Q & A 2018 09 September

Hi everyone! Welcome to the September version of my Q and A's, and thank you very much for tuning in again. Hopefully, we'll have an interesting discussion tonight. I want to start with a demonstration of some newly managed technical wizardry. I have a program that I developed with my colleagues that I want to talk to you guys about for just a few seconds. Some of you already know about this, called self authoring.

Self authoring helps people write about their past to guide it. The autobiography, that's the past authoring program. It helps to write about their virtues and their faults — that's the present authoring programs and a future authoring program that helps people write out a vision and a destination, let's say an ethical destination for their lives, as well as formulate a plan to put that vision into reality.

Our experimental investigations have indicated, for example, that university students who complete this program, even if they do it badly — and I would recommend at least doing it badly — increase their probability of staying at university by about 30%, and it has a positive effect on their grade point average as well. So, there’s a fair bit of evidence that your personality is organized at the highest level through articulated speech. Some of that you can formulate internally by thinking, and some of it you have to do — you can do by writing.

You also do that in discussion with other people, but these programs are designed to break down the problem of articulating your life — in the past, present, and future — into a series of steps that are at least in principle manageable. Thousands of people have done them, and I think they are very helpful programs, and we spent a lot of time perfecting them, I suppose to the degree that they are perfected.

Anyways, I want to — here’s the high-tech part of this — you see that’s the website selfauthoring.com. I put a coupon together; the coupon name is September. That’s what you have to enter for the coupon, and that gives you a 20% discount at self authoring. So, now all this is even more high-tech because this marker is in a different color.

This program is a personality test based on the Big Five Aspect Scale, which is a scale that a colleague of mine, one of my students developed when he worked in my lab, along with Lena Quilty. The Big Five Aspect Scale offers you a five-dimensional readout of your personality: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness — the classic Big Five. Then it breaks each of the factors, each of the traits into two aspects so you get a high-resolution map of your personality.

The test takes about 100 questions; it takes about 15 minutes to do, and you’ll learn about yourself. I think you’ll learn interesting things. I had my kids do repeated iterations of the Big Five Aspect Scale when they were teenagers, and I learned a lot about them, even though I thought I knew them quite well. I learned things that were very useful. So, you can do that, and maybe you’ll understand yourself a little bit better.

And so this is the site, and the coupon is September just as it was for self-authoring, and that’s 20% as well. You’ll see that, amazingly enough, this advertisement, I suppose, which is what it is, is in purple instead of blue, and so that’s another technological miracle brought to you by the internet and the intelligence of modern human beings.

So, alright. So we’ve dispensed with that. So that’s self authoring and understand myself, and you might find those useful, and I hope you do. So, on to more — on to different things. I guess I just got back to Toronto yesterday, I think it was yesterday. I was out in Western Canada; I went to a family reunion on Vancouver Island and then a reunion of sorts as well in Saskatchewan with my side of the family, and I finished a talk in Regina and went to Saskatoon as well, which seemed to be relatively well received, so hooray for that.

I've really enjoyed all these lectures that I've been giving. Tammy and I — Tammy's my wife — we've visited 65 cities now on this tour, and we're starting again on September 5th. We're going to go down the Eastern Seaboard — there’s 20 cities in the northeastern US — and then we’re off to Europe for another 15 cities or so. Then in February, I think we’re going to go to Australia, and then in March and April, back to Europe, and then in May I’m going to spend four months diligently finishing up what I hope to be my next book, assuming that I can get that done in that period of time and also that other opportunities, let’s say, or distractions don’t rear their head either positively or negatively.

Who knows, right? Because life is a very uncertain business. I’ve really enjoyed the lecture tour a lot. You know, I’ve been speaking to audiences of about 2,500 to 3,000 people, and mostly about — I would say mostly about the nexus, the relationship between meaning and responsibility. I’m trying to make the case that because life is difficult, as everyone with any sense knows, and because we can make that worse with our own stupidity and malevolence, that it’s necessary to find sustaining meaning in life.

My sense is, and I think people tend to agree to this, is that the most sustaining meaning can be found in the adoption of voluntary responsibilities. So, in attempts to decrease the suffering in life and to do things that are worthwhile and admirable, and to take care of yourself individually and your family, and to have a little bit left over for your community, and to have goodwill across all those dimensions, if you can possibly manage it despite the fact that there's something in life to make people relatively bitter.

Then, as well, the necessity of conducting yourself in a truthful manner. I’m also making the case to my listeners, I suppose, that one of the most ancient presuppositions that underlies the structure of Western civilization, which is a very functional civilization in my estimation, is the idea, derived from Genesis, that truthful speech — if you confront truthful speech, if you confront the chaos and potential that is in front of you with truthful speech, that you engender the order that is good.

That’s a fundamental ethical dictum. It’s a presupposition in some sense that the order that you bring into existence in all the choices that you make will be the best possible order in proportion to the degree that you conduct yourself in a truthful manner. So, those ideas seem to be falling on very receptive ears, and they are the most resilient ideas that I think I’ve ever come across.

I mean, I always take an ice pick and a hammer — any idea that I encounter, and I really do that diligently because I don’t want to rely on ideas that can fall apart and break, especially when they’re stressed. I don’t see — I haven’t come across ideas that are more solid than that. I mean, the first proposition, you know, that life is suffering and that we make it worse with our malevolence — I think everyone understands that to be true. But the second is that the best way to confront that is to shoulder responsibility voluntarily and to live in truth.

I think those are even more powerful ideas because you could say that the cure for a malaise or the treatment for a disease is more powerful than the malaise or the disease itself. And if responsibility and truth are antidotes to suffering and malevolence, then that means that they have a power that’s transcendent over suffering and malevolence. And, you know, it’s a very pessimistic viewpoint on the one hand because I’m stressing, for everybody that is coming to listen to me talk, the fact that life has an inalienable element of difficulty and travail and suffering and all of that.

You certainly see that sort of thing when you go to a family reunion. You know, like, a lot of my relatives — my parents’ generation — they’re getting old. My parents are in their 80s now, and some of their friends are older, and everyone’s starting to suffer from the inevitable deterioration associated with old age, and it’s very, very trying and very difficult for people.

It’s in those situations that you see more clearly the fragility of life and also the importance of having a family that’s functional and people around you that love you, and all those things that, in principle, can help sustain you through difficult times. So, anyways, I’m here in Toronto for about 10 days. I got a lot of media interviews again, partly to discuss the upcoming talks. My book, "12 Rules for Life," still appears to be selling extraordinarily well; it’s quite amazing, all things considered. It’s approaching 2 million sales in the English version, and there are foreign versions coming out all the time.

I’m also in the process of putting together the final arrangements for my next book, which I talked about, so the plan is to write — I’m writing that now. I’ve got it about half written, maybe a little bit more, expanding on the themes that I developed in "12 Rules for Life" and also extending them as much as I possibly can. I hope to continue writing during this period of touring as well so that I can stay on top of my deadlines, and then from May to September to spend most of that time finalizing and editing and polishing and all of that.

Then, hopefully, the book is due in September, and the current plan is to spend September through December likely concentrating on a return to the biblical lectures, starting with Exodus, which is something I’m really looking forward to but haven’t really been able to turn my hand to.

The other thing I’m really thinking hard about doing, I’d like to do a series of lectures — and I don’t know if I could do them publicly or not, but I might be able to finagle that in some manner — I’d like to do a series of lectures on the sacred icons of the radical left. So, I’d like to do a lecture series on Marx and Foucault and Derrida and then some of the famous feminists too, like Betty Friedan, whose work I’m not a fan of for a variety of reasons, and Judith Butler as well. But I’d really like to concentrate on Marx.

One of the things I might do, for you guys tonight, or to you — yeah, one of the things I might do to you tonight as I found a poem by Karl Marx that is extraordinarily interesting and that might be worth reading if I can — I just thought about doing that, if I can scrape it up in time. So, let me just check very quickly and see if I can find it, and then I’ll get to some questions because, after all, this is a Q&A, right? That’s the theory. So, give me 30 seconds if you can indulge me. There it is.

Yeah, so let me read this to you, and then we’ll get to the Q&A. I think this is the kind of thing that I'd like to shed light on in any possible lecture series on Marx. So, this is called "Invocation" — Invocation of One in Despair:

A God has snatched from me my all,
In the curse and rack of Destiny.
All his worlds are gone beyond recall;
Nothing but revenge is left to me.
On myself revenge all proudly wreak,
On that being that enthroned Lord.
Make my strength a patchwork of what’s weak;
Leave my better self without reward.
I shall build my throne high overhead;
Cold, tremendous shell!
Its summit be—for its bulwark—
Superstitious dread.
For its Marshall blackest agony,
Who looks on it with a healthy eye.
I shall turn back, struck, deathly pale and dumb,
Clutched by blind and chill mortality.
Made his happiness prepare his tomb;
And the Almighty's Lightning shall rebound
From that massive iron giant.
If he bring my walls and towers down,
Eternity shall raise them up, defiant.

Well, so on that happy note, that’s perhaps some insight into the spirit that motivated our friend, Mr. Karl Marx. So I’ve really been thinking a lot about the Marxist critique of Western culture.

Especially, a fundamental Marxist critique is a criticism of the fact that in capitalist societies, a disproportionate amount of the spoils, let’s say, the wealth, goes to a disproportionately small part of the community. This is, of course, a truism, by the way. It is the case that that occurs. Which is why the richest dozen people in the world have as much money as the bottom two billion, something like that.

It’s also the case — it’s part of a more generalized law sometimes called Price's Law and represented with the Pareto Distribution — Pareto is P-A-R-E-T-O — showing that not only do the bulk of the spoils, let’s say the wealth, go to a disproportionately small number of people, but the bulk of the productive work is also done by a disproportionately small number of people, not necessarily the same people that have the wealth, by the way, although in a functional society, there’s some overlap.

Now, Marx was correct in observing that that happened in capitalist societies but incorrect in assuming that there are any societies that have ever been formulated or that could ever be formulated that would escape from that destiny. Because you see that same tremendous Pareto distribution — that proclivity of wealth to accrue in the hands of a small number of people — you see that in every human society that’s ever been studied.

If it’s not wealth, it’s sexual access or reproductive opportunity, let’s say, or material possessions, which is obviously a form of wealth, etc. So, one of the things that characterizes the West is that all our societies produce inequality like every other society, including animal societies, by the way.

Even among plants, even amongst ours, a disproportionate number of the heavenly bodies have most of the mass, by the way, which is not something that you can lay at the feet of Western capitalism. The thing that the West has been able to do that other societies haven’t been able to do is to produce wealth alongside inequality, and that wealth — a fair proportion of that wealth — is actually going to benefit the people who are in the direst straits.

And that process has been accelerating over the last 20 years. So, from the year 2000 to the year 2012, the level of absolute poverty in the world was halved, which is the fastest rate of economic development in the history of the world. I think that rate is accelerating, at least in part because the Soviet Union, for example, isn’t around anymore to agitate the economic masters and leaders of developing countries into the adoption of counterproductive collectivist economic strategies.

What appears to be happening is that as we spread the fundamental Western ethos of individuality and private property and free markets and freedom, in general, for men and for women around the world, the poorest people are becoming — well, at least they’re not starving; they’re becoming richer. Even though at the same time we do pay a price for that in inequality.

So, there’s a rule, and I don’t know how to formulate it exactly, or there seems to be a rule, which is that a given unit of wealth is produced at the cost of a certain production of a certain number of units of inequality, and that seems to be inalienable to some degree.

So, anyways, that’s part of a Marxist critique — the poem first, which is like, you want to listen to that poem a couple of times, I would say. But then more fundamentally, a critique of the Marxist critique of the West. Yes, the West produces inequality, but it’s not something that you could lay at the feet of capitalism; it’s a much, much deeper problem.

What that means, too, is that those people who purport to be on the side of the poor and dispossessed are not being friends to them by any stretch of the imagination at all by attempting to tear down the very hierarchies that seem to be leveraging the world’s poorest people out of poverty as rapidly as possible.

There’s evidence, as well, that people start to become very concerned about the environment if you can get their family income — I think it’s GDP — I think up about 40, above about 4,500 USD a year. They start to have a little bit of spare time to be concerned with the environment around them, and so the right way to achieve ecological balance in the world seems to be to make people rich as fast as we possibly can, to make the poor rich as fast as we possibly can. Wouldn’t that be lovely if that was really the way out?

So, anyways, let’s try some questions here. So, any advice on effectively implementing what I learned into my life? I resonate with "Twelve Rules" so much when reading but struggle to remember it in my day-to-day life. Well, you’re not alone, Sam. You’re not alone in that, Sam.

I mean, first of all, you got to figure out what your time frame is. You know, one of the truisms of clinical psychology is that slow and incremental improvement is first of all normative, in the best possible way, in the most optimistic situation, but also very powerful.

So, of course, you struggle to remember it in your day-to-day life because life is difficult, and it’s harder to do things than not to do them, and it’s harder to do them well than to do them badly. You know, and it’s easy to sit around and be hopeless.

I don’t mean it’s emotionally easy because it’s not, but it’s procedurally easy to be useless and to fall back into your old habits and to not discipline yourself. It’s a matter of continual practice, slow continual practice. I think a good example of that is something like weight lifting.

If you start a weightlifting program, which I would recommend, by the way, because it’s tremendously advantageous physically and cognitively, you’re not gonna really see results for a number of weeks, and then the results are rather slow. But you can get pretty decent results over a six-month period and absolutely stellar results over a couple of years.

So, you have to make sure your timeframe is right and not to be too hard on yourself. I did mention the future authoring program earlier, and one of the things I would recommend, too, is if you’re having a hard time implementing your decisions, say your ethical decisions, that you spend a bit more time thinking them through and writing them down, and the future authoring program is really helpful. That’s why we designed it.

So, get your goals straight and continue to practice every day, and if you’re not succeeding, then make your goals slightly smaller. You want to make your goals large enough so that they challenge you but small enough so that you have a reasonable probability of succeeding at them on a day-to-day basis.

Then you have to also understand that if you fail on a given day — like let’s say you’re trying to quit smoking and you quit for two weeks, and then you have a cigarette and you think, "Oh my God, now I’ve screwed it up; I’m not quitting anymore." You smoke a whole pack of cigarettes. It’s like — well, there’s a couple of mistakes there.

One is, just because you had a cigarette doesn’t mean you failed; it just means that you had a cigarette. You can start stopping again the next day, and the fact that you had one cigarette in the last two weeks is a hell of a lot better than the two weeks that you had before that.

So, you’ve got to be realistically humble. You got to be ambitious enough in your goal so that you’re pursuing something that you regard as truly meaningful and worthwhile. And maybe you can judge that to some degree if you think about someone you love attempting the same thing and think about how you would feel if they managed it. If you would feel good, then that’s probably a good — what would you say? That would be a good evaluation strategy to use on yourself.

So, you want your goals to be of sufficient nobility so that you can live with yourself properly if you’re pursuing them, but you want them to be small enough so that you have a reasonable probability of implementing them. And if your implementation — okay, it’s good. It’s back. You can start again. Maybe we’re back.

Yeah, okay, guys, well that was interesting. The software that I used on my camera crashed, and then when I reopened it, it told me I hadn’t purchased it and wanted me to re-enter the serial number, which is quite the interesting experience.

So, I’m just getting my questions back up. This 3/4 person that you see here is Julian who’s, you know, reasonably helpful about these sorts of things now and then I’ve — I’ve almost actually learned how to do this. I tell you, you do get slower technologically as you get older; it’s kind of annoying.

Or maybe you get just fed up with it more; it’s hard to tell. I think you’re probably stupider and less patient, and so then you justify your last stupidity by just assuming that you’re less patient. So, okay, anyways, we’re back, thanks, Julian.

Okay, so Paul Maloney says you mentioned analyzing one of your wife’s dreams that left you feeling hopeful that we’ll emerge from this chaos. Okay, do you still feel this way? Any new signs?

Well, who knows, right? Because the future is complicated and no one’s a prophet. I don’t know what to think. I think this, I guess I already mentioned earlier in this Q&A that on a global level there are all sorts of reasons for real optimism as far as I’m concerned.

There are reasons for pessimism as well, but there are reasons for real optimism. Look — it looks to me like what’s happening is that the spread of the Western free market individualist ethos around the world is producing a substantive increment in wealth, a substantive decrease in poverty, and the consequence of that decrease in poverty is also, in places like China — which, by the way, China is reforesting — so that's pretty interesting.

China is now rich enough so that it can afford to reforest. So, there’s more forests in China than there was in 1990, which is quite a remarkable thing.

Anyways, my point is that on the global scale things appeared to be very positive, but then in the West, we seem to be suffering from a crisis of confidence, and that’s destabilizing us and making us act foolishly.

I don’t know how much of a threat that is to the integrity of our political system, and I’m so much in the middle of this let’s say personally that it’s hard for me to have a clear hand about it now. I’m very optimistic about a variety of things that I see. I’m very optimistic, for example, about the fact that so many people have come out to these long-form lectures and paying attention to high-complexity educational and political material on YouTube.

There’s a real hunger for that, and I, as I said before, the lecture tour that I’m on has been extremely positive. It’s really something to see all these thousands of people come out to concentrate on getting their lives together, and I do believe that’s why people are coming out.

And then, you know, I think — I don’t remember if I did a Q&A since I did the discussions with Sam Harris, but I did four discussions with him, four debates, let’s say; each of which was about two hours long — two in Vancouver, one in Dublin, and one in London, UK, and there were about 3,000 people at each of the Vancouver events, 8,500 people in Dublin, and something approximating 6,500 in London.

The audience was very attentive for the two-hour stretch for all four discussions, and so I do see more intelligence in the general population, say, than I think we presumed was there, and more hunger for serious discussion.

I’m hoping that people who are clear-headed and sensible can push back the idiot collectivist radicals on the left and on the right. We’ll see. So, yeah, I’m hopeful because I think that people are remarkable creatures despite their limitations and the absurdity of our existence and our proclivity toward malevolence.

I think that we can — whatever constitutes our essence is capable of transcending that, and I think that people know that, and I think the more people that realize that consciously and start to implement it, the better off we’ll be.

And so nested inside my extreme pessimism about the structure of life and the frailty of human character is an exceptional optimism about our potential.

So we’ll see, but I would also say to all of you that are listening, you know it is my firm belief that each of us have a responsibility to set the world right in the manner that we are able to, and that is fundamental. That’s a fundamental import.

I really believe in some sense it’s of cosmic import, in the same way that consciousness itself is of cosmic import, and consciousness reflects being itself, and so, and I do believe that we have the ability and the responsibility to bring new creation into being and that our decisions help us, then our ethical decisions— that the value of that new being is dependent directly on the ethical decisions that each of us make, and I think we can realize that even though it’s a frightening thing to realize.

Marcus Perry asks, "You said the narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think we are stupider than we are. Well, internet censorship lead to the same problem once TV is supplanted?"

Well, God, other incredibly complicated question, you know. Whenever I think about censorship, I actually talked to Mark Zuckerberg a while back, and we had a good conversation, you know. Zuckerberg, who I think is a very straightforward person as far as I could tell, is optimistic about Facebook and does see it as a platform whose primary goal is to connect people, and mostly at the personal level, although Facebook has made forays into news provision and that’s complicated their corporate vision.

Now, I’m not a pro-censorship character. I do not like hate speech legislation, and I am absolutely opposed to compelled speech legislation of the sort that’s been introduced into Canada. I think it’s a violation of the principle of free speech and free thought, and I think it’s exceptionally dangerous.

But having said that, you know, nothing is ever simple. That’s part of the reason that things are so annoying politically. So, you know, one of the things that Apple and Facebook and so forth — those, the large social media platforms had to contend with, say, was the attempts by organizations like ISIS to use their platforms for recruitment.

Now, let’s say that I'm a free speech absolutist, which isn’t exactly true because I realized that there are the constraints that have evolved in some sense naturally in the English common law system on free speech, and that they’re necessary. You can’t libel someone, you can’t outright lie about someone, you can’t slander them, you can’t counsel them to criminal conduct, etc. There are restrictions on free speech.

Well, but I think those restrictions should be minimal. Well, let’s say that one of the restrictions you assume should be placed on free speech is that those that you are at war with are not allowed to use your platform to recruit, which doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable proposition and is perhaps even the sort of thing that a conservative or a libertarian, much less a liberal or a left-winger, might get behind.

Well then that means that you’ve defined already a framework in which — is that censorship? Or maybe I’m not thinking this through clearly, but is that censorship? It’s certainly self-protection.

Well, then, having established the principle that a certain amount of — what would you call it — monitoring of the use of your platform is necessary, where do you stop? The answer is, it’s complicated.

I think that what Facebook, etc., did with Alex Jones was a big mistake. I think that was because, well, it wasn’t just Alex Jones that was punished, let’s say. It was all the people that were watching him, and not everybody that was watching him was an avid follower of him. Some people were just watching him to see what the hell he was doing and what he was up to, and that’s necessary.

But you don’t just censor the one person; you censor everybody that’s paying attention to him, and then you make him a martyr, and you persecute someone who’s paranoid, which all that does is validate his conspiracy theories as conspiratorial theories and the conspiratorial theories of his followers.

I guess one of the things I’ve really been wondering is if the wild and woolly reality of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter are actually sustainable in a corporate environment or if the radical freedom that was associated with those technologies was only something that was possible when, in some sense, all of that material provision was outside the standard legal framework because it was too new to regulate.

You know, I can’t tell. I don’t know if corporations can manage something like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook for that matter, because their internal conservatism — and I mean that in the temperamental sense, their unwillingness to take risks — is what I mean in that their case is liable to make it impossible for them to be neutral purveyors of information, some of which is going to be extremely radical.

So, well, I have no conclusions to offer there. I guess I’m glad in some sense that these particular complicated problems aren’t mine to solve. I certainly think that the production of automated sensors is a very, very bad idea, but I’m also someone who’s constitutionally opposed to such things.

Closed-circuit TV monitoring of the general public as well and cameras that watch people at stoplights and any automated system that enforces the law, or what's hypothetically the law, to me should be regarded with deep, deep suspicion.

So, okay, that’s that. Much of my early work deals with alcoholism, yes, and, at the biological level, that’s what I did my PhD thesis on, and much of my early published papers were where I learned about brain function because alcohol affects every part of the brain.

I had learned a lot about the brain. What prompted my interest in that area and your apparent shift to issues clustered around personality? Well, I was always interested in motivation for drug and alcohol abuse, you know what it was that drove people to use drugs of abuse, let’s say.

I got the opportunity to study at McGill under Dr. Robert Peel, who was an excellent supervisor, and he was deeply involved with drug and alcohol abuse research, looking at motivation for alcoholism, and he offered me a position in his lab. That was what he was working on, and I thought, well, that was one of my cardinal interests, although perhaps not my fundamental interest, which even at that point had to do with motivation for totalitarianism and the commission of atrocity in the service of group belief.

But I thought, well, it’s a broad topic, and I could learn a lot about biology and neurobiology as a consequence of working on something that was so biological. So my early work in psychology was extremely biologically oriented, and it was unbelievably useful. I learned a lot from the animal experimentalists, in particular people like Jeffrey Gray and later Jaak Panksepp.

I have a reading list at Jordan B Peterson dot com that outlines some of those emotional — those books on emotional neuroscience. Um, what was my — why did I shift? Well, there were a variety of reasons. One was that the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism — NIAAA — which funded grant research in the United States essentially made the kind of research I was doing with Robert Peel impossible.

It’s part of the consequence, I think. This is one of the things that the universities are doing so terribly wrong: As the ethics committees made our research impossible both to fund and to implement. So here's why:

So we were bringing people into the lab. So here’s who we picked for subjects. If you were going to be a subject in one of our experiments, you had to be a young man, and you had to have an alcoholic father and an alcoholic grandfather and at least one other first or second-degree male alcoholic relative.

Well, I hope I'm back again. You know, my software updated, and obviously the update has a bug, so that’s rather annoying. Apologies for that once again.

So back to the alcoholism discussion, where was I? Oh yes, so we would get these subjects I mentioned who they were. They were young men who weren’t alcoholic but who drank socially who had an alcoholic father, an alcoholic grandfather, and at least one other male alcoholic relative.

Now, why did we pick subjects like that? Well, we knew alcoholism ran in families, and we couldn’t really study its transmission in women because if you’re a female alcoholic — can you drink when you have a child in utero? Then the child can have fetal alcohol syndrome, and whatever abnormalities in psychophysiological response or psychopathologies might be associated with their alcoholism can easily be masked by the presence of fetal alcohol syndrome.

So we couldn’t use women, and besides, alcoholism is a problem that fundamentally characterizes men. Although there are female alcoholics, I think it’s four to one, if I remember correctly from those days, it’s four to one male to female. So it was — you know, we thought if we concentrated on those who had the highest probability of developing alcoholism because of their loaded family history that we could shed some light on the mechanisms associated with alcoholism, and that would be useful for men and for women.

So we studied sons of male alcoholics, sons of multi-generational male alcoholics; those were our target group. Very hard populations to fight. We had people hired full-time to do nothing but find us research subjects.

We did relatively small studies because we were lucky if we could gather four or five subjects a month in the Montreal urban area. Anyways, we did discover a lot about alcoholism. We discovered, for example, that if people with this multi-generational history — a substantial proportion of them, if they drank enough alcohol to move their blood level up above 0.08, which is the legal intoxication level, and if they did that in a relatively short period of time, then their heart rate would increase above — I think the average was about 12 beats per minute.

Do the standard control of zero, zero or one or two; it was very low. And then we did figure out over time our whole team that that seemed to be a consequence of susceptibility to alcohol’s effect on opioid production in the brain, and secondary or opioid effects on dopamine, which is both opiates and dopamine are primary reward chemicals.

So it looked to us like people with multi-generational family histories of alcoholism got an opiate response from alcohol. But we had to get people drunk in order to find this response. It turned out that 0.08, which was the legal limit at that time for driving, was approximately the place where we saw these psychophysiological effects, and also saw fairly pronounced cognitive and motor effects of alcohol because we also studied that.

So now to bring — we bring people into the lab, and we’d give them three large shots of alcohol that they consumed in ten minutes. We used laboratory alcohol, which was I think 95% pure alcohol. Usually, put it in orange juice, and so people would be, you know, reasonably intoxicated.

We’d let them sober up until they were at point 04, which is half legal intoxication, which we thought was useful, and then we put them in a cabin and they’d go home. We had our own mishaps now and then; someone would throw up, and that was — well, I’m at least getting better at fixing it when it screws up now.

So you know — and it — anyways now and then we would have somebody who would be coming in the lab, and that was always unpleasant. But then we’d also let people sober up, but it actually takes quite a long time to go from point 08 to 0.04, especially if you’re a big guy because your dose of alcohol is proportionate to your body weight.

So we used to have people wait in the lab for a couple of hours, you know, and they were not very happy necessarily about having to wait before we paid them and so forth. If we didn’t treat them extraordinarily well — which we tried to do — then of course they were much less likely to come back and participate in another study, and since it was very difficult to get research subjects, we wanted to treat them very well, apart from the fact that we would have done that anyways.

But then, NIAAA decided that half our subjects had to be women or we couldn’t get funding. Well, now our subjects couldn’t be women. It was impossible to do the kind of research that we were doing with women for the reasons that I just outlined.

Well, first of all, alcoholism doesn’t affect women as much as it affects men. Depression and anxiety tend to affect women more, and it’s perfectly reasonable to study those things, but that isn’t what we were doing.

And then we couldn’t do multi-generational studies for genetic predisposition with women because of the fetal alcohol syndrome problem. This was something I think came in under the Clintons — this requirement for absolute gender equality in subject selection — and they didn’t give a damn if that meant that there were certain kinds of research that just couldn’t be done anymore.

And so I had to stop doing it, and no one’s really doing that kind of research anymore because it’s just too difficult. It was always a pain because it was really hard to get the subjects, and then you had to get people quite intoxicated, and then you had to deal with them when they were drunk, and you had to do your psychophysiological recording and all that sort of thing, and then they had to sober up.

You know, it was complicated. Clinical research is unbelievably complicated and difficult. And then you had like two more restrictions to it, and people just go, "Oh okay, well I guess we won’t study the psychophysiological consequences of alcohol anymore." Or so people would use low doses, you know, and only get their subjects’ blood-alcohol level up to like point O2 or point O3. But that’s completely irrelevant because alcohol doesn’t have much of a physiological effect at those low doses.

And so, well, this is one of the things that made me absolutely despise ethics committees, and I believe that the proliferation of ethics committees is one of the reasons that university research, human research is doing badly, psychological research is doing badly.

There’s a variety of reasons, but that’s certainly one of them. So, I was interested — sorry, this is a very long answer — but I was interested in personality as well, you know, because I was a clinical psychologist and I’d read Freud and Jung and Adler and all the great clinicians of the 20th century.

When I went to Harvard, I was offered — you know when you’re a new faculty member, there’s usually a set course that they require you to teach; that’s one of the core courses, and then you have some freedom with your other courses. So, I said I’d teach personality, and then I got more and more — we were looking at personality models with the alcoholism research.

At that point, the Big Five was starting to establish itself. I wasn’t much of an admirer of the Big Five because I like — well, I like theories as well as empirical research, and I thought the Big Five — well, there was just no theory at all; it was just brute force empiricism.

But, well, you know, the data eventually became convincing, and as I got more and more interested in personality, I got more and more interested in the use of personality and other psychometric technologies to predict things like academic and creative success.

You see, at McGill, my Bob and I and a variety of other people were using psychological tests of various sorts to predict things like alcoholism and antisocial personality, so we could use the Big Five and neuropsychological tests — tests of dorsal lateral prefrontal function, at least in principle, to predict to some degree who might be susceptible to the development of antisocial personality.

Then when I went to Harvard, I thought, well, hey, maybe we could use those tests to predict who was going to be good at things as well as who was going to be bad. You know, the people who are creative or the people who were academically outstanding or people who did well as managers and administrators in corporations might do well on personality tests and on neuropsychological tests that assess dorsal lateral prefrontal functions — that’s higher-order cognition.

So we started to put together test batteries that assess that, and that was fascinating research. I did that with Daniel Higgins, who’s my partner in the development of the self-authoring program and Understand Myself, the things that he’s labored for 20 years on before they really became successful. He wrote a bang-up thesis; I think it was the best thing ever written on the topic of intelligence and launched that — he started working on and in 1993, which is about the same time that the Bell Curve came out.

His research actually became relatively politically contentious even though all we were trying to do was trying to determine what attributes predicted success among creative people and among managers, and administrators in academia and so forth. Pure empirical research, but it became — it was very rapidly politicized.

Anyways, so I just got more and more interested in psychometrics partly because I realized way back when in 1993 that almost nothing that psychologists measured was actually real, and so we were interested in what was real, and Daniel is an engineer trained at MIT, and so he was a very methodical person, and he didn’t like to move ahead with his research at all unless he had nailed absolutely everything down in a way that only an engineer and a software coder would.

So we started working on personality models, and I’ve been doing that and concentrating on that more specifically ever since, as well as writing the more theoretical material that was associated, say, with "12 Rules for Life" and "Maps of Meaning." So, okay, so that’s that answer.

Are you aware of any of your critics — are you aware of any critics of your work who are deep and credible? Well, of course, not someone who had a minimum — had read "Maps of Meaning." Well, it’s a complicated question.

You know, I’ve never read a critic of Jung who actually understood what Jung was talking about, and I actually knew a number of scientists, including Jaak Panksepp, who wrote "Affective Neuroscience." It was a great book who is a real admirer of Jung and the psychoanalysts. I mean, Panksepp was very interested in neuro-psych analysis, and most of the people — many of the people who are interested in the half in the neuroscience of emotion were also very interested in the psychoanalytic types.

Most of the people who criticized Jung don’t have a clue what he was talking about, and it’s not surprising because he’s very difficult. No, I haven’t come across a credible critic of "Maps of Meaning," and I think — and I don’t know. I mean that may also be because, you know, up until I became notorious, let’s say, over the last couple of years, it was — it influential, it did pretty well.

The book did pretty well for an academic work. It was no massive seller, although it’s hit the bestseller list now on in the audio version, which I think is pretty amusing — that’s the New York Times bestseller list, given that they wouldn’t list "12 Rules for Life."

So I don’t know if the lack of criticism is a consequence of its lack of influence or its difficulty. I’ve had social psychologists talk to me a little bit about the ideas of "Maps of Meaning" and I tried to talk to them, especially the people are interested in such things as terror management, but they usually don’t know the neuropsychology, and they don’t know the mythology.

There are very few people who are versed in the world of neuropsychology and in the world of mythology simultaneously, and I’m drawing these parallels, you know, and they’re very complicated parallels.

So I made the assumption — see, I studied these Russian neuropsychologists, Vinogradova and Sokolov, who were students of Alexander Luria, brilliant students. They discovered this phenomena called the orienting reflex, which I wrote a lot about in "Maps of Meaning."

The orienting reflex is your automatic response to what is unknown, and you have a very deep automatic response to what is unknown. That really means that the unknown is a conceptual category, and it was my proposition, developed in "Maps of Meaning," that the unknown is a fundamental category — or maybe even a fundamental category of reality, depending on how you define reality.

Like, I’m defining reality phenomenologically as experienced but as experienced universally and as experienced biologically by animals and by human beings. The unknown is something like unexplored territory, and it’s reasonable to assume that there’s a fundamental distinction even neurologically between the patterns of action that obtain in territories that you’ve thoroughly explored and the pattern of action that’s necessary when you step outside the domain that you’re familiar with, where your reaction as a prey animal, or perhaps as a predator, has to become paramount.

So the fundamental proposition in "Maps of Meaning" is something like the domain of the unknown that’s reflexively responded to with the orienting reflex, which is a very, very fundamental reflex and basic to the entire process of learning itself, is reflected in our mythological representations.

If that’s true, then it’s a profound realization. I wouldn’t exactly say discovery because I don’t know if you bring two literature’s together that have never been conjoined if that constitutes a discovery, but I’ve certainly never found anyone who was able to suggest to me any reason why I should assume that that hypothesis is incorrect.

You know, when I’ve had pretty damn bright graduate students, and they’ve gone off to be credible professors, most of them have maintained that viewpoint, and I think Colin DeYoung is probably foremost among them. So, you know, it would be nice actually, if I could encounter critics of "Maps of Meaning" who were credible because I’m sure there’s some things in it that I wrote that were wrong, and I don’t know what they are.

I mean, I’ve been thinking about the damn book since 1982, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and my work in "12 Rules for Life" is an extension of what I did in "Maps of Meaning," but I can’t see holes in it. Nothing I’ve learned since then — and that might be a consequence of my own stupidity, but I haven’t seen any reason to radically revise the propositions that I put forth in "Maps of Meaning." I think they’re credible; I think the idea that — and I think there’s actually more evidence now that the propositions were correct than there were when I wrote the book originally.

The idea, for example, that our hemispheres are specialized – one for action in the domain of the known and the other for action in the domain of the unknown — I think that’s well supported by the work of, what’s his name? Another student of Luria, Greenberg.

It’s either Greenberg or Cohen or Goldberg. I don’t know what Chore is. I know Penrose and Hameroff. I’m not an admirer of the Penrose and Hameroff attempt to reduce consciousness to microtubule function — quantum mechanics and microtubule function. I did my best to understand it; I couldn’t.

It seemed hollow to me, and my experience has generally been if I find something incomprehensible and hollow, it generally is. I’ve read better books on consciousness, like "The User Illusion," which I really liked. That’s "The User Illusion" by the way, and Jeffrey Gray wrote a good book on consciousness as well.

The only — and Pauli, I’m not gonna be able to answer this question very well because I’m starting to get a bit worn out here. Wolfgang Pauli and Jung recognized that — man, this is really a complicated problem. I don’t know if I can — I don’t know if I can answer this.

Okay, let’s try this. God, it’s been years since I thought about this and wrote about it, so we’ll see how I can do. You could think about this from the perspective of Piaget and constructivism.

So imagine that what you confront — what you confront fundamentally in the world is what is unknowable and what is unknowable has an intrinsic meaning. It’s both frightening and compelling simultaneously. It activates predator detection systems that protect you in the way that a prey animal is protected by freezing and withdrawal and that sort of thing, but it also makes you curious.

So that which you do not understand — which is something that you can conceptualize as that which has not yet been made habitable — world has an intrinsic meaning. Now, the question is whether the fundamental stuff of the world is that meaningful unknown or something material.

You can make the case that what we recognize as material is actually a pragmatic reconceptualization of the meaning of the ambivalent meaning of the unknowable. Now, I know that that’s hard; that’s a hard concept.

But imagine you see it — it depends on whether or not you believe that our descriptions of material reality are the superordinate descriptions of reality or whether our conceptualization of material is actually a form of pragmatic tool use that’s oriented toward our survival.

And this isn’t an easy thing to sort out; it’s something that I did try to sort out to some degree with Sam. You know, is do we have an objective description of reality and is reality something that can be objectively described? Or are we using a technology that produces so-called objective representations to facilitate our tool use?

It’s a hard question, right? Because obviously our advanced technology, which we use in a tool-like fashion, is a consequence of our materialist worldview, which begs the question: Is the fundamental purpose of science descriptive or pragmatic?

Now, I think I tend to think it’s pragmatic because I think our fundamental problem is a problem of survival. So, there’s a way of looking at the world where the fundamental reality is the chaotic potential that gives rise to fear and curiosity, and that activates — how your nervous system responds by the way.

That’s interesting to me because I would say, well, it’s a truism of evolutionary biology that what your nervous system is adapted to, what you’re adapted to as a consequence of your 3.5 billion years of evolution is reality. And that there’s no other real way of defining it.

The way your brain construes reality is as if what you’re confronting is an indeterminate chaotic potential that first generates something like apprehension, fear, and curiosity; secondarily the apprehension to freeze you so that you don’t get eaten or destroyed, and the curiosity to allow you to engage with what’s unknown and to transform it into habitable territory, which in large part consists of tools.

Now, the Onus Mundus that Pauli and Jung talked about seems to me to be associated with this idea of that chaotic potential. I think that’s related to the physicist Wheeler’s proposition that the fundamental reality of the world is information rather than material — that material is a secondary, what would you call it? It’s a secondary manifestation of information.

And I think that what we confront in the world — see, I don’t think we’re driven by the past and or determined by the present. I think what we do is we apprehend the potential of the future, the chaotic potential of the future, and I think that that’s associated with a Tohu Vavohu — which is the chaotic potential that God confronted with the logos at the beginning of time in Genesis.

I think the Genesis story is a reflection of that fundamental truth, and I think that capability characterizes us. And so the Onus Mundus is the informational substrate that constitutes the world before it’s divided into psyche — so that would be spirit, that’d be human spirit, and consciousness, and material.

So there’s something underneath that, and this is what Jung and Pauli were driving at, in my understanding. There’s something underneath that which is the pre-division unity of reality, and that’s something like the Tohu Vavohu or the Taimat, which is etymologically cognate, by the way, with the word Tiamat.

And Tiamat is the goddess that the Mesopotamian creator god Marduk confronted and cut into pieces and made the world from. So that’s all outlined in "Maps of Meaning," although not so much the Onus Mundus hypothesis.

You know, I haven’t thought about that for a long time. Oh man, okay, well here’s a weird thing. All right, well, the rate at which my camera equipment is crashing seems to be accelerating, so it appears that discussion of the Onus Mundus is irritating the structure of reality in some manner.

Anyways, let’s get back to it for a minute. So this is a different way of conceptualizing the world. I think it’s a phenomenological perspective, and I don’t know what to make of it. So, think about it this way:

It looks like your left hemisphere is specialized for operation in territories that you understand, so it’s specialized for operation in those places where behavioral patterns have been made habitual and explicit, whereas the right hemisphere is specialized for response to chaos itself, to the unknown.

What that implies is that the division that’s expressed, for example, in the yin-yang symbol, which is essentially chaos and order, actually represents something fundamental about the structure of reality.

Now, you might say, “Well, only the structure of reality insofar as biological organisms conceptualize it.” But I don’t know if we can talk about the structure of reality outside the conceptions of biological organisms.

Like, if you’re a strict believer in objective material reality, in that transcendent existence of strict material reality, then you might say, “Well, of course you could talk about it because strict material reality exists in the absence of biology and consciousness.”

But it isn’t so obvious to me that material reality does exist in the absence of consciousness because I can’t conceptualize what existence would mean in the absence of consciousness. Like is there time? Is there duration? Is there size? Maybe all of these things are relative in some sense. All of these things presuppose a conscious observer even in the materialist description.

So, it looks to me like what reality is is this Onus Mundus that Jung and Pauli were pointing to, its chaotic potential. Now, I also think that we treat each other that way.

So if I’m treating you properly, then I treat you as if you’re a moral agent who’s actively engaged in the transformation of the chaotic potential that manifests itself as the dawning of the future and that attracts your attention.

I treat you as if you’re a moral agent engaged in making the moral decisions that determine how that potential is going to manifest itself, and if I don’t treat you that way, then I’m patronizing. I don’t give you your full — I don’t grant you your full stature as a sovereign being, and I impinge upon your debt and your intrinsic value, the same value that allows you to claim the existence of natural rights, and also the presence, I would say, of natural responsibility.

So, I treat you as if you are, well, I would say made in the image of God, in the Genesis terminology, that you are part of the process that turns the Tohu Vavohu — I never pronounced that properly — into habitable order, and I think that that’s the Onus Mundus.

I think that that’s reflected in your neurological structure, and I think the fact that it’s reflected in your neurological structure and in the neurological structure of animals — you know, with this almost universal dual hemisphere neurological structure, which also, by the way, is something that’s necessary even in neural networks, which is where we got the idea for plasticity and stability, by the way, for the Big Five aspects scale models and the higher order personality factors.

I think the fact that that bifurcation is reflected in neurology is a reflection of the fact that it exists in reality.

Now, of course, how defining reality is no simple thing, you know. You can think about it as an objective materialist, but you can also think of reality as the sum total of that which is experienced, and those aren’t the same things.

They aren’t the same fundamental presuppositions, and I think that we’ve predicated our society, insofar as our society is functional, on the proposition that each individual is a sovereign entity — what would you say? Characterized by a spark of divinity that uses the responsible full word to confront the chaos of potential and generate the habitable order that is good.

I think that’s — I think we act that out. And look guys, I’m gonna call it a night because obviously this has got to be getting somewhat annoying for you to be constantly interrupted by these idiot software crashes, and it’s also approaching 9 o’clock. So, even with the delays, that’s a good hour and a half.

And so I think maybe we’ll call it a day and I didn’t get too many questions, although some of them were very complicated, and I would like to thank you for tuning in, and maybe I can remind you again about selfauthoring.com and understandmyself.com, and the discount coupon code, September.

So if you guys want to try out those programs, I think they’re real helpful, and I think that’s how people experience them, then you can do that, and then I’ll have another Q&A probably — I would say probably in mid-October because I’m on the road now. You can see that in JordanBPeterson.com at events.

I’m on the road now until mid-October, and so I’ll do another Q&A then and hopefully have an update on the educational progress of the educational material and all of that.

So thanks very much for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed the discussion. It got quite well beyond what I thought it would get to. I haven’t talked about that Onus Mundus idea for a long time, and it’s a very, very radical idea.

It’s sort of central — that idea is central, I would say, or at least central in an implicit sense to "Maps of Meaning."

Alright, well look, obviously the technological problems are mounting exponentially by all appearances, so I’m going to call it a night. Thank you very much and good luck to all of you — get your lives together, man. It’d be a good thing for everyone, including you, but also everyone else and maybe the structure of the world itself.

I really believe that’s true, by the way. So, for what that's worth. Okay, guys. Bye.