want a system where the only people who have substantial economic power are actually members of the government, or is it safer to have large pools of capital somewhat arbitrarily distributed in the general population so there are multiple sources of power?

You know, so if you think about what's happening in China, for example, it doesn't seem self-evident to me that the rise of multiple millionaires and multiple billionaires in China has been a bad thing for the population—not least because those people hold power that can buttress the entire society against the overwhelming centrality of the government.

You know, now you might argue that, you know, person A shouldn't have that money because it's unfair, and I suppose you can make a case for that, but it's very unidimensional, that sort of thinking.

And another thing that you might think about is that there are certain kinds of projects that can't be undertaken without massive pools of private capital. So for example, if you want to build a chip fabrication plant, it's $4 billion. So those aren't going to get built unless they are large pools of unused capital more or less at hand.

And you know, Elon Musk, for example, right now, is going to build a massive factory to produce a new kind of lithium-ion battery. You know, and it's going to be staggeringly expensive, and he has no idea if that will work—and probably, it's hard to say: probably it won't because most things don't work. But there's not even a chance that a project like that could get off the ground given its unbelievably high-risk nature and the demand for excessive levels of capital unless he happened to have more money than God.

So, it's necessary to analyze problems at a high-resolution level and not fall into the foolishness of unidimensional utopian schemes. And partly because that bespeaks ignorance, as far as I’m concerned, if you use an ideological approach to a problem. All that means to me is that you don't know what the hell you're talking about and that you're too lazy to figure it out.

But worse than that is that underneath the ideological presuppositions, there's always some kind of hatred of one form or another that's never agreed to by the people who happen to be in that position on the ideological spectrum. And that turns out to be something that's tremendously dangerous.

You know, so I know someone who's a businessman who's had a tremendous amount of success. Although, um, it wasn't permanent success in some ways; although success is rarely permanent. You know, I've talked to him about both left and right-wing approaches to economic revitalization in Canada, and one of his primary claims is that Canada is too unsophisticated in its legal and political systems to support high-tech industries against international competition.

We just don't have the power, fundamentally, conceptually or legally. And so he says, "Well, the left-wingers, you know, their basic attitude is that, well, you don't need large corporations, and they're more of a pain in the neck than they're worth, and certainly there's no sense in the government supporting businessmen."

And that's just not helpful because most countries that have tremendously powerful, say, intellectual property companies—and which is where all the money is now—have a legal system behind them and a governmental system behind them that's doing absolutely everything they can to support the distribution of those companies out into the international market and to ensure that they succeed.

And then on the right, you have people who say, "Well, all you have to do is pare down government to nothing, and then the entrepreneurs can go out there and make money." And, you know, from his perspective—and it's an ordinarily well-informed perspective—neither of those solutions are going to work because the world's too damn complicated for the answer from the right to be, "Well, we need less government," which is—that's not an answer.

Right? Anyone can say that in one second. It's not a coherent system of thought that's devoted to the solving of a specific problem. It's way too low resolution, you know. And then you can easily untangle the right's claims because, because the right is basically orderly, and because they're somewhat disgust-sensitive, they look at people who are in the, you know, at the low end of the dominance hierarchy distributions, and they think, "Well, it's just useless bastards who never do any work that are down there, and if they would just, you know, get off their ass and look around, there'd be a job for them."

And the thing about that is that it's true for a certain percentage of the people that they're referring to because there are unconscientious people who don't do a damn thing. But then it's untrue because there's all sorts of reasons why people end up at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, and some of them have to do with the fact that they're not very conscientious, which is why conscientiousness predicts success over the span of your life in a Western democracy.

But then there's all sorts of other reasons why people aren't thriving that have nothing to do with, you know, their willingness to work. So it's not the sort of approach that's useful for solving any sort of complex problem.

So, and then there's the additional problem, which is that the people who are offering utopian solutions aren't who they say they are, and that's a big problem. And I think we learned that—we should have learned that more than anything else by looking at what happened in the 20th century. You know, and I think the fact that, like, just out of curiosity—I’m sure I've asked you this before—but how many of you were aware that Stalin starved 6 million people in the Ukraine in the 1930s?

Okay, how did you learn that?

Okay, so you knew that. How do you know?

Um, I was really interested. So, did you learn that on your own?

Yeah, you learned that on your own?

How many people were taught that in school?

You were? Where?

History?

Okay, at the University?

Univ?

Okay, that's good.

Anybody else learned that in University?

So, very strange form of luck, right? Right?

And the six million deaths in the Ukraine in the 1930s—that's this, by the way.

Right, right? Yes. Well, and that's just the—that's just the tiny tip of what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959.

It should be embarrassing. Like, it's—you know, the thing that's so terrible about that is that what happened in the 20th century is something that we need to understand. We have to understand it because it's the most—you know, the commission of those atrocities, both on the left wing and the right wing, especially when you view them from a Nietzschean or Dostoevsky perspective, which is that, well, they were the inevitable consequence of the collapse of traditional religious systems.

That is something that's so important that it's the most vital thing you need to know, in my estimation. I mean, the other thing that we need to remember—and this is sort of creeping up on us again, by the way—is that the potential for nuclear holocaust, which was really upon us in 1962 and 1984, was a direct consequence of the battle for various utopias. And you know, it just about wiped us out.

And the thing is, is we haven't solved that problem yet. We haven't solved it at all. Because—and it's the old Horus-Osiris problem—which is how do you stop your damn institutions from becoming genocidally corrupt? And to me, that's a cross-cutting problem.

It's not like how do you stop the government from becoming corrupt or how do you stop corporations from becoming corrupt, even though those are two perfectly reasonable sets of problems. I can't see how they're different.

But then how do you—how is it that you act within institutions so that you don't become corrupt and also so that you don't further the corruption of the institution? And you can be absolutely sure that for all of you, this is going to be one of the most fundamental ethical problems that you face throughout your entire life because you're all going to be members in one way or another of large and powerful institutions.

So the way you comport yourself in those institutions is going to determine to a large degree whether you're a slave or a free person or a tyrant, and also whether or not the institution within which you work becomes tyrannical and destructive. And like I see this particularly in my clinical practice. Lots of the people who I've dealt with, their problem has been pathologies in their workplace.

They're bullied by a manager, for example, or maybe by a coworker, or they're driven to absolute insanity by the proliferation of completely counterproductive and crazy regulations and rules. So, and they don't know what to do about it. Generally, they're too afraid to do anything about it. And but that's not helpful because if they're afraid to stand up and stop it, then they pay a price.

Possibly, often not the price they think they'll pay, by the way. But if they don't stand up and do anything about it, they also pay a price. And my observation has been that although that's a price you pay ounce with flesh ounce by ounce instead of one pound at a time, you end up losing more over the long run than you do by standing up and having something to say.

I actually gave your advice to my partner; he's a contractor, and he was doing some subcontracting for another contractor. And the contractor was giving part-time hours and disorganized and stuff. And then sort of said, like, "You know, if you're not interested in doing the work or whatever, then forget it."

And I said to my boyfriend messages by a text—not the F by comma—but whatever. I said, "Well, you know, Professor Peterson would say that if you're not prepared to walk away and, you know, you're never really going to get their respect."

So, you know, be prepared to walk away.

Like, yeah, he's strong-minded. Like, he would absolutely go tell him where to put it. I kind of got him to tone it down a bit from what he would normally do, and it actually worked out for the better. Suddenly, hours increased and responsibility increased once he realized, like, "Oh, like you're mismanaging me. It's not that I don't want to work more; it's that, you know, there's a problem. If you want to hire someone else, I implore you to go do that."

One of the things that's quite interesting about people who are tyrannical is that they're often weak. And so they'll push on you, and they don't have any real internal boundaries. They'll push on you and push on you. And as far as you can be pushed, there's no ending to that. And they may even delight in that because if they're weak and resentful, the fact that they can exercise some power and cause some misery is actually quite satisfying, especially maybe if they're also jealous of you for one reason or another—then they can really make your life hell.

That's less knowledgeable in a lot of ways to my partner, right?

So I think that it was coming from a place of insecurity.

Right, right? Well, that's very common.

Oh, it's very common. I mean, you guys will all experience that or meet it out as you move through your lives because there'll be lots of times when you're in a situation where you're smarter and more competent than the person who's supervising you. And you might have your head screwed on straighter too, whereas there'll also be times where you're supervising someone who's like that, and they have advantages over you, you know?

So, but if you— as a general rule—if you're willing to walk, and you tell the person exactly what's going on, they will leave you alone from then on. They will walk a wide berth around you and leave you the hell alone.

Now, you know, they might cause some conspiratorial trouble in one place or another, trying to get back at you, but my experience has been that that's rarer than you think, and generally it's not very effective.

But unless—or now one of the things Solzhenitsyn talks about, and Frankl as well, and this is all relevant to the last half of the course— is where should your fundamental values find themselves?

Now, you know, we've been talking about the hierarchy of values, you know, and I've showed you that idea many times, that your action is nested inside a conceptual map, and that's nested inside another conceptual map, and so forth, all the way out as far as you can go. And one of the things that I've been curious about is, well, how far out can you go?

And I think—I think I know actually how far out you can go. I think the ultimate question, I believe for human beings, is whether or not they're working to make the world a better place or a worse place. And you could say better by whose standards or worse by whose standards, but I don't care about that question because I would say that for each individual, they're either trying to make the world a better place by their standards or a worse place by their standards.

So, the question of absolute standards actually doesn't enter into it. Because if you're resentful—and, well, we'll just go with resentful because resentment moves towards genocide fundamentally. Now, it takes a while to get there, but that's really where it's headed.

If you're resentful, what you're going to do is try to make the world a worst place in whatever creative manner you can think up. And you'll know it's worse. I mean, you might be a little wrong, and maybe by accident sometimes when you try to make something worse, it'll get better. But that's just a mistake.

It's not like you don't know what you're doing. You bloody well know what you're doing. And I think people know exactly what they're doing at each time they make a decision—not that they necessarily know what they're doing across large spans of time and not that they necessarily remember all of those decisions because you don't remember any of your decisions, right?

They just start manifesting themselves out in the world as consequences, and you also start to build systems in your head that do things automatically. And so, like if you're resentful, and you act on that repeatedly for years, you're going to build a little automatic resentment monster at the back of your brain, and it's just going to do things like that without you even noticing.

And that's when you become unconscious in the psychoanalytic way. You're bloody conscious when you make the decisions. Now you might not be fully conscious of all their repercussions, but I don't think it matters at all.

The other thing that I've observed—or I think I've observed—is that I've never seen anyone ever get away with anything they ever did. And I think the reason for that, I think it's quite clear—it's that if what you're dealing with is real, so it's there, it's actual, it has some structure. If you bend or twist it, that twist and bend stays there; it's going to snap back.

It's going to cause some trail of—like some causal trail of trouble. Now, the trail might be so peculiar and bizarre that by the time it produces a negative outcome for you, you have no idea what the initial cause was. But I can tell you, a tremendous amount of what you do in psychotherapy—especially of the psychoanalytic variety rather than the behavioral problem-solving variety, which is also extraordinarily useful.

In fact, it's primarily useful—is, "Okay, why did this happen?" And you trace it back, and you trace it back, and you trace it back, and you trace it back, and then all of a sudden, the person goes, "Aha! There is how the dominoes fell!" You know? And sometimes it's horrifying because sometimes the initial problem isn't even the person's.

It's like something that happened between their mother and their mother's father, you know. So you can certainly be the person who inherits multigenerational karma. I mean, that's basically Osiris. You can think of Osiris as multigenerational karma—you know, you inherit all of the errors that are embedded in the adaptive system, you know.

And that's also what makes young people often resentful about, you know, the power structure, the patriarchy, or the military-industrial complex, or whatever you want to call it. You know, of course, the bloody thing's corrupt and half ready to fall over, you know. It is because, first of all, things get outdated just as time progresses, and second, they get outdated and corrupt because people are willfully blind and refuse to update them.

And so you're stuck with that. You're stuck with that from a social perspective, and you're stuck with that with regard to your own individual and familial history.

So, you know, that's partly why I wanted to portray it in this class as an existential problem. It's not—you shouldn't take it personally; it's just a condition of life. It's like fragility—individual fragility is a condition of life. You're stuck with having to deal with that. Corruption of society is a fact of life—you have to deal with that. The perversity of the natural world and the fact that you don't know everything is a fact of life, and then the chaos that underlies everything that you come from and that you will return to—that's also a fact of life.

And so then the question is—and those are ugly facts because I've only concentrated on the negative element there—but those are ugly facts. So then the question is, well, what should you do about that? And despair and nihilism and resentment are a perfectly logically reasonable response.

The problem is, though, as far as I can tell, is that all that does is turn tragedy into hell. And it turns out that hell is actually worse than tragedy, and I've seen this in many situations.

So a while back, I was with a family where one of their family members was dying, and not a particularly pleasant death. It was associated with a degenerative brain disease, you know. And those are—they're not as nasty as they get, but they're certainly up in the plenty nasty category. And the family comported themselves incredibly well, you know.

They had a lot of experience with death. One of them was a palliative care nurse, and most of them had some medical experience, so they weren't naive about such things. But the family came together and took care of the person who was deteriorating and did what they had to do to help them when it was necessary.

So the person's prime caretaker, her husband, was very, very good at admitting when things had fallen down yet another level and doing something about it right then and there instead of pretending that it wasn't happening, which is a great way to catastrophe. And like, you know, it was quite—it was not pleasant, but it wasn't hell. They managed it, you know, and it pulled the family together a little bit better.

And everybody who was going through the experience had the support of everybody else, and there wasn't a lot of garbage underneath the family carpet that often is the sort of thing that comes up when families are extremely stressed. And, um, one of the things I think they all gained was that their family tightened up approximately as much, I would say, as the support they lost from the family member who departed.

Now, so that makes you wonder a situation like that. It's like, well, obviously the world has this tremendously negative multilayered structure, but that leaves open the question, which is, well, if you reacted to it properly, to what degree could you ameliorate it?

It's pretty damn obvious that you can make it worse—like that's easy. You know, if some—if a catastrophe befalls you and all you can do is run around in circles and panic, and you're just as—maybe a catastrophe occurs, and it's affecting five people, and you fall apart in a cowardly and pathological manner, then they have two people to deal with at a time of crisis instead of one.

And I can't see that being the least bit useful. And so one of the things that means—and you know, it's also something I really don't understand why people aren't taught this—is that one of the things you have to do is to learn to be competent in the face of tragedy.

And you also have to understand that that's not brutality. You know, 'cause one of the things you might wonder is, if someone close to you dies, how morally obligated are you to fall apart? And you could easily say, "Well, if you really love the person, the devastation should be total."

And then if you say, "Well, it shouldn't be total because that just adds to the catastrophe," then what that implies is that there’s a sort of toughness that you have to have even in intimate relationships that allows you to remain standing in the midst of a hurricane.

And there's something about that that's kind of harsh, you know? So if you're the person who has to make funeral arrangements when one of your parents passes away, one of the things people might wonder is, "Well, how can you be calm enough to do that at a time like that?"

But the answer to that is, well, it's exactly at a time like that when you better have your act together. And that means you can't be too afraid of death and that you can't be too afraid of being left on your own, and that you have to be able to stand on your own two feet.

And that in that sort of time, there's enough of you so that you can be of service and support to the people around you who maybe have fewer resources than you, maybe you're younger or more helpless, and that you can actually help. And that's a much better—not only is that a much better outcome, but it's the right aim.

That's the way that you should be conceiving your development in the future, you know? You should be the sort of person who can be relied on when things fall apart.

And I also think that that's analogous to what we were talking about before with regard to your ability to negotiate from within the confines of pathological structures. You should not lay yourself so open to loss that if you lose you're dead. It means you've configured your life improperly.

So if you're so dependent on one person that you cannot tolerate their loss, then what that means is you have not distributed your support properly along all of the multiple sources of support that you could conceivably have.

You can't stand on one leg; like no legs, you're done. You're in chaos. One leg—that makes you too vulnerable. It's not wise. And so you have to fortify yourself so that not only can you withstand the pressure of tyranny from the pathological systems that you'll end up involved in, but that you can also tolerate the catastrophes of Mother Nature without falling apart and disintegrating.

Can we extrapolate this to say that you also can't only care about or rely on yourself? Because say you may fall ill, or you may start to grow old, and if the only thing you've ever looked for is yourself, that'll be...

I think that's exactly the same problem, is that, you know, I mean, I know the basic dimensions that you have to fortify. You know, we covered them in the future authoring program, roughly speaking. It's not that difficult to lay them out, and I would sort of think about these as the central elements of human nature, in some sense.

You know, and one of the things that is worth pointing out, by the way, is that most utopian schemes admit to no human nature, right? Because they pause at a certain kind of Utopia, define that as perfect, and then imagine that they can build the human being that would fit in that Utopia. It's certainly what happened among the Nazis and also what happened among the radical left-wingers. You know, so they're going to build the new socialist man, and that would be someone who was completely unselfish and devoted towards the state.

It's like, well, you don't want to build someone who's completely unselfish. It's a foolish endeavor; it's a hubristic and arrogant endeavor, you know? You have no idea how much selfishness is necessary, but none is certainly the wrong amount.

Like I would say, roughly speaking, you should take care of yourself about as well as you take care of someone who's close to you whose best interests you have at heart. I think you have a moral obligation to do that—it's a basic moral obligation you have to yourself, which is that on average, you're as valuable as every other individual is on average, you know?

And you may have some elements that are particularly virtuous and some elements that are particularly, you know, weak and contemptible, but—and those should be uplifted and dealt with—but you don't have any right to hurt yourself, and you don't have any right not to take care of yourself. And part of the reason is exactly that. Like you have to distribute yourself out so that you're also not a burden.

And being overly selfish is certainly one way to do yourself in. And, you know, it’s also the sort of thing that's never discussed seriously in the modern world in relation to such things as marriage because we're very, very immature in our conscious morality.

So you might think, well, why get married? This is a question that Jung attempted to address, for example. What's the purpose of marriage? Well, the standard routine is that of, you know, a 14-year-old girl who still believes in unicorns. You know, it's, "Well, you find the love of your life, and then fundamentally the arrangement is flowers and magic for the rest of your life. You live happily ever after," you know?

And there's something to that on the mythological plane, but you've got to think that's not a philosophy of intimate relationship. You know, it's so naive and undeveloped that it's embarrassing. So with regards to marriage, I mean, I can tell you some things I know about keeping a long-term intimate relationship together.

One is you can’t lie to your partner, and they can't lie to you. And the reason for that is that if you don't know what's going on, you can't adapt to it. So if the person's lying to you or you're lying to them, neither of you are there, so you're not going to be able to get anywhere with that.

Because, you know, if someone tells you that the truck is broken down when the car isn't working and you go out to fix the truck, that's hardly going to get the car going. So we know one of the things we tried to impress on our children when they were growing up, you know, to some—children always experiment with lying—was that if you lie to me, I can't help you because I don't know what the hell's going on.

So how the hell can I help you if I don't know what's going on? And you know, people like Carl Rogers—and this is certainly echoed in the psychoanalytic community at large—is that Rogers, in particular, said the precondition for a therapeutic relationship is that the people agree to tell each other the truth.

Now, Jung took that a step further, which I think is absolutely brilliant, and it's a measure of his humility and genius that he was able to formulate this idea: He said that in order to tell someone the truth, you have to tie them to you so they can't run away and vice versa. And that's the purpose of the marriage bond from the perspective of psychological development.

It's like we all have a monster; we all are monsters. And if the person with whom you're communicating can run away, there's no way you're ever going to show them what sort of monster you are.

And then there's no way you're ever going to learn what sort of monster you are, and there's no way you're going to know how to control it, you know? And so part of what's kept me on the straight and narrow, in so far as that's been possible during my marriage, is that I know that I'm not getting rid of this woman. And so, if I don't solve the damn problem, I'm going to be living it out painfully—daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly—for the next—for the rest of my life.

It's like—and then you have to imagine that—it's like, "No way, man. I'm going to have this out here right here and now because the alternative is I'm going to have this problem forever, and so is she."

And the corollary of that is that if I'm having a problem with her, I'm also, despite my own desire, open to the possibility that it's my stupidity that's causing it. It's not like I'm just going to roll over and admit it because I tend to think I'm right, but I do allow for the possibility that I might be wrong.

And so if she can convince me that I'm wrong—and sometimes I help her make the arguments—then I want to find out because I also don't want to have the problem every day for the next bloody 50 years if it happens to be my stupidity that's causing it.

And so it's terror and humility that lead me to attempt to find out where I'm wrong. It's not because I'm a good person; I wouldn't say that. It's because I know enough that I know enough to know that if I'm blind in some area, I'm going to get hit by the thing I'm blind about over and over, and I don't want that.

That's partly why I had you guys imagine your catastrophic future. It's like you need to know where you don't want to go.

I also think that's why culture is part of the reason why cultures have always posited Heaven and Hell—or at least Heaven and the underworld—because those are real places. Now, what their reality is metaphysically, it's like, God only knows—literally—but as actual places that you could inhabit, it's like, they're there. All you just have to do is wake up and look to see that lots of people live in Hell, you know?

And some of them are so deeply embedded—I like to think of Hell as the worst suburb of the underworld, and that's the part where you go—you go into chaos, and that's the underworld. And then the chaos embitters you, and you sink deeper and deeper. And when you've got to the spot that's so deep that you can't get out, then you're in Hell.

And people are there all the time because their lives are so surrounded by chaos that they can't fix them, and that's really—you do not want to be there.

So Jung's proposition with marriage was, well, there was a variety of them, and they're very, very intelligent. You know, he said, for example, that the reason that you ally yourself with someone is because the probability that your faults and your virtues won't line up is quite high. Just like, you know, you're not going to get—your children aren't going to get a disease that requires two disease genes, generally, because the probability that you'll be a carrier of a particular mutation and that your partner will be at the same time is quite low.

It's part of the reason why there is sexual reproduction. So your errors and your partner's errors aren't going to match up, and so their strengths will cover your weaknesses. That occurs at a genetic level, but it also occurs at the level of information exchange.

So if you're lucky, where you're weak, your partner won't be. Now often, you see in marriages where they start to really crumble, is where one person's weakness hits another person in their weakness, and it starts to develop a positive feedback loop.

So in my marriage, for example, my wife tends to be accusatory, and I tend to be guilty, and that's a difficult thing for us to deal with.

So, and you know, now and then it kind of opens up a bit of a hole. But those little positive feedback loops can develop all over the place. But the point is, is that, you know, if you're trying to build yourself into the sort of person who can withstand tyranny and not contribute to it and can keep the adversarial side of their personality under control and can tolerate tragedy without becoming embittered by it, then you're trying to hammer yourself into a particular kind of shape.

And I would say that shape is approximated by figures like Horus, for example, or even more accurately the combination of Horus and Osiris. And the way you do that is by rectifying your faults. And one of the advantages to having someone else around is that if you can get a dialogue going that's predicated on truthful exchange of information, then you can repair your flaws, and that makes you way tougher. And it makes the other person way tougher, you know?

And there's all sorts of things that go along with that that are very good. So, if you're not cynical, one of the things that you might say is that when you fall in love with someone, you're allowed a glimpse of what they could be.

And then that alerts you to that possibility. Now, it's just a possibility. You're not going to get there without a tremendous amount of work. So the window opens, and you can see through it. Some of that's going to be delusion based on your own, you know, faulty viewpoints.

But controlling for that, the window opens up. I think the latent inhibition is stripped off for a little while, and so you can see the person as they might become. And then, that closes, and then if you're careful and you work diligently, then you can start making that possibility into an actuality.

And that's then—the benefit from that is that you do build yourself more and more into the sort of person that is working for the betterment of reality instead of for its perversion and destruction. And that, you know, so I said the ultimate external ring of the value hierarchy is something like, are you going to work to make being better or worse? So that's like the battle between good and evil fundamentally, which is why it's archetypal.

Then the innermost ring is, well, are you going to manifest a heroic stance in the world, which means that your eyes are open and you're willing to take on difficult problems and not shy away from them, or are you going to be primarily adversarial in your role and communication between someone who's close to you?

The bond—and this is why from the Jungian perspective, the vow is actually necessary—is, you won't do the goddamn work if you can run away. And it's a very interesting idea.

I believe it to be true. I believe it to be true because I think in many situations there's no damn way you're going to reveal what you're like to someone unless you know they cannot run away. So, partly because it's embarrassing, partly because it's difficult, partly because it's frightening.

You know, and it's strange too because it's very frequently the case—and this is part of the Jungian idea of the shadow—that those terrible things that you want or even that you've done are sometimes pointers to parts of your personality that are incredibly powerful and strong.

You know, so for example—here's an archetypal way of looking at it. So one of the things I've noticed about men—and I think this is a universal truth—is that—and this has to do with the bifurcation of the feminine archetype—is that on the positive end there's basically the Virgin Mary, and on the negative end, there’s like the whore of Babylon.

You know, and so for men, the Virgin Mary part is Mother, Sister, Daughter, roughly speaking. So those are asexual relationships, and the relationship that are fundamentally predicated on positive care. And then there's Mistress, Prostitute, Stripper over here, you know.

And the problem is, is all the sexual energy is on the negative side now. And so what happens with the men is that because they're not very sophisticated in their psychological integration or in their worldview, there's no way they can tolerate a woman who's both.

So what they do—because the negative, the sexual element, contaminates the purity—and so what they do—men do this to their wives all the time—is that every time once they get married, every time their wife does anything that's vaguely sexy, they punish her by commission or omission.

Like, "You're not going out in that, are you?" You know, if you say that to your wife 20 times, it's like she's going to be dressing like a 50-year-old peasant in no time flat, you know?

Because she's going to be not only responsive to that; it's also very easy to hurt someone if they go to the trouble of trying to manifest themselves as attractive and you punish them for that. That's a much more effective punishment than telling them that they're not looking very good when they're not looking very good—at least they can expect that.

Right? It's not polite, but to punish them when they're doing something that in some sense is virtuous—that's it. You know, Nietzsche said if you really want to punish someone, you punish them for their virtues.

And what he meant by that is that's when it really hurts. Now, you might say, "Well, why would the man do that?" Well, first of all, he's uncomfortable with the idea that Mother, Sister, Daughter could have any element of sexuality whatsoever because that contaminates the purity.

But then there's also his own resentment and insecurities, and the way they manifest themselves is, "Well, I'd rather that you were at home fat, ugly, and unhappy than out there potentially attracting another man."

And that's a pretty damn vicious way to live, and all it does eventually is turn into mutual contempt because the man produces what he's aiming at, and the woman hates him, and no bloody wonder.

So part of you might think, like, in a relationship, because it has to encapsulate sexuality, there's all sorts of demands and desires that might manifest itself within the confines of the relationship, you know? And those are the desires that may have to be fulfilled, in many cases with a relationship outside the marriage, right?

So that would be almost a purely sexual relationship very often. But that only becomes necessary when that isn't allowed and encouraged inside the relationship. That's a very complicated thing.

First of all, each partner might have to admit to what they actually want. Well, people are very unlikely to do that; they're afraid of it. And so—and they—or they think there's something wrong with it.

Well, everything that's powerful, sexuality included—I mean, you only have to know a trifle about Freud to understand that has a tremendously dark side, sexuality and aggression. I mean, those things are dangerous, and part of the way people deal with them is they just don't get very good at either of them, you know?

And then that's not helpful because it means they're primitively aggressive and primitively sexual, and then they do all sorts of unsophisticated things at a whim— not helpful.

So all that has to be tangled up inside the relationship too, and that's very, very difficult. They’d have an affair when they're drunk, right? Which is often why people get drunk.

Well, really, you know, I mean, that's why people get drunk—so they can do stupid things that are fun, obviously. And no wonder because it's fun to do stupid things that are fun, and it's even more fun to do them when you're drunk.

But if you're the least bit awake, you try to make sure that you don't put yourself in a situation like that at a point of maximal temptation. And like if you're resentful, for example, you're just waiting for an opportunity to cause trouble.

So absolutely, I mean, one of the things that this is part of the Jungian idea of encountering the shadow is you have to watch what you fantasize about.

Now, lots of fantasies look pathological, especially if they're dealing with material that has been repressed because what happens is that like the more sexually unsophisticated and useless you are, the more resentment is going to be tangled up in your fantasy, and the more extreme it's going to become, you know?

So, you backwards—what it would take—well, or more, more, more. That's kind of a Freudian idea. So that would be a catharsis idea or relieving of pressure. What I would say, it's better to think about it from a Padian perspective, which is how do you turn that into a game that can be played in a sustainable manner across large stretches of time without disrupting your entire life, you know?

And what part of what that might mean is if you're an adventurous sort of person and you like to cause trouble is that you better figure out how to cause quite a lot of trouble within the confines of your life in a way that doesn't disrupt the entire structure because that's what you're like.

You're going to need trouble, you know? And maybe you're going to marry someone who likes trouble, and so, hey, away you go. You know, Eric Neumann, who was one of Jung's most apt students, most able students, he wrote a book at the end of the Second World War called "Depth Psychology and a New Ethic."

And in there, one of the things he recommended was don't try to be better than you are. And he didn't mean don't strive for perfection. He—that for, for example, if you're having an extremely violent fantasy about your father, let's say, and it's so violent you don't even want to let it into your head, it's like you better bloody well let that thing play out and see what it means.

And it's going to mean all sorts of things that you are not comfortable with, but that doesn't mean that the impulse that's driving that isn't something that's absolutely necessary for you to integrate so that you can be powerful enough to survive without being corrupt.

So—and it's no joke, it's no joke—because one of the things that Jung said about the shadow—and the shadow in some sense is the adversarial element of the individual but it can also be the tyrannical element of the state, and it can be the pathological element of Mother Nature too. Those things are all sort of tangled together, right?

Because like your most violent aggressive fantasies—assuming you have such things—you can think of them as a manifestation of the dark side of nature. That's sort of an analogy to Freud's id. So, or you can think of them as only emerging as a consequence of the fact that you are tyrannized by a society that's out of kilter.

You know, each level of explanation has its relevance and its place. But it doesn't matter where you localize the impulse; the question is what do you do about it?

And you know one of Neumann's observations was, he said morality is cowardice. And what he meant by that was that most of what people claim to be moral virtue is merely their fear to do anything that they would actually like to do that society would deem inappropriate. It has nothing to do with morality whatsoever, and what they do is say, "I'm moral," not "I'm cowardly."

And part of the reason, for example, why people are so attracted to bad guy stories—you know, criminals and serial killers and all those sorts of people, vampires—you know, that whole destructive force is because those characters aren't fearful. They're just what other people would be like if they weren't afraid.

Okay, so then you might say, well, should you act in a manner that isn't inhibited by fear? Well, maybe then you turn into a mafioso or a psychopath. Well, obviously, that's not necessarily the final element of worship. There may be something past that where you have those things under your control.

But it's not obvious to me that the criminal in certain circumstances isn't more moral than the virtuous person if the virtuous person is just abstaining because of fear. Then all they are is a cowardly criminal. And, you know, and that's— that's an idea that's—well, it's a Nitzschian idea in some sense, that was elaborated in large part by Jung, you know.

So, because one of the things you have to ask yourself is like if you're in an organization and someone is bullying you, what needs to be at your fingertips before you will stop it? And the answer to that is you have to have enough force to stop the person from doing it. And that's going to take the same kind of force that, in some sense, an impulsively violent Hell's Angels biker is capable of manifesting.

Now, that doesn't mean that you should be all admiring of the Hell's Angels biker, you know, because that's not an integrated and stable solution. But it also means you shouldn't assume that your weakness constitutes a virtue because it doesn't.

It just—it's just a place of weakness where degeneracy can flourish.

So, combined is the flip side of the veneration of like the paternal—the benevolent father, kind of—and how that comes with sexuality for women looking at a male partner. And then how women raised in that kind of veneration can possibly grow up to be sort of the positive virtues of the Virgin Mary, which is like desirable while also being sexual.

That's the question. But seriously, I mean, I would say in some sense that's—that's one of the prime moral questions.

So here, here's the situation. It's like, um, how friendly should you be with your husband's friend if you're attracted to him?

Okay, well, you have to think this through very carefully, right? Because the answer isn't not friendly; the answer also isn't no sexual provocation whatsoever because that takes a huge chunk of the spice out of human interactions.

It has to be tease-y, with limits. And the limits have to be very, very firmly evident and continually manifest, and then it's fun. And then if you're like—if your husband has any sense and he can trust you, then what that means is that the whole—the energy of the whole situation is elevated, partly because there's no reason to deny sexual attraction.

The question is, what the hell do you do with it? And part of that is, well, you make it subservient to the greater whole. And you have to decide what that is. I mean, we've been talking about that too.

You know, I already mentioned today what sort of being you should aspire to be. You know, you should be someone who can stand up in the face of tragedy and tyranny in your own lacking virtue. You know, that's a really—that's a wonderful thing to aim at for all sorts of self-evident reasons.

Then the question is, well, how do you tangle sexuality up into that? Well, not by repressing it, I would say. By using it as a sophisticated ability. And that takes practice, and it takes encouragement, and it takes attention and vision.

And it also takes the willingness of your partner to allow that to occur. And that's not going to happen without trust, and that's not going to happen without honesty.

So it's a funny thing because what that means then is honesty and trust opens up the door to games. And if you're good enough at those games, you might not have to go outside of your relationship for excitement. You might be able to get enough excitement exactly where you are.

And the question—this might be a bit of a stretch, but consider people who are in open relationships. I hear about that more and more often. Are those people, in a way, doing the same thing but with broader boundaries?

No, they're just delusional.

See? Yeah. Like, I—I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever. I've never seen anyone in a relationship like that who's actually—who actually has a clue about relationships. There's delusion somewhere in there.

It's like the friends-with-benefits arrangement. It's like, no, that doesn't work. There's a whole bunch of reasons. I mean, first of all, it presumes that you can detach sexuality from emotional commitment.

I mean, every 16-year-old admirer of porn believes that or would like to believe it, but it's not in the least bit true. How could it be?

So then it's also predicated on the idea that both partners are equally committed and attracted, and that's never true. One person is always way more attracted in a situation like that than the other, even if they don't want to admit it.

You know, and then there's the idea that you can have a friendship and introduce sexuality into it, and it's still a friendship. It's like, no, that's not right.

I mean, the levels of naivety that are underneath the idea that something like that could be possible is mind-boggling.

Right?

So this is fairly common in my generation?

Well, so is stupidity. You know? I don't mean with your generation in particular. I don't—you know?

I don't—I certainly like people talk about younger people as being more foolish and self-obsessed than, you know, baby boomers. But you can bloody well forget that. They were the most self-obsessed generation in the world!

I wasn't saying that it's common as a justification; rather, I was using that as a segue into the question of what you would advise for such people.

Well, the thing is people are deeply confused about relationships, and it's no bloody wonder. I mean, the reason they're confused about relationships is because of the birth control pill.

I mean, that's a biological mutation of massive proportions, right? It's probably the biggest biological event that hit the human race—that hit animal life—ever since sexuality evolved. This is a big deal.

Like, no female creatures have ever had voluntary control over their reproductive status before, so—and that only happened in 1960. It's like that's yesterday. It's like a blink of an eye.

And so everybody's trying to sort that out. Nobody knows what the hell to do about it. But you know, what do you do with autonomous women? They're annoying, they're interesting and attractive, and they do all sorts of bizarre things. But they're so damn complicated that they don't know what to do with themselves, and neither do men.

So everybody's struggling along with how to deal with that, and then that all gets contaminated with, you know, stupid wish-fulfillment resentment and ignorance and willful blindness and general stupidity to produce all sorts of completely harmful solutions.

So, and we could go—look, let's go back a little bit, and let's go back to those dimensions of life just because you guys can argue this out with me. You know, I'm perfectly happy to hear what you have to say.

What I've observed is that in order for you to have enough pillars underneath you—because you don't want to be knocked out by a single event, it's not good. And single events that are capable of knocking you out are on their way. Some of you no doubt have already experienced them, and there's going to be many of them in your life.

So you need friends. How many? That's an open question. None is the wrong number, especially for men. Because it turns out that men without friends seem to be unhappier than women without friends.

So, but that doesn't mean women don't need friends. You need an intimate relationship of some sort, you know? And I would say, in the absence of a better theory, you should do it traditionally. Because the probability that you're going to spin out of your own experience a solution that's better on average than the traditional solution is zero.

You don't have the lifespan to do it, so unless you get really lucky, you know, and stumble into it, but it's very unlikely.

You need to do something that's of benefit to the collective and that's reciprocally beneficial to you. That's usually a job or, if you're lucky, it's a career, which would even be better.

You need a family of some sort because otherwise you're just too isolated, especially when you get older. So—and that probably is going to involve children, and I think children are probably 30% of life. Maybe more; they might be 50% of life, but they're certainly 30%.

You need to figure out what you're going to do with your own private time, and you have to watch your health. That partly means making sure that you don't fall down various drug and alcohol abuse holes.

So—and then you keep yourself relatively intact. And like, I don't think that's everything you need, but if you're missing any one of those, then you're weaker.

Now, you could probably miss one or even two of those and still be fundamentally okay, you know? Because I don't think you need to stand on six legs, but you certainly need to stand on three or four.

And so one of the things I would suggest is that—and I would say I also learned this from Jung—is do not deviate in too many directions at the same time. You're lucky if you can deviate in one direction without blowing yourself apart.

Because as soon as you deviate, then you're in a chaotic domain, and there might be a lot of possibility in there—there no doubt is—but the idea that you can tolerate that is possible, but it's unlikely.

That's why most people are conservative.

So now, so then the next issue in part is, well, how do you meld all those things together? And that's partly why I told you about the Peterson ideas because I think that the idea that what you're trying to do is to produce a sustainable game that can be implemented across large sections of time, that's not an inhibitory model.

Right? It doesn't mean, well, you should just crush your aggression or crush your sexuality. Or it doesn't even mean that they should be sublimated, which is the Freudian alternative.

What it means is that those capabilities should be made sophisticated so that they're actually in play all the time. You know? So if you see somebody who's sophisticated and aggressive, they're aggressive all the time. Always in everything they do, but it's more like power; it's not impulsive damage.

So, it's an unbelievably useful thing to have at hand, partly because it enables you to say no. And you need to be able to say no because if you can't say no, then you're a slave.

So, well, then you might ask, well, how do those problems get solved? Well, one of the things I can tell you is that marital union is a human universal, so the probability that something like that is the right solution is—it’s canonical.

Well, maybe you can find a better solution, but I wouldn't count on it.

So, and there's other things that people don't take into account, then. And that's partly because I think that we refuse to admit them.

The temporal course of life is radically different for women than it is for men, and men have a much larger horizon to play around with than women do.

And so men can—I like—I have friends who got married when they were in their late 50s and had children, you know. That's not—it’s not that uncommon, you know? And they're doing fine. You know, both—the one man I'm thinking about, he married a woman from the third world, and he treats her far better than she ever expected to be treated by anyone, you know?

And they have a child, and he absolutely dotes on the child, and everything seems to be working out fine. But as a general rule, that's not an option for women.

And so women have to solve most of the problems in life before they're 40, probably before they're 35. And so that's a real problem, and no one talks about it. No one will admit to the existence of that problem.

So, what the reason I'm saying that is because what that means is that women have less time to experiment with alternative modes of sexual being than men do, because the price they pay for losing the time during the experimentation is prohibitively high.

Not that I would say that this is true. There are obviously exceptions, but just from my experience.

Don't you think that in some ways it's better that women kind of have this limit?

Because I have a friend whose parents are like 29 years different, and she resents her mother so much for it.

And that's probably what her father is. I mean, because of the age difference.

Yeah, because he died when she was 10.

So,