Iceland: 12 Rules for Life Tour: Lecture 1

You know, when I give the cash paid, Rosetta Thornton came from Tacoma. I'm gonna switch to English since we have, since Jordan hasn't had Dr. Peterson hasn't had time to learn enough Icelandic yet. So thank you all for coming. This has been amazing.

First, when I got the idea to book him to Iceland, I had no idea that others had been watching him on YouTube. So as it turns out, a lot of people have been, and of course he's exploded since then in popularity. So we've sold out this venue, which is almost three times larger than the first one we had, and we've sold it out two times. So that's pretty good.

He's gonna come up here, and he's gonna speak for one hour and 15 minutes, just about. Then he's gonna take a four-minute break and go offstage before the Q&A. You can submit questions to the Q&A, and we're gonna use a similar system that he's been using on his trips in America with Dave Rubin. So I'm gonna serve as a surrogate Dave Rubin here, or slightly less gay Dave Rubin.

So, and I'll bring, I'll ask him the questions, and you will put them online on a site called Slido. So it's spelled SLI dot do. Slido. I'll say it in Icelandic as well, as at a punter dao slater. So it is customary to introduce the speaker as if you know me better than him, but usually when someone is being introduced, people tell things about him, things that are true about that speaker.

Now, of course, you've all come here because you know who that guy is. But, and I'm gonna do a different thing because I think it tells you something deeper about what is going on with this guy. So I'm going to read you a few things that are wrong about him.

So these are actual things that have been said about him in media, mostly in hit pieces and, you know, character assassination attempts, and there has been one each day just about for a long time, and some of them in big, big media.

So he's a far-right guy, Hitler. He wants to force young women in... Toomer? He's the stupid people's smart person. That's actually not that bad about him, but so... And that's the reason they say that they want you to become afraid to admit that you like him or go to his talks.

Well-groomed? Alright, at least he's well-groomed. A messiah comes, surrogate dad for gormless dimwits. So that's another one directed at you. I'm one of you as well because I don't know what gormless means, but I suspect that having a gourmet is preferable.

So just stay away from this guy, Tim wits. Jordan Peterson has nothing of value to say. He's a patriarchal pseudoscientist. He encourages young men to see themselves as victims. He's a mash-up of... He has... He delivers a mash-up of Cosmo tips and my first book of myths. He's the professor of piffle. He seems like a terrible therapist.

He's a bad political and social thinker, an angry white guy. And the line between Peterson's authoritarianism and Richard Spencer's paleonazism is a blurry one. He's a Jewish shill. And if you're gonna be a shill you want to be a Jewish shill. And he's a fascist mis- terrorist.

And this is just a small sample of what has been going on, and it's all wrong. Perhaps you know, depending on how you define shill—shills okay, but it's all wrong. And that tells you something, a new one every day, too, misinform people about that man, and you can demonstrate it.

It's demonstrably false everything, and there are some people that see him as a risk to their agenda and their world we have you for some reason. But he's a reasonable, balanced, moderate, truthful man, and I've never seen such a campaign against any thinker ever in the world.

Not even someone that is untruthful or as despicable as they make him sound like. So this tells you something. This is the reason I was reading this. This tells you something about the importance of his message. And I'm not gonna theorize about exactly what that is, because there are lots of theories about exactly what it is, and what he's saying that is threatening, and to whom it is threatening.

And I think actually many of them are correct, but let's just listen to him and let's hear what he has to say, and we'll figure out why it's threatening later. So please give a warm welcome to Dr. Jordan B Peterson.

[Applause]

Well, that's an introduction that I'm going to have to live up to. So I was thinking the other day about numbers. You know, there are mathematicians who think that there isn't anything more real than numbers, and that's an interesting proposition.

I mean it's obviously the case that once you invent or discover numbers that that confers on you a tremendous power and who knows the limits of that power? And the claim that numbers are more real than anything else is predicated in part on the fact that when you discover them or invent them and start to utilize them, that your ability to operate in the world expands immensely.

And so that's one of the ways of judging whether or not something is real, is whether or not when you use it, that facilitates your means of operating in the world.

Interestingly, numbers are abstractions, and so that raises another question, which is, well, what's more real, the thing that's being abstracted from or the abstractions? And again, that's not obvious.

And maybe the question of more real isn't germane; maybe it's a question of equal reality. But it's not obvious that abstractions aren't real. And you can make a damn strong case that they're more real than anything else.

And so then you might ask yourself, well then what are the most real abstractions? And so that's what I'm going to start to talk about tonight. I'm going to talk about it in relationship to as many rules as I can lay out simultaneously.

I'll go through the rules first. So rule one, stand up straight with your shoulders back. And rule two, treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. Rule number three, which is very tightly associated with number two, they're sort of variations on a theme, is make friends with those people who want the best for you.

And by the way, these last two rules aren't injunctions designed to make your life easier; they're actually injunctions designed to make your life more difficult. Kierkegaard said at one point that his role in life, given that everything was proceeding to become easier and easier in all possible ways, was that there would come a time when people would cry out for difficulty.

And so that's partly how he envisioned his role in the world, interestingly enough, as a universal benefactor of mankind who would strive to do nothing other than to make life more difficult for everyone. Right?

And so rule two and three are like that, because treating yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping isn't the same as being nice to yourself. It's not that, and to associate with people who want the best for you means that they get to demand the best from you, and that's also not an easy thing.

Rule four is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today, and that's an injunction about envy, right? It's easy—you need people who you need things that are above you because you need to do something worthwhile with your life. You need something to aim at.

But one of the consequences of that is that you can become envious of people that you believe have attained more in an undeserved manner, and that can make you bitter. And so it's much better to compare yourself to yourself and to use yourself as the target for improvement in comparison.

Rule five is don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. And the rule of thumb there is if you dislike them, then other people will, and it's a bad idea to allow your children to act in a way that makes other children dislike them or adults dislike them, given that they're going to have to deal with children and they're going to have to deal with adults. So your primary responsibility as a parent is to help your child learn how to behave so that the social world opens up its arms to them and welcomes them at every level, and you've done your job if you can manage that.

And it's not a simple thing to do. Rule six is put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And that's not take no action for others until you have your act together. That isn't what the rule means. It means that bind your ambition with humility and work on what's right in front of you that you will suffer for if you get wrong before you engage in the large-scale transformation of other people.

Rule seven is do what is meaningful and not what is expedient, and I would say in some sense that's the core ethos of the book. Not exactly, because rule eight, which is tell the truth, or at least don't lie, is a necessary conjunction to that or a necessary additional element.

Because I don't think that you can pursue what is meaningful without telling the truth. And the reason for that is if you don't tell the truth—or let's say if you lie, which is an easier way to think about it—you corrupt the mechanisms, the instinctual mechanisms that manifest themselves as meaning. And then you can't trust them, and that's a very bad idea.

So the fundamental reason to not lie is because you corrupt your own perceptions if you lie, and when you corrupt your own perceptions, then you can't rely on yourself. And if you can't rely on yourself, then, well, good luck to you, because what are you going to rely on in the absence of your own judgment? Here you've got nothing. If you lose that rule, rule eight, as I said, is tell the truth; they're doing, or at least don't lie.

Rule nine: Assume that the person that you're listening to knows something you don't. And that's not so much a mark of respect for the person, although it is; it's a mark of recognition of your own unbearable ignorance.

You know, one of the things you have to do in life is decide whether you're more—you have to make friends more with... Let me see, let me just... Let me rephrase that properly. You have to decide what's more important: what you know or what you don't know.

First of all, there's a lot of what you don't know, and so if you make friends with that, if you decide that's important, then, well, that's a good thing because you're going to be surrounded by what you don't know your entire life. And so if you're appreciative of that, then that's going to make things go better for you.

But the other element of that is, well, why should you be appreciative of what you don't know? And the answer to that is, well, you shouldn't if your life is absolutely perfect in every way; you have exactly what you need and want; you've put everything in order around you. Then what you know is sufficient.

But if you believe that things could still be put right around you in your own personal life and with regard to the effect that you have on other people, then obviously what you don't yet know is more important than what you do know, and you should be paying attention to find out what you don't know at every possible moment.

And if you're fortunate, when you have a conversation with someone and you're actually interested in what they say, then even if they're not very good at communicating, even if they're awkward, or even if they display a certain amount of enmity toward you, there's always the possibility that they might tell you something you don't know, in which case you can walk away from the conversation less ignorant and corrupt than you were when you started the conversation.

And if your life isn't everything that you would like it to be, then being slightly less ignorant and corrupt is probably a good thing. And so rule ten is be precise in your speech. And that's an observation.

I would say that's a variant of a New Testament injunction which is—or maybe a description of the nature of the world—which is knock, and the door will open, and ask, and you will receive, which is a very strange theory, let's say, but which I would say is far more in accordance with what we know about the psychology of perception, let's say, than you might imagine.

Because it is the case that you don't get what you don't aim at. You might get what you do aim at, and your aim might get better as you aim as well, which is something to consider. If you specify the nature of the—actually, if you specify the nature of the being that you want to bring into being, then you radically increase the probability that that's what will occur.

And of course you all know that because you regard yourself at least to some degree as active creative agents, right? Your fundamental attitude towards yourself, at least in the manner that you act towards yourself, is that you wake up in the morning and you have a landscape of possibilities that lay themselves open to you, and you make choices between those possibilities and determine, in consequence, how the world is going to manifest itself.

So you confront a field of potential. That's a good way of thinking about it, and through your choices, you determine which elements of that potential are going to concretize themselves into the real world.

And you are very unhappy with yourself if you don't do that properly, and you're very unhappy with other people if they don't do that properly. And you're very unhappy with other people if they don't treat you like that's what you're like because part of what you demand from people, let's say in terms of sheer civility, is that they act towards you as if you're the locus of voluntary choice in a world of potential.

And you upbraid each other for that as well. If you have children and parents, your parents will say to you—if you're fortunate—you're not living up to your potential, which is actually a compliment in a sense, even though it's also a judgment.

And the compliment is, I know perfectly well that you could be more than you are, and you'll hang your head if you have any sense, and you'll think—in relationship to your own conscience—that yes, I have a lot of potential that I'm not fully realizing, and that actually constitutes a transgression against the good.

And I don't think I've ever met anyone who doesn't believe that if you have a reasonable conversation with them. It just seems self-evident. I mean, maybe now and then you meet someone who's narcissistically self-satisfied, but then they're narcissistic, and that's not good. As a medium to long-term strategy, that's a catastrophe that ends in disaster.

You know, in the short term it protects people, but long term it's not good in the least, and of course other people don't appreciate it as well. Rule eleven is don't bother children when they're skateboarding. And that's actually a discussion of courage, of encouragement more specifically.

Because I've been trying to understand, for example, what role parents play in the lives of their children, and I would say this is a role that is of fundamental importance as well as attempting to guide your children so that they act in a socially desirable manner, so that the world opens itself up to them.

You also want to encourage them, which is not the same as sheltering them; it's not the same at all. And to encourage someone is to say something like, or to act out something like, look kid, as you... The world's already difficult because the world isn't easy for children any more than it's easy for adults.

The difficulties are there, not the same, they're child-size difficulties, but they're still difficulties. The world is a very hard place, and it's a bitter place in many ways, and it's not only a hard and bitter place; it's also touched with betrayal and malevolence.

And that's the fundamental bottom line. But there's something in you that is capable of taking that full on and transcending it, and that's encouragement. You say, well, as difficult as things are, you're up to the challenge.

And to interfere with children when they're skateboarding, for example, when they're doing, let's say, inadvisably dangerous things—which kids, of course, do if they're skateboarding—to interfere with that is to interfere with the child's willingness to voluntarily expose themselves to the risks that they need to expose themselves to in order to develop the sort of competence that allows them to thrive in a world they cannot be sheltered from.

And so to interfere with children when they're taking necessary risks is not love or empathy, but cowardice on the part of parents, and it's deeply damaging to children. And I can tell you, as a clinical psychologist, I've never had a client come to my office—in all the hundreds—in all the hundreds of encounters I've had with people in my office, I've never had a client say, my parents made me too independent.

Right? That hasn't happened once. Right? Now my parents made me too dependent, or I conspired with my parents to perpetuate my dependence? That happened all the time. So there's a rule of thumb, which I think is a good one, which I believe is often applied in nursing homes by people who work in nursing homes, which is, of course, a very difficult job, and the rule is do not do anything for anyone they can do for themselves.

And the reason for that is that it's a form of theft. Right? If you do something for someone and it facilitates their movement forward, then they move forward because you helped them, which is something I was very careful about as a therapist.

I don't want to give my clients advice, first, it might fail, in which case they are going to pay for my advice. And second, if it succeeds, then I get to be the successful one, and I don't want to steal the success from my clients.

That's a bad idea. I want to help them figure out what it is that they should aim at and then help plot out a strat for attaining that, but I want to ensure that it's their destiny, not something I'm imposing.

And of course, the imposition of that sort of thing is the hallmark of a bad, I would say, therapeutic relationship, but also a bad relationship, period. Right? So one of the things you want to do with your partner, your spouse, you say your husband or wife, and also with your children, is to listen to them.

So that you can figure out what their problems are and figure out with them, because they're going to figure that out by communicating, and then perhaps aid them in the development of a strategy. But you have to ensure very carefully that you're not imposing your own structure in a manner that's going to steal from them what's rightfully theirs.

So, well, rule eleven is an injunction to courage as the fundamental. Because you could say, well, what's the antidote to the catastrophe of life? And one answer might be safety. It's like, well, you know, look, everyone's sensible enough to know that a certain amount of provision for safety is worthwhile.

You should probably wear your seatbelts when you're driving around in your car, because why take foolhardy risks? But, given that there is no security in life in the final analysis, then encouragement is a much better medication than sheltering.

And that's what—that's, I think, in keeping with the idea that what life is essentially is not a place to attain happiness or even to aim for happiness, even though you should be grateful if some comes along now and then.

But a call to something like adventure, and I think that's the proper way of conceptualizing it. Certainly, if you go watch a story, a movie, you read a book, something like that, if you encounter a narrative that's gripping, whether it's a romance or a classic adventure story, then the element of it that's gripping is the adventure.

And so to portray life as an adventure in romance and in the world is the proper way to portray it. And the way that you facilitate the adventure is encouragement.

I had a client once; I really liked him. He was a good guy, a smart guy, a good-looking young guy, had everything going for him. You know, he was a good musician; he was a talented athlete. But he hadn't been encouraged.

I wouldn't say he told me about his relationship with his girlfriend. He said his girlfriend wanted to go biking around southern Ontario. She was about 19 or 20, and he thought he might join her.

And when she went and talked to her parents, they made every provision possible to help her prepare for the journey, to make sure her bike was in good shape, to make sure she had the right equipment, to help her plot out a route.

And when he went and talked to his parents, all they did was worry that he was going to get hurt. And like he might get hurt, because people get hurt. But they didn't understand that they were choosing between the hurt he might encounter by going out in the world and having an adventure, let's say, with his girlfriend, or the hurt that he would encounter by staying at home, cowering in his basement under the protection of his overloving parents while his girlfriend ventured bravely into the world.

You think, well, which of those two things is most likely to be damaging? And the answer to that is, well, his parents wouldn't worry as much as if he was in the basement, and that's the wrong worry, even because they should worry more, not less.

So in rule twelve is pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. And it's oddly enough a meditation on fragility; it's a discussion of what you do when you don't know what to do.

And that's really when things have gone badly for you: when you face a terrible tragedy in your own personal life or in your familial life, or perhaps even in life of your community, when things come crowding in too quickly in the case of a death in the family or a terrible illness, or the collapse of a dream, or any of the things that can flip your world upside down, is how do you cope with that?

And that chapter contains discussion of the necessity of narrowing your timeframe, you know, because sometimes the right way to look at the world is across years, and sometimes it's across months, and when things are more out of control, perhaps it's across days.

And when things are really—when you're really up against the wall, it's across hours or even minutes. And during those minutes, then you concentrate on doing as well as you can with what's right in front of you for the longest unit of time that you can tolerate conceptualizing.

Maybe that's what you do at someone's deathbed. And while you're doing that and suffering away madly, then you also take the time to appreciate everything you can that manifests itself, that allows itself to be appreciated, and so that's the metaphor of the cat, I suppose.

And so that's the twelve rules. And I'll return to rule one, which is stand up straight with your shoulders back. And I'm going to use it as a platform for laying out the abstractions that I talked to at the beginning of the lecture.

So some of you might be familiar with the central Taoist symbol, and it's a symbol of Dao. And Dao is a very strange word; it doesn't have an easily translatable single meaning at least in English. It means a variety of things: it means the path of life.

So that would mean the path that you take as you move forward through life, but it would mean more also the proper path. So it's that—the proper path through life. So the idea now is—it's a symbol of reality, and one of the things that means is the path you take through life.

And so there's an implicit idea there that the fundamental reality of life is the path you take through life. It's not a materialist idea; it's a different kind of idea. It's the idea that life is a journey while we're mobile creatures, and we're on a journey.

And the best way to conceptualize reality is as the place that you journey through, and the question is, well, what are the elements? What are the constituent elements of the place that you journey through? Because that's also part of Dao.

And the Daoists believe that that's yin and yang. And yin is the black serpent, because those are two serpents head-to-head that make up the totality of the world. And the black serpent is yin, and yang is feminine, classically speaking from the Taoist perspective; it's a symbolic representation.

It doesn't mean that women are yin and that men aren't—it's not that. It's an attempt to use sexual symbolism to represent a deeper underlying reality. And yang is masculine; yin is dark and night, and there's a white dot in the black serpent, and there's a black dot in the white serpent.

And the white serpent is the daytime and masculinity, and it's the interplay between those two things that make up reality. And one can transform into the other at any moment, and so that's the Taoist idea of reality.

And so there's yin and yang, and they make up the world, and the question is, perhaps our question is, well, what exactly does that mean? Well, it actually means something; it's a kind of abstraction, and it's actually an incredibly helpful abstraction, once you understand the abstraction.

It might be the most real abstraction there is. So I'm going to lay out a little bit about what these two domains refer to, and then I'm going to make a case that they're real, and then I'm going to tell you what it means that they're real.

So you could think of yin as chaos. Now, we need to know what chaos is. Chaos is what God made the world out of at the beginning of time. So one of the things that chaos is is it's something like potential.

And so you can imagine—and this is not how we think as modern people, because we tend to think in a materialist way—but it is how we act. And as I said already, you act as if you confront potential, and you treat potential as if it's real.

And if your attitude towards it confers on you a certain moral obligation, which is why you know what people mean when they say you're not living up to your potential. No one ever says, "Well, what do you mean by potential?" Not unless they're being argumentative, because you already know.

And very few people say, "Well, I'm fully living up to my potential." So you admit to the reality that undergirds that conception that makes that question a possibility. Immediately, potential is—well, potential is the future, that's part of it.

And we believe in the future; we believe that it exists even though it isn't here and it's not measurable; it only exists as a potential set of realizable possibilities. That's what the future is, and it's really what we contend with.

We don't really contend with the present precisely; we orient ourselves towards the future, and the future comes at us from every direction. And we decide, as we encounter the future, which parts of it we're going to interact with and how we're going to construct the present and the past as a consequence of doing that.

And so part of chaos is potential, and that's the positive part. It's like if you're in a bind, what you look for is potential. Is there another way of conceptualizing this? Do I have a different way of acting? Can I make another plan?

Is there something that I'm not taking into account that would make this terrible situation tolerable? That's all an attempt to call upon potential and to use it to transfigure a reality that's intolerable.

And maybe it's intolerable because of the way you're conceptualizing it. Now, I'm not being naive about that; I understand perfectly well that people can find themselves so badly cornered in life that they're basically done, no matter what they do.

People obviously develop fatal illnesses, and they die, and their businesses collapse, and genuinely terrible things can happen to you that aren't your fault, that you can't fix. I'm not saying that you can just gerrymander the world by changing your attitude; it's not that straightforward.

But I am saying that you have a tremendous ability to transform the landscape of possibility that reveals itself in front of you, and that when things are terrible, that's your best bet. It doesn't mean it will succeed; it just means you don't have a better option.

And so chaos, that potential, is also something that manifests itself in a terrible manner. So imagine this—a good way of thinking about it—imagine that you have an intimate relationship. Let's say a marriage, and the marriage is predicated on trust and fidelity, which is a variant of trust.

And that the trust and fidelity is an axiom of your memories. You might think, well, what does that mean? It's like, well, let's play it out. Imagine you've been married for ten years, and then your wife tells you that she has had three affairs. Each of them lasted three years, and the last one has lasted five years and it's still ongoing, or maybe you discover that.

Okay, so then you might say, what happens then? Well, what happens is that everything you thought was wrong, right? And this is such an interesting thing because it actually means you had the past, and you think the past is fixed; it's done with, that's why it's the past.

But all of a sudden, you find out that one of the things that you thought about the past—and it happens to be a very important thing—wasn't true at all. And so what that means is that whole past that you thought was what it was wasn't what it was at all, and so it transforms itself from an actuality into potential. And most of that potential is negative.

And unless you're relieved that your wife had an affair—well, but that's an important consideration because you could imagine a situation where your marriage is dreadfully unhappy and you're just looking for an excuse to leave.

It's possible that that revelation, even though it would be shocking, would also come with a fair bit of relief. And so this potent—the potential that manifests itself, even when it's unexpected, doesn't only necessarily manifest itself in a negative guise; it can also free you, you know?

And if your marriage was unhappy, even if you wanted to cling to it, if your marriage wasn't happy and the betrayal was revealed and you're divorced and you set yourself up in two years, you might be in a better place than you were.

It's not a pathway I'm recommending, by the way. I'm just saying that it's more complicated than that. Look, that's the introduction of chaos into order, right? And the oldest story we have is something like order is susceptible to disruption by chaos.

And the fundamental demand that's made on the human being is to contend with the chaos that disrupts order—not to live in order and not to live in chaos, but to be able to contend with the chaos that disrupts order.

And so when you encourage your children, for example, what you're doing is encouraging them to become the masters of the chaos that can disrupt order rather than denizens of order, which makes them tyrants, or denizens of chaos, which makes them nihilistic and hopeless.

So you train your children; you encourage your children, and yourself, and your partner, if you have any sense, to be a master of emergent chaos and to be able to contend with that. And so chaos is potential, and it's this disruptive—it’s the capacity of the infinite world to disrupt your finite considerations. That's another way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it is it's the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And the reason that that story is set up the way it is is because it's trying to represent that there's no place that's so bounded and secure, even if it's set up by God himself, that doesn't have an agent of chaos inside it.

It's exactly the same idea that the Daoists put forward with their symbolic representation; it's just portrayed in a different manner. And the question is, well, what do you do in the garden, given that there's a snake in it? And the answer to that is something like you've become the master of snakes.

And so, and that's a deep idea. That's the same idea as confronting the dragon and getting the treasure. That's the same idea as going to the bottom of the ocean and rescuing your father from the belly of the whale. It's the same idea, and that's an element in the greatest of stories.

And the greatest of stories is heroic. A heroic story is to voluntarily confront the unknown when it manifests itself and to gather something of value as a consequence and to share it with the community.

There isn't a story that's more emblematic of what it means to be human than that. That is us, that's our best bet. Alright, so chaos—chaos is the catastrophe that will suddenly enter your life. Chaos is the flood that's definitely coming. Chaos is the ever-present possibility of apocalypse in your personal life, in your familial life, and in this broader social life, right?

Chaos is the consequence of your finite fragility existing in a world that's beyond you. Chaos is potential. Chaos is what lies before you. Chaos is what you can call on when you need something to rescue yourself from malfunctioning order. It's a permanent element of existence.

Chaos is what you don't know. Chaos is what's outside the firewall. Chaos is what's outside the walls of your house. Chaos is what's outside the walls of your town. Chaos is what's outside the borders of your country. All of that is chaos and potential.

Order. Order is where you are when what you're doing is working in the manner that you intended. Okay? It's a very specific definition. How do you know that you know what you're doing? Well, you don't, because you don't know what you're doing.

Because you don't know everything. Everything you do is bounded by ignorance. Well, you still have to operate in the world. And so what you do is you make finite plans, and then you execute those plans. And then you execute strategies to make those plans manifest themselves.

And if the plans manifest themselves the way that you desired, then you regard your knowledge as sufficient. That's your definition of truth, and it's the only definition of truth that you can use because you don't have everything at hand. And when you're where what you're doing is working, that's order.

And you might think, well, I should just stay there, because that's a comfortable place to be, and there's a certain amount of truth to that, except for one thing: if you've defined a domain of order and you stand in it and you wait, the disorder will enter all by itself.

Because things aren't static. Things change all the time, and your attempt to bind yourself within a static structure is destined to fail because everything around you is in flux. And the thing that you've parceled out as permanent will transform itself across time.

Here's an example: let's say you're a perfectly well-adapted eleven-year-old, and it's actually possible to meet it. Eleven-year-old children are often very delightful, because they're like adult children. They're not teenagers; they're like—the most mature form of children. And they can be really delightful people.

And then, like three years later, you hate them. And the reason for that is that, of course, as soon as they hit puberty—which is the emergence of chaos into the already developed childhood structures—the emergence of sexuality into a structure that didn't have to adapt to sexuality. And maybe even the emergence of aggression to some degree, but mostly sexuality.

If the child maintains only the eleven-year-old personality, by the time they're 16, they're no longer a delightful eleven-year-old. They're a very immature sixteen-year-old. And the reason that I'm pointing that out is because just because something works for you now doesn't mean it's going to work for you five years from now.

And so in order to remain stable, you can't be stagnant. They're not the same thing. Stability is a dynamic, not something static. And so not only do you have to be where you are, but you have to be going to where you're going, and you have to be participating in both of those things actively.

So it's stability plus transformation. And I would say that manifests itself—you know you're there, because that manifests itself as meaningful. That's actually the instinct of meaning, which is an instinct and perhaps the deepest instinct, is precisely the instinct that tells you when where you are is sufficiently stable, but you're forming yourself at a sufficient rate to keep up with everything that's changing.

And you know that because if you're at your job, you might say to yourself, well, my job is really secure, but it's not very challenging. And you think, well, why do you care about that? It's very secure. And the answer to that is, well, if it's not challenging, it's deadening in a sense, right?

The spirit goes out of it if it's not challenging. You need to be challenged. And why is that? Well, the answer is, well, tomorrow is coming, and whoever you are now isn't enough for tomorrow.

And so today you also have to be preparing for tomorrow and next week and next year, and if your job isn't challenging, then it isn't doing that for you, and you find it deadening, not meaningful.

And the reason for that is that it violates your most essential instinct. And your most essential instinct is the instinct for meaning, and it signifies that you actually have the balance between chaos and order right deeply right, which is why it's the most fundamental of instincts.

Because chaos and order are the most real of things. Alright, so you have the chaos that surrounds you, and in some sense infinite in scope, and then you have the order that you produce, which is your mastery of it.

Well, let's take order apart for a minute. We want to think about the structure of order, and I'm not saying that chaos is bad and order is good. I'm not saying that at all. That's not the right way to look at it. It's the balance piece.

It's the balance between them that's of crucial importance. They just think they exist as superordinate categories; whether you like them or not is really not that relevant. They're there. They're there. The fundamental constituent elements of reality.

You might say, well, what's your evidence for that? And I can tell you one piece of evidence, which I won't go into for very much time. You have two hemispheres in your brain. The brain is composed of two hemispheres, which implies something about the nature of the world, given that your brain is hypothetically adapted to the structure of the world.

It's not just your brain, because animal brains have the same fundamental structure, this bifurcated structure. And the bifurcation in that is that there's two fundamental realities because otherwise why would you need a bifurcated structure? Or maybe you need a triune brain or one that's divided into four, but that isn't what you have. You have one that's divided into two.

And if your working definition of reality is scientific, biological, let's say, then your definition of reality is that which shapes life. You can't actually do better than that from a Darwinian perspective.

And if the reality that shaped life produced a bifurcated representational structure, then that implies that the proper way to represent reality, and perhaps that reality itself, is in fact bifurcated. And I believe it's bifurcated in the manner I just described, and the neurological evidence for that is actually quite overwhelming.

It's come from multiple sources—some of them Russians, some of them American. That's where most of the work has been done. Your left hemisphere is specialized for operation in those situations that you know and understand, and your right hemisphere is specialized for operation in those situations that you neither know nor understand.

And the proper way to orient yourself in life is to get the balance between those two sets of operations correct, and the way that manifests itself in your subjective experience is as meaningful engagement.

So that's not a bad first pass, what would you say, justification for the view that these two domains are the most real domains. Okay, so order—what is order? Well, if you just sit there and do nothing, that will be chaos. Why? Well, because you'll suffer and die; that's what will happen.

So without action on your part, deterioration and death is a certainty. Okay? So you need to act. Well then we built on an action platform. I mean, we're the consequence of three billion years of evolution for action. Action, movement forward in the face of necessity, is the prime dictum of life; that's a good way of thinking about it.

We're embodied action. What do you have to do when you act? Well, at minimum, you have to do whatever keeps you able to act. These are truisms, right? I mean, you have to have something to eat; you have to have some fresh water; you need some shelter; right? You need some companionship; you need a sexual partner; you need children; you need play; you need to be touched. There's a—and I mean, I actually mean need, by the way.

People deprived of play go insane. People who aren't touched die. These things are necessary. Well, assuming that survival itself is necessary, but we'll start with that. We'll start with the assumption that just sitting there and suffering and dying is not the right solution.

Okay? So you have to act in the world. You have to act in the world in a manner that stops you from deteriorating and dying at minimum, and that means that you have to address the problems that are intrinsic to that destiny.

Now you have all sorts of systems that have evolved to help you do that: motivational systems. We have to eat, so you get hungry. You have to find water and consume it, so you get thirsty. You get lonely; you get curious. There are specialized biological systems that are very, very old.

You get aggressive; you get afraid; you suffer pain. All those specialized systems for all of those unidirectional systems of orientation in the world, and they help you figure out what to do. So when you're hungry, it's time to eat. And when you're thirsty, it's time to drink. And when you're lonesome, it's time to seek out some companionship.

And you have specialized systems that help you do that, but they're not enough because, well, they're not very bright, that's one way of looking at it. They're kind of uni-dimensional, and you also have the problem of organizing all of them.

It's like, well, you have to eat now and you have to drink now and you need a companion. That's probably time to play. And you have to do something about shelter, and there isn't just you right now; there's you now, and tomorrow, and next week, and a year from now, and five years from now.

So you have to plan across all those stretches of time, and there isn't just you now and the future you; there's you plus your family and your community. And so all of that has to be taken into account while you're plotting your movement forward.

It's very, very complicated. You have all these problems to solve simultaneously, and your motivational systems—anger, hunger, and so forth—can help you solve one of those problems now, but not all of them permanently. That requires higher cognitive function.

And that's part of what drove the evolution of our complex cognitive systems: that's how do you propagate the game across time in a complex environment? The left hemisphere operates when what you're doing works, and so a lot of what you do during your life is to keep your right hemisphere off.

People don't like it going on accidentally. It's the home of negative emotion; it's the home of pain and anxiety; it's the thing that turns on and freezes you in your tracks when something that you deeply did not expect happens, and it prepares you to deal with the onslaught of what you didn't expect.

Now, it's not all bad news, because to use the right hemisphere in a judicious manner is also something that adds intrigue and interest and artistic expression and all sorts of positive things to your life.

So, because potential is not only negative; it's also positive. It can be dealt with in ways that are deeply enriching and meaningful. Order. Okay, so you have to do something—otherwise, the consequences are dire. To do something, you have to value something.

It's a definitional issue, because to do something is to act out the proposition that the thing you're doing, the thing you're aiming at, let's say, is preferable to the thing you have, and preferable means you'll do it. So those things are tied together so tightly that you can't disentangle them.

If you say, I'm aiming at X, but I don't value it, then there’s something wrong with the way that you're conceptualizing the statement. Because to aim at something and to work to bring it into existence is the same as valuing it, and if you say, well, I don't value it, then something's out of kilter.

Either you're acting out of falsehood, or you don't know what you're talking about. It's one of those two things, and you meet people like that who are deeply confused. Their action patterns and their verbal self-representation don't mesh, but that doesn't mean that they're critics of value.

It just means that they're deeply confused. So you have to act or you suffer. In order to act, you have to have a value structure. Because to act, you have to value one thing more than another, which means that you have to inhabit a structure of value. You have to.

Okay? So you need a structure of value because it's the antidote to catastrophe. Now, if you act out a structure of value socially—which you will because you're social—you're not gonna pursue your aims in isolation, because you're not a solitary animal; you're a social animal.

You're a tribal animal, deeply tribal. We live in groups; we live in families; we live in communities; we live in large societies. We're social at every level of analysis, and we've been social for as long as we've been primates.

So maybe that's at least six million years, and it might be more like 60 million years. It's really a long time, so it's not an arbitrary social construction; it's far, far deeper than that.

Now what happens when you act out a structure of value in a social environment? You produce a hierarchy, inevitably. Well, let's think it through. Why? Well, let's say that you say that one thing is more worth doing than another, whatever happens to be.

And then you tell a bunch of people about what you're doing, and they decide that they're gonna come along and help you do this thing that's valuable because they also think it's valuable, and maybe you get 20 people together to do this thing, whatever it happens to be.

And the first thing you discover is that some of the people are way better at doing whatever it is they're doing than other people. And who knows why that is? Because it depends on what you chose to do. You know, if you chose A, then it would be a different group of people who were good at it than if you chose B, because people differ in their abilities.

But one thing you will not escape from if you make an organization to do something valuable is the brute fact that it will be a minority of the people who are good at doing it. And there's actually a law; it's called Price's Law, and it's a real law.

It even governs the size of cities and the mass of stars and the heights of plants in the jungle. It just doesn't govern human interactions, and Price's Law says that the square root of the number of people engaged in the enterprise will do half the work.

So if you have ten people doing something, three of them will do half the work. But if you have a hundred people doing something, then ten of them will do half the work. And if you have 10,000 people doing something, then a hundred of them will do half the work.

And then you know how wealth distributes itself, such that a minority of people have most of the money. 1285 richest people in the world have as much money as the bottom two and a half billion. It's something like that. And everybody goes, oh my God, the 1%.

It's like, well, first of all, you're all the 1%, so get over yourself, because you're, you know, Western European, roughly speaking. And by world current world standards, and certainly by historical standards, you're all well ensconced in the 1%.

So if that's a problem, well, it's a problem for all of you. Some of you might be, you know, richer than that, but that doesn't mean all of you aren't in the same boat fundamentally. The fact that wealth aggregates in the hands of a small number of people is part of the general expression of Price's Law.

There's nothing special about the distribution of money. You see the same thing in every creative domain. I mean, how many of you have recorded a gold record? How many? Looks like zero. Up. There's one. One person. Okay, there's 850 people in here, so there's one in a thousand.

So that's 1/10 of 1%, something like that. How many of you have written a piano concerto? How about painted a painting that's hanging in a national museum? Oh, look, it's none of you again, right? Well, and how many of you have been a member of a professional sports team? Okay, look, one. One.

So that's one in a thousand. Well, you get the point here. Well, there was a couple. There is. Okay, so it looks like it's easier to be a member of a professional sports team, or my audience is set is biased. The sample is biased. But it is the case.

If you look at high levels of creative achievement of the sword I've just described, they characterize a staggering minority of people. And so the rule is that you produce a value system which you better produce because otherwise you suffer and die.

And it isn't only that—it's like look, here's something else you all know, as far as I can tell. We start with the idea that there's an intrinsic chaotic element to life, and that includes the inevitability of suffering and malevolence, betrayal at the hands of yourself and other people.

So that's the baseline, and that's intolerable in many ways because life is in many ways intolerable. And the question is, well, what do you do in the face of something that's intolerable? And the answer is, well, you try to find something that justifies it, right?

You want to have something that gets you the hell out of bed in the morning, and not just any old morning, but a morning when your father has Alzheimer's disease and your daughter has an incurable illness, because you need something to get out of bed for in those mornings too.

And that better be the purpose that you found in life. And if the purpose is going to be such that it gets you out of bed in those mornings, it better be a pretty damn noble purpose, because otherwise, why would you bother?

And so not only do you need a value structure, you need one that's of sufficient tension, let's say, or sufficient value or sufficient nobility so that it's worth suffering for, because you're going to suffer, and you better have something that makes the suffering justifiable.

And so not only do you need the value structure so that you don't just deteriorate and die, you want the value structure so that when the flood comes in your life, as it certainly will, that you have built a vessel that will sustain you through the catastrophe.

And that's not this pursuit of happiness; it's not even the pursuit of security. It's none of that. It's your—the orientation that you've managed to produce in your own life towards a higher good that's so high that it's worth bearing the burden of being, to produce.

You implement that in the world; you produce a hierarchy. Now you might say, well, and then you have the problem of hierarchy, and the problem of hierarchy is a very few people are going to be very good at whatever that hierarchy does.

And then you have the second problem with hierarchy, which is the problem I just laid out when I asked you about your spectacular levels of attainment and found out that they were very—it was very unlikely.

I'm not saying that you haven't attained worthwhile things; that's not my point. My point is that very high levels of attainment are extraordinarily rare, and that's an inevitability.

As soon as you decide that something's worth doing—two inevitabilities: people stack up at the top, a minority of people stack up at the top and take most of the proceeds, whatever they happen to be or deserve them, or earn them, however I don't care how you conceptualize it—and almost everybody else stacks up at the bottom.

And so the problem with hierarchies is that even though they're necessary, they tend to produce a situation where most people stack up at the bottom. And so that's the next thing that we have to contend with. You can't get rid of the hierarchies, because if you get rid of the hierarchies, there's no value structure.

And if there's no value structure, not only do you deteriorate and die; you want to deteriorate and die, and that's not a good solution. But if you do generate a hierarchy, then you have the problem of the hierarchy.

And the problem of the hierarchy is that it will dispossess most people. Now to the degree that the postmodernists have something to say, that's what they say: hierarchies dispossess. Okay, and then we can look at that clearly and carefully, and we can say that doesn't mean that hierarchies themselves are corrupt or that we can dispense with them.

But it also doesn't mean that we have no moral obligation to the dispossessed. And we say, well, how do we deal with that politically, conceptually? And the way we deal with that, at least in part, is to produce a political spectrum that ranges from left to right that deals with hierarchy and the problems that hierarchies cause.

So one of the things that you can reliably assume about someone who's on the right is that they will be patriotically in favor of the current hierarchy or even more abstractly, they're in favor of the idea of hierarchy itself. And you say, well, more power to the people on the right because you need hierarchies so they should support them.

But then you have to take the people on the left and you say, yeah, but what about the people who are dispossessed by the hierarchy? And what you have to say to them is, yeah, we actually have to do something about that. And you think, well, how do we do something about that?

And the answer is we don't actually know because there's no permanent solution to the problem of dispossession by the hierarchy. We don't know how to fix it. You say, well, we could flatten the hierarchies. It's like, not without disrupting the value structure; that's a price you don't want to pay.

Well, we could take from the top and put it at the bottom. It's like, yes, hypothetically we could, but it turns out that when you try that in practice, it's very, very easy to rapidly go too far, and then what you end up with is less dispossessed.

You end up with no one who has anything, and that's not a good solution to the problem of scarcity, right? To make everyone equally dead or equally starving, which is essentially what the Communist States did across the entirety of the twentieth century, is not the proper way to address the problem of hierarchy.

Now it has to be addressed even if you're on the right, because here's one thing that happens: hierarchies tend to ossify. You know, because what happens is that the people at the top—maybe they got there by merit—but it's easy for them to gerrymander the system so they can stay there without merit—or perhaps their children can stay there without merit—or they can—or the hierarchy becomes corrupt so that people who only use tyranny and power can climb it.

And so you don't have a hierarchy of competence and value anymore; you have a hierarchy of brute power which looks like a tyranny. So there's all sorts of ways that hierarchies can deteriorate, and we have to be awake to ensure that that doesn't occur.

Also, if the hierarchy gets so steep that everybody stacks up at zero and no one can climb it—which is basically the definition of a malfunctioning tyranny—then all the people at the bottom rightly think, well why don't we just destroy the game? Because we're already at zero, so what the hell do we have to lose?

And so one of the things that you want to do if you're a sensible conservative is make sure that the hierarchy maintains its rooting competence, that it's transparent, and that it's climbable, because otherwise it will ossify and steepen, and then it will destroy itself.

And if you're a conservative and you value stability and the hierarchy, then you don't want to set up a situation where the most likely outcome is that the hierarchy destroys itself.

So we can be intelligent about this; we can say, look, don't be thinking you can get rid of hierarchies. They've been around—this is why I wrote chapter one. I talked about lobsters.

The reason I talked about them is because not only is the hierarchical structure itself a permanent feature of existence at least a third of a billion years old, which, by the way, means that you cannot attribute it to capitalism, the free market, or the corrupt patriarchal West unless you're willing to make the case that all three of those elements contributed to the existence of dominance hierarchies among crustaceans, which seems highly unlikely.

So, and this is actually something that you could think about: as an idea that's directed towards the productive left, if you want to help the dispossessed, don't blame the existence of hierarchies on capitalism, because it's wrong.

It's wrong; the problem is way deeper than that. And here's something else that's very interesting about capitalism: a couple of things you might consider. You know, we have become spectacularly wealthy since 1895, right?

First, in the West, Iceland is a classic example. I mean, you guys are so much more wealthy than you were a hundred years ago that it's absolutely impossible to believe.

And so that's first happened in the West: exponential economic growth starting in about 1895. There's a long tail; I mean, people were improving before that, but it really kicked in around 1895, and first happened in the West, and now it's happening everywhere in the world.

I don't know if you know this, but you know the UN set a goal in 2000 to half the level of absolute poverty in the world by 2015, which is the fastest rate of economic growth ever recorded. We attained it in 2012, three years ahead of the most optimistic projections.

Right? And so people are being lifted out of poverty at a rate that has never been seen in the history of the world, hooked to the power grids, provided with cell phones, provided with free access to fresh water, provided with access to medications that decrease child mortality.

Like if you look at the statistics, there are so many things getting better so fast you cannot even believe it. And that's, and here's—that's a consequence, as far as the data indicate, of the operation of the free market system, which does produce inequality.

That's the thing! But as far as I can tell, the only system that has ever produced wealth and has long—all systems produce inequality, but the only system we know of that produces wealth and inequality is the free market.

So here's a question for everyone, left and right: how many units of inequality will you tolerate to produce one unit of wealth? And if the answer is zero, then you've gone too far. You're outside the appropriate political debate; that's the wrong answer.

And if you try to impose that, all there will be is mayhem, because the price we pay for wealth is inequality. Now that doesn't mean that you can let inequality run to its ultimate extreme because then you run into the other problem, which is the monopoly problem.

You've all played Monopoly, I presume. What happens in every Monopoly game if you play it out? Everyone stacks out at zero except one person.

Now, if you play it 50 times, you'll find that it's hardly ever the same person, because it's basically a game of chance. And there's a fair bit of chance, by the way, operating in the distribution of money in the world. It's not all chance, but there's a fair bit of chance.

But the logical conclusion to a hierarchy that can play itself out totally is that one person has everything and everyone else has nothing. Obviously, that's not a useful outcome.

So, you know, there are ways that we fix that in our society. We have progressive tax policies, and you can argue about their utility, but that's one way of rectifying it potentially.

Another way of rectifying it is that we don't have one game; right in a pluralistic society we have many, many games that people can play. And so if you can't be a successful lawyer, then maybe you could be a successful plumber.

And if you can't be a successful plumber, maybe you can run a small restaurant. Or, you know, there's a diversity of games, and so that's a good way of allowing—of increasing the robustness of the system so that you don't get hierarchies that are so steep that they collapse in upon themselves.

And so those are sophisticated approaches, and perhaps there are other approaches too, but it's an intractable problem. It says in the New Testament—it's one of the things you'd swear would be edited out because it's such a harsh statement: "The poor will be with us always."

Well, what's that in reference to? It's also in reference to the Matthieu principle, which is another New Testament statement and happens to be an economic axiom: "To those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken."

That's the structure of the world, and you can't lay it at the feet of the West; it's the structure of the world. Now that means we have to contend with it, and it's not an easy thing to contend with.

And part of the reason that we have a continual political dialogue and that we need to have a continual political dialogue is to make sure that our hierarchies exist and remain intact, but don't become so steep and corrupt that they destroy themselves.

And you need a left and a right for that, and if and buts, that means the left has to admit that hierarchies are not only necessary, but valuable, and the right has to admit that despite their necessity in value, they tend to stack people up at the bottom, and that actually constitutes a continual problem.

You see that in—you see that in the Old Testament, because one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is Israel struggles up to state and Empire status six times; it struggles out of the chaos up to Empire status, and then it gets corrupt.

It loses the way; it isn't balancing things between chaos and order properly; the kings get arrogant, so do the people, and then they forget their relationship with God— that’s another way of thinking about it.

And then a prophet comes up and says, "You aren't paying enough attention to the widows and the orphans; you better look out, because that displeases God." And the Israelites, who are stiff-necked and arrogant, think, "What's God going to do to us?" which is not a very wise way of thinking.

And so they don't take the steps necessary to rectify their deviation from the proper path, and they get absolutely flattened. And the consequences of that lasts for generations—like seven generations. And then they struggle their way up to something approximating Empire status again, and exactly the same thing happens: they forget, and they collapse.

There's six stories like that in the Old Testament. It's all documented by a man named Northrop Frye, who is a Canadian literary critic who wrote a couple of books on the Bible, one called The Great Code and the other called Words with Power, which I highly recommend.

It's an analysis of the Bible as literature; brilliant for those of you who might be interested in Union thinking. Frye's thinking is a nice adjunct. So, alright.

So, that's the nature of the world: order, chaos, and order. And your goal is to keep those—the relationship between those two things optimized, and you do that by doing what's meaningful, not what's expedient. That's rule six.

And you ensure that you have the world construed properly by following rule number eight, which is tell the truth or at least don't lie. You don't want to pathologize the instinct that orients you in the world, and you will pathologize it by engaging in habitual deceit.

And the reason you do that is when you practice something, you build structures that specialize in that, and then they run automatically. So if you're living a lie—which is a very common thing for people to do—then you're building neurological mechanisms that view the world through that lie.

And once they're built, there you—and good luck unbuilding them; it's very, very difficult. That's in part what happens to people who are addicted, by the way; they build mechanisms of search neurological structures that are focused on the drug; and those systems are alive, and all they want is the drug, and they're—they're not—it's not psychological exactly; it's psychophysiological.

Don't build structures of cognition predicated on deception, because you will pay for it. And so if you're gonna guide your life with the orientation of the instinctive meaning, then you have to be very careful with what you say and write and think, because every time you say or write or think something, you build a little neurological structure that's specialized for that, and it participates in this parsing of the world. So, alright.

Chaos and order then you can say the order–order is a hierarchy. Okay, so here's the next question. Next to questions: is order a hierarchy? And then a subsidiary question would be, if order is a hierarchy, what’s well; either what is at the top of the hierarchy, or what should be at the top of the hierarchy?

Said hierarchy is a structure of value. So that's the question: is what should be of all commit value? Okay, so now we're gonna take that apart a little bit. The first thing I would say is order is not a hierarchy; order is a set of hierarchies. That's a different thing.

So I'll tell you how to think about that, I think. So imagine you have a child and they're playing soccer, and your child's a pretty good soccer player. No, I'll tell you a different story; this actually happened, so I'm gonna tell you a story about hockey. And since I'm Canadian, what the hell, I might as well tell you a story about hockey.

My son played hockey; he still plays hockey. He's a pretty good hockey player. And my wife and I used to go watch him play hockey. There was an arena just down the street from us, and there was a nice neighborhood league there.

And so they'd sort the kids into teams, and then they'd let them play a few demo games. And if any team was getting stomped flat or any other team was winning too much, then they'd rebalance the teams so that they were approximately equal in skill. So that was the sorting of the teams.

And then they were on their teams, and then they'd play, you know, 15 games during the regular season. They'd have a little tournament to see who won, and it was really good. It was a good, friendly league.

And so my son's team was in, I think, it was the championship game, if I remember correctly. And there's one kid on his team who was the best player on the team, but by quite a margin. You know, he was very fast on his feet; he could skate rings around a lot of the kids; he was good at stick handling; he was a good hockey player—but he had some problems.

This kid, one problem was he wouldn't pass the puck. Now you think, well, why the hell should you pass the puck if you had the best hockey player, which is pretty much what he thought? And the answer is, well, you're part of a team, right?

You want to be the best person on the team, fair enough, and you want to win the hockey game, but you also want to, what? Make your teammates better players? How's that? Maybe you even want to make the people on other teams better players. I mean, I know that's going a little bit too far, but you certainly want to make your teammates better players.

And you might think, well, why would you do that? Because if they're better, then maybe you won't be the best. Well, that's a boneheaded way of looking at the world because, first of all, if you amp up the competition around you, maybe that'll motivate you to be even better.

And it's a hell of a way to win by making everyone else lose. That's not much of a victory. And so, if you have any sense, you pass the damn puck, even if you're the better player—especially if you're the better player, especially do that.

Let's say you've got a comfortable two-goal lead. Well then, maybe you can risk taking the time away from that specific game to build up the confidence and ability of your teammates, and then maybe everybody thinks that you're a bit of a leader, and they make you team captain.

Not even so much because you're the best hockey player, but because, well, because why? That's the question. Okay, so we're watching the game, and it's a pretty exciting game, and it's a real close game, and it's like 3-2, 3-3, and it's a minute left and the other team zips down the ice and scores a really brilliant goal.

And so my son's team loses, except that they were in the championship, and it was a really good game. So you know, whether or not they lost is not all that obvious. They lost that game, but you know, there's a broader context to take into consideration.

Okay, so this kid—the star—goes off the ice, and he takes his hockey stick and he smashes it onto the cement, and he's all angry because, as far as he was concerned, he was robbed. And maybe that's because of his useless teammates, who he didn't really spend any time helping, by the way, and maybe it's because the referees were unfair, and who the hell knows why.

But it wasn't fair, and his idiot father rushes over to him and consoles him on his loss and supports him in his notion that he was robbed. And I thought, you unspeakable son of a... Because he was an arrogant narcissist, and it was way more important to him that he had a son who was a star than that he had a son who was a good person.

And that's absolutely inexcusable. He made the wrong choice! He sacrificed his son's soul in part to help him save face for a hockey game. That's not acceptable.

So here's what you tell your children: it doesn't matter whether you win or lose; it matters how you play the game. And so that's what the father should have told the son, and he should have meant it, and even better, he should have known what it meant.

But who knows what that means? Because you tell your children that, and maybe they're not so happy because they lost a game and they look at you like you're an alien, and they think, well, what the hell do you mean by that?

Because obviously, it matters whether you win, and it does matter whether you win. So what is it that you mean when you say that? And your kid asks, well, what do you mean by that?

And you go, well, I don't know what it means, but it's a good rule. So what do you mean by that? Here's what you mean. And it relates to rule five, which is don't make your—don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them because other people will dislike them then, and you don't want other people to dislike your children.

Unless you want your children to inhabit a world where everyone dislikes them, and maybe you do. You don't like your children, and maybe you don't like your children because you let them behave in ways that makes you not like them.

And so the way you take revenge is by not correcting them so that other people will punish them because you don't have the courage to discipline them. And if you think that people don't play that game, then you don't know much about people, because they play that game all the time.

Alright, so it matters how you play the game; it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. Let's take that apart. Well, so the first thing is—and this goes back to the idea that hierarchies order a hierarchy—and the answer is no; it's a set of all hierarchies, or you could say it's the set of all possible hierarchies.

Because, you know, in a society at a given time, there's hierarchies that function, but that transforms, and then there's new hierarchies that function. The specifics of the hierarchies change, but the fact of the hierarchies remains.

And so you can imagine a hierarchy as a meta-structure that consists of a multitude of possible hierarchies, and that's going to change as life continues. And so what you want for your children is not to be the master of a hierarchy; you want for your children to be the master of the set of all possible hierarchies.

Because then, no matter how things change, they're ready. Say, well, how is it that you get ready for things to change? And the answer is play, so that people will invite you to play, right? And there's a rule for raising children that really—it's a rule, one of the things you can do with your children—this is something good for men because men are more likely to do this than women, although women can do it too, but men are more likely to do it.

It's really good for children to engage in rough-and-tumble play, play fighting. First of all, if you have children and you've played with them physically, you know that they absolutely love it. They will rough-and-tumble play with you until you are completely exhausted, and they're not even vaguely ready to quit.

They have an inexhaustible hunger for it, and they like it. They like to be pushed to the edge. So I knew this when I was a new father because I read work by a man named Jaak Panksepp, who was a genius, an effective neuroscientist—one of the world's great neuroscientists, perhaps the world's greatest neuroscientist—although there's four or five people that might compete with him.

He wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, Emotional Neuroscience, which is a work of real genius. He discovered the play circuit in mammals because there's a separate play circuit in mammals, a specialized circuit, and he did a lot of work on rats, showing that in order for a rat to become socialized—because rats are highly social—they had to engage in iterative bouts of rough-and-tumble play.

And here's a cool thing—it's a ridiculously cool thing. So, and this has to do in some sense with the postmodern critique of the patriarchal tyranny.

So if you take two juvenile rats, males, and you imagine you give them an opportunity to play, so you throw two of them into a little play arena, and you let them wrestle.

Okay, the next time that you bring them to the same place, you can measure how much work they'll do to open the door to the arena, how many times they'll push a button, say, to open the door, or how hard they'll pull if you tie a strength spring to their tail.

And so you can get an estimate of their motivation, because the more motivated they are to play, the harder they'll work. And the rats will work really hard to play. So you know that they want to play.

I mean, assuming that you're willing to accept the fact that if you work for something, you want it, it's like an operational definition. So rats will work to play. Now, if you let the rats out in the play arena, and one rat is ten percent bigger than the other, then that rat will win.

You might say, well, what does winning mean? And rats wrestle like people wrestle. They even pin each other and they manifest play behavior to begin with, like dogs playing in a park. You know how a dog looks when it wants to play?

It sort of hunkers down a little bit, looks up at you expectantly, kind of move back and forth, which is like, okay human, I'm ready to play. And if you have any sense and you know how to play, then you look at the dog and you sort of go like this, and the dog goes like this, and you cuff the dog not too hard and the dog bites you not too hard, and then you can play and you're both happy with that.

And kids can do that with dogs because kids understand dogs, and dogs and kids know how to play. If your dog can't play, then you should not own a dog, because you're not smart enough to own a dog. So it's true.

And if you have a dog that can't play, then don't have a kid, right? It's true. The stupidest dog I ever saw was owned by a psychologist; that was really embarrassing.

So, okay, so you put