Jordan Peterson Q&A at Cambridge's Caius College

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Dr. Peterson, Jordan, thank you so much for that. A lot of the way in which the debate has been conducted here in Cambridge on free speech has been rather dry. In fact, it's been heated but quite dry, quite arid. We've been thinking a lot in philosophical terms, and we're talking a lot about Milton and Mill. But what you've done for us tonight is show us the existential power of being able to speak freely. That if we care about well-being, we care about psychological flourishing, and we care about what Aristotle called eudaimonia—happiness, well-being, flourishing—then we should prize truth and the free pursuit of truth above all else.

Now the time has come for discussion, for Q&A. This is what we like to do here. In fact, this is what it’s all about. So if anyone would like to kick off, Vincent here is going to traffic the microphone around. If I could just ask you to speak into the microphone, just for recording purposes and for amplification purposes. Vincent, you can't miss him; he's in a bone white suit in the middle of Cambridge, November. So just make sure that you put your hand up clearly so that he can spot you, and then since Vincent will have the mic, I'll let Dr. Peterson pick the questions as they are.

Emily: Hello, Dr. Peterson. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. So I have a question; it’s sort of personal. So I've recently become convinced that I'm called to work either in politics or at least in the public intellectual space. I want to do that because I really love my country, and I want to try to help preserve the values that have been at the foundation of our country. But I'm worried that I'm going to be seduced by the loss for power, and I was wondering if you had any advice for how to fight the lust for power.

Dr. Peterson: Well, that's kind of a germain question altogether, isn't it? Because part of the cultural battle that we all find ourselves enveloped in is partially due to the claim that there's virtually nothing other than the lust for power. You know, I would say fair enough in some limited sense. And that bears directly on your question because you see that as a temptation that might be powerful enough to bend and distort you as you attempt to make your way through, let’s say, the halls of power.

[Music] I heard recently from a reliable source that Putin's conversion to Orthodox Christianity might be genuine. And then you might think, well, if you're atheistic, well, that's not necessarily a good thing, or maybe you think it’s a bad thing, or maybe you think it’s an irrelevant issue. And you may also think it's a lie, but I would say that I would be more inclined to trust someone who thinks there’s something higher than himself. And then you might say, well, what is it that’s higher than ourselves? And that's worth thinking about. We all need to think about this regardless of the particulars of our religious belief.

And I would say again, from a clinical perspective, service to others is really something. People who are depressed tend to use the pronouns "I" and "me" much more frequently than people who aren't depressed. And I'm not saying that people get depressed because they're selfish; I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that one of the ways out, one of the roots out of depression, appears to be an increase in service to other people.

And I think the reason for that is because we aren’t power-mad demons at the core, even though we may be tempted by such things, and that we find the genuine meaning that offsets genuine suffering in the genuine service to others. And I think it's a big mistake to be cynical, especially prematurely, about such things as political activity because they're necessary. Despite, let's say, their adversarial and party-centered nature, you have to be clear about what you serve and why, and that has to be held higher always than mere victory—mere operationalized victory or instrumental victory.

It's a very, very difficult thing to negotiate, particularly because in the political realm, in some sense, you have to defeat your enemy, right? Because you have to win the election, and the other people have to lose. It's a binary choice. But so often I see in partisan discussion the proclivity to assume that all the ill will and malevolence resides on the other side of the chamber. And that's a big mistake.

You could think about that more deeply too. We all need a place to put the existence of malevolence, right? Because malevolence clearly exists, and we all suffer from the weight of malevolent history, right? Because even the grounds we walk on here—which this is a remarkable and wonderful place—I mean, English soil is soaked with blood, just like the soil of every place in the world. That's part of the human heritage, and all of us bear the marks of that conflict in some sense in our souls, partly because of the possibility for us to engage in that, but also partly because part of the reason we're here in all this privilege is because of all that catastrophe.

Well, the best way to localize that malevolence is inside you, right? And to remember that the enemy that you're fighting with—the greatest enemy that you ever fight with—is in your own heart. And that’ll also stop you from confusing that true source of malevolence, let’s say, with your mere political enemies. And that isn't to say that you won't encounter malevolent behavior, although most of it in the political sphere, as it is everywhere, most of it is more ignorance than malevolence, although willful blindness certainly plays a large role.

So you need to know what it is that you're serving. And I would say one of the ways to do that practically, or a couple of ways to do that practically, is you need a good team around you. The people you really trust and who can watch you and who do it with a certain degree of impartiality, and who are disagreeable enough to talk to you when you do something wrong; so you need trusted advisors.

Then the other thing I would say is you really need to listen to your constituents because they will tell you what the problems are if you listen to them. And if you really listen to them, well then you’ll have your feet on the ground, which is where they should be, and you'll know what the problems are. And you will win elections because what people really want from their leaders is to be listened to and then for those leaders to articulate what they've heard in the halls of, let’s say, influence and power.

And so if you know those things, if you know you need to listen, you need to get in touch with the people you're representing as regularly as you possibly can, and mostly to listen. I knew a man in Canada who started a political party, which is a very difficult thing to do. And not only did he start it, but he wrote it to sufficient success that he became the leader of the opposition in Canada within about 10 years.

I asked him how he did that because it’s like, well really, how did you do that? That's actually really hard. And he said he would go out from constituency to constituency and make his stump speeches. But what he really liked was the Q&As because people would tell him what their problems were. Then he knew what the problems were, and out of the dialogue would also emerge the answers that the audience found compelling.

And so not only would they tell him what the problems were, but they would tell him the answers they would like to have instituted to solve those problems. It's the same thing that comedians do when they finesse their acts in front of live audiences. Before they practice them in front of a large audience, they tell jokes, and the audience either laughs or they don't. If they laugh, then you keep that joke. And if they don’t, you throw it out. Soon, you're just as funny as the audience can possibly manage.

And it's the same thing. You can also do that in a dark manner, by the way, which is what Hitler did. So he could utter terrible things and wait for a response and collect those, and so then you become the embodiment of the shadow of your people. So I would recommend that you probably don’t do that.

Emily: Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Emily: Thank you, Dr. Peterson. My question is, what does this listening posture look like over time?

Dr. Peterson: You do test for reciprocity. So children, for example, when children are investigating potential play partners on the playground, they'll come up to a child, let’s assume a child of roughly the same age, because that would be the most common situation—maybe we’re talking about kids who are four or five years old—and they’ll throw out a play gesture that’s rather simple, so maybe one that a two-year-old could manage.

Then if the person manages a proper response, they throw out a little more sophisticated gesture. And if the person responds appropriately, then they ratchet up to just above their developmental level, and then they play like that at that level. That’ll make them friends. And so partly what they're testing for there continually is whether there’s something approximating reciprocal altruism, right? It’s tit-for-tat in the positive sense.

And I would say that, well, we know there’s actually a literature on this which is quite interesting. This is also something very practical to know, and I’ll get to another practicality here. So there have been psychologists who've done empirical investigations into what predicts the longevity of a relationship.

So here’s one experiment that was conducted multiple times, and I believe this is very reliable data. So, imagine you have the two partners in a marriage, each rate the number of encounters they have with their other partner a day. It’s kind of an arbitrary and subjective measure, but it doesn't matter. You might say, well, I talked to my wife eight times today; we had eight different interactions.

Then you’d say, well, did you rate those for whether they're positive or negative? Then you can calculate a ratio of positive to negative, and then you can use the ratio to predict the longevity of the relationship. And the data show that if the relationship interactions fall below five positive to one negative, then the relationship deteriorates and is generally doomed.

And so five to one—that’s the preponderance of positive interactions. But we're wired so that negative interactions hurt us more than positive interactions help us if they are of the same magnitude. So for example, people will work harder to avoid a loss of five dollars than they will to attain a gain of five dollars.

And you might say, well, why is that? And the answer is you can be absolutely dead, but there’s only so happy you can be. So it’s better to err on the side of conservatism in the domain of negative emotion. And interestingly enough, if the interactions rise so that they exceed eleven positive to one negative, the relationship also deteriorates.

And so what that suggests is that it’s kind of like smiles with teeth, right? You want a fair bit of positive emotion and reflection from your partner, but you don’t want them to be a naive dependent pushover who’s afraid to stand up for themselves. And you want to—you know, because you’re a nasty horrible human being, and now and then you poke your partner just to see if there’s anything there.

Because that’s what you’re like, and if you find out there isn’t, you’ll run roughshod over them. And you think you won’t, but you will, especially if they’re very good at implicitly encouraging that, which dependent people sometimes are. So you do assess for reciprocity, and the basic rule is you want approximately equal reciprocity in relationships that you want to maintain.

Now maybe you know you have enough additional resource to be the giver more often than receiver in some relationships, but I don’t even think that really works that well with children. I mean, you obviously have to take care of them, but it’s not like they don’t deliver the goods to you if you have a good relationship with them.

And you want to some degree to enforce that reciprocity. Now you might say, well, what happens in relationships where that’s impossible? And well, I give you a practical piece of a suggestion on that front, and this is another thing you can do in your own household. This is so useful, man, if you get good at doing this, your life will get so much better—you can’t believe it.

It’s watch the people around you, and whenever they do anything that you would like to see repeated on a regular basis, tell them exactly what they did in detail, with, you know, be positive about it obviously, and just indicate that you noticed. Because I saw this when I was grading student essays, you know, and so I taught this seminar for a long time, and I was trying to teach kids how to write.

They were in their fourth year of university in the honors psych program—you'd think they'd bloody well already know how to write, but they didn't. And so I'd have them write a four-page essay on a given topic, and then they had to rewrite that to a six-page essay, and then they had to rewrite that to an eight-page essay. The first essay I graded, it was only five percent of their grade, and I told them I'm going to cut you into ribbons, but it doesn’t matter because it’s, you know, five percent of your grade, and so they could tolerate that.

And generally by the third essay, they had written the best thing they’d ever written in their life, and they learned so fast it was unbelievable. But one of the things I noticed was that they did a little testing with the first essay. They’d hand in something, and it was just like god-formulaic, boring; they weren’t in it at all.

You know, there was nothing of the person in there; there was no thought. There was just the kind of cycle babble that they learned, especially if they were in faculties of education. And it was dry and dull, and everything about it was wrong, and so those are hard to grade. Right? What’s wrong with my essay? Well, the words aren’t right; the phrases, they’re not so good; they're not organized well into sentences; the sentences aren’t sequenced well in the paragraphs; the paragraphs don't make a coherent argument, and the entire thing is empty.

But other than that, no problem. It was often easier just to rewrite those essays than to grade them. No. So in any case, though, one of the things I did learn was that even in an essay like that, there is usually one sentence or two sentences buried on like page three that was an actual thought, and reasonably clearly stated, and somewhat gripping.

You know, it was like the person popped out from all the background rubbish and said, well what about this? And if you saw that and checked it and said, hey, you hit the mark right there, the next essay would be like two-thirds that, and that was really fun to see. And then maybe by the third essay maybe it was all like that, and then they were really thrilled; it’s like, wow, I wrote this, you know, and sort of the culmination of—they were in their fourth-year seminar; it was the culmination of their career as a psychology undergraduate. So that was great fun.

But you can do that in your own household if the envious part of you isn't jealous of the revelation of the goodness of the person. And here’s the opposite tact if you want to do this: so imagine that you're a man who's managed to attract a mate, and he believes he's punched above his weight. So this woman is more attractive, let's say, more vivacious, more desirable than he deserves. So that's going to grate on his soul a fair bit, right?

Partly because her shining casts a dim light on his lack of utility, let’s say. And so you can imagine someone like that being prone to jealousy for obvious reasons. And so the best tact to manage in a situation like that, if you're that man, is to wait till your wife dresses herself up in a particularly attractive manner and then either fail to notice by occupying yourself with something trivial while she’s attempting to gain your attention or by criticizing her directly for what she’s just managed to do.

And if you do that 50 times, let’s say, you can be sure that she’ll never reveal her attractiveness to anyone else for the rest of her life, including you, and you’ll get exactly what you deserve. So that’s the opposite of watching people carefully.

Now, I learned this in part from Skinner, B.F. Skinner, the famous animal behaviorist, because he was very—he used all sorts of reinforcement contingencies to shape animal behavior. And Skinner was unbelievably good at this. He trained pigeons in World War II to guide missiles by pecking at photographs so they could map the photographs onto the missile trajectory, viewing the territory underneath and pecking accurately enough to guide the missile to its destination.

That was discontinued as the technology for guided missiles developed, but Skinner could do that. And you know, we think pigeons—they’re not that bright; it’s like they’re smarter than you think, pigeons. That’s why they can live in cities; that's not easy for a bird to pull off; you know, it's not their natural habitat.

And so but Skinner, although he would use punishment technically speaking—which is the application of a certain amount of pain or threat, which is the use of anxiety—but what he believed was most effective was reward. But it required a tremendous amount of attention. So, for example, if Skinner was trying to train a rat to climb up a little ladder and then across the ladder and then maybe do a pirouette and come down, which he could do with no problem, he'd wait. He'd just watch the rat, and then when it got close to the ladder, he'd give it a food pellet.

Now, his rats were starved, by the way, down to three-quarters of their normal body weight, so they were pretty eager to work for food. That’s not something you necessarily saw in the methodology section of the papers, but, well, and that's not a critique of Skinner; it's just an indication of how simplification takes place in laboratory experiments.

But in any case, he'd wait for the rat to get near the ladder and give it a food pellet. Soon, the rat would be hanging around the ladder quite a lot, and then now and then, just more or less randomly, the rat would put a paw up on the ladder for its food pellet.

Well, if he did that continually through observation, he could get the rat to do pretty much anything that you could imagine a rat could do and then maybe some things you couldn't imagine. And this isn't a manipulative technique, by the way—although it can be used that way. It's not effective unless you do it with a certain degree of wisdom. You want to think, well, what do you want in your house? How about peace, tranquility, happiness, and humor—something like that.

It’s not a bad first-pass approximation, and you've got to get that in your head. It’s like, do you want that or do you want the delights of endless martyrdom? Because you have to make a choice. And you might think, I wouldn't pick martyrdom. It's like, really? Really, you wouldn’t, eh? You'd pick peace and happiness and humor, and so everywhere you go that’s all you're ever surrounded with. It’s like, highly improbable.

So don’t be so sure you’re aiming up, but if you can orient yourself in that direction and then, and carefully, and knowing full well what the hellish alternative is—because you need to know that—then you can watch and see, well when is this manifesting itself in the people around me? And then you can tell them in detail, "I noticed today we’re having a discussion at dinner; you know when you made a spectacularly witty remark right at the right time, and it was provocative but not annoying? So good work."

Then the kid thinks, oh my god, he noticed, and then he's like twice as funny the next day, and maybe not in some unbearable manner. And that really works. It really works, but like I said, you have to quell the envy that would otherwise beset you, and you have to want to aim up, and then you have to not be jealous of the other person's goodness, and you have to be extremely attentive.

But man, as a transformation technique—even in extraordinarily difficult relationships, which goes back to your point—there isn’t anything I know of that’s more effective. And I've been working with moderate Democrats in the United States recently and with a number of Republicans and suggesting that to the Democrats, that when the Republicans do something that isn’t absolutely malevolent and stupid in your opinion, you might want to just say something like, "That’s not as bad as it could have been."

You know, something at least, and the same for the Republicans in relation to the Democrats. And that’s also one of the ways that you can reduce the for-tap proclivity, right? You want to give the devil his due, especially when you're not actually talking to the devil, but just the person who’s sitting across from you, let’s say, in the house.

It’s unbelievable. People—that’s another issue. I mean, if you want people to appreciate having you around, learning how to listen—that is a skill that is absolutely unbeatable. And this technique of summarizing to their satisfaction—that works like a charm. And it’s not, you know, you might be a little awkward when you first try it and might feel a little manipulative because you’re not that good at it, but if you get if you get expert at it, it’s—and you have the greatest conversations with everyone you know.

I had people in my clinical practice who were extraordinarily impaired intellectually and suffering from all sorts of assorted pathologies in addition to that, and if I was listening to them properly, they were as fascinating as anybody I had on the, say, more able and competent end of the spectrum. And you learn so much because there is nothing that people won't tell you if you listen. It is absolutely amazing what people will tell you, and so quickly they’ll reveal things they didn’t even know about themselves, and they need to know those things.

Often, they’ve been hidden for years; it’s so rewarding. And then this use of attentive reward—that’s also, it’s so—it’s fun in a game-like sense once you learn to play it because you're watching and you think, I’ll just wait, this person's going to do something good sooner or later; it's like, pat good work!

People are so thrilled that that little manifestation of goodness in their heart, that managed to sneak out past their cynicism and boredom, was recognized. They’re so—what is it? What is it? It restores their faith in what’s good inside them, it really does. It’s unbelievably powerful, and so that can work if you’re embroiled in a difficult relationship, you know, and you can’t escape easily, or maybe you can’t escape on moral grounds.

That listening—that helps a lot. You might have to listen a lot, but that use of judicious reward—man, that’s a powerful technique.

So Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for your work and your passionate defense of free speech. In relation to therapy, as well, the UK government’s currently consulting on banning so-called conversion therapy, and I wondered what your view was as a therapist on that in relation to talking therapy in particular.

Dr. Peterson: Well, the first thing I would say about that is that as soon as it's termed conversion therapy, the argument's already over, right? Because this is one of the things conservative politicians are particularly bad at, by the way. That’s why I mentioned at the beginning that you should never discuss viewpoint diversity. I mean, you think about what you're doing when you discuss viewpoint diversity. You think you’re conservative, let’s say, that you’ve just pulled a fast one on the lefties.

It’s like, you’re so, you know, gung-ho about diversity. What about viewpoint diversity? And you don’t even notice that you just subordinated the highest value in the hierarchy of values to diversity. You lose, buddy! It doesn’t matter what argument you make after you’ve done that. It’s like I defined the terms of the debate; I established the questions; I usurped the terminological ground.

You can flap your lips all night, but you're not going to change that. And so the conversion therapy issue: right there is the way. As soon as that's framed in that manner, it's a lost cause. I had a client, a young man who was being pressured quite intensely into a homosexual relationship by someone who was attracted to him, and he was genuinely confused about his sexuality and certainly about how to respond.

Well, I wasn’t going to do conversion therapy. I mean, I don’t know what’s up with this kid; I have no idea, and neither did he. And so the goal there is, if someone comes to you who’s confused about their sexuality—and like, have you met someone who isn’t confused about their sexuality? It’s really complicated, especially when you’re 16, you know?

Well, you listen, and you try to sort them out. And if you have any sense, you realize that you have enough trouble with your own destiny to not bother imposing your viewpoint, moral or otherwise, on this teenager. You want to help them come to their own conclusions. It’s an axiom of clinical practice that only those formulations that come from the client themselves will result in anything approximating lasting behavioral change.

So, you know, you could come to me and I could give you advice, and you might even think it was good advice, but you’re not going to take it because you can’t even give yourself advice and take it. How are you going to take it from a relative stranger? But if you go through the process of thinking it through, like really deeply thinking it through, and you draw your own conclusions, and then maybe you practice their implementation, there is some possibility of change.

And you just can’t do that by, well, like conversion therapy. And it's partly because there is enough temperamental variability in people that you don’t know what the right answer is for the person who comes to see you, no more than you know what the right answer is for your children or for your mate. And hopefully what you do is in this process of dialogical relationship, and mutual revelation, the person’s pathway becomes clearer.

And I do believe that the goodwill exchange of thought does in fact constitute that process. So I, yeah, as soon as it’s conversion therapy, the game’s already lost. But there’s a fair bit of fluidity in human sexuality, and people have to come to terms with that. You know, you might say as a rule of thumb—and I think this is true—your life is going to be a lot simpler if you adopt something approximating traditional sexual rules.

So you step outside of that confine at your peril, but it might also be your necessity—who's to say? So when you help the person in humility, you help the person discover that for themselves.

And so, I think the talk of conversion therapy, you know, if someone’s saying, well, I’ll cure you or cure you of your homosexuality—it’s like, well it’s not a disease, first of all, and so it doesn't need a cure, and probably you can't do that anyways. And it's not the proper way to advertise clinical services, let’s say, because that isn’t really how a clinical relationship works.

So the argument, in some sense, is beside the point as far as I’m concerned.

Audience Member: Thank you so much for such an amazing talk, and the definition you gave of freedom of speech, I think, is not heard enough. Something I would like you to perhaps talk about is many people talk about the failure of the university as the failure of the marketplace. Many say the failure of their leaders, or the university setting, as a failure of the marketplace, and some say it is because freedom of speech has fallen out of fashion and is not used enough and is being criticized too much. My question is: do you think the marketplace of ideas—you believe in such a thing—can be fixed by imposing, I mean, putting more upfront what you've been redefining as freedom of speech? Or is there something in the marketplace of ideas that is broken, and perhaps we should fight specifically some ideas all the time, and it's not good enough to have them in the marketplace of ideas that are very evil and bad themselves?

Dr. Peterson: Well, it might not be good enough, but it's the best we have—that's the thing, you know? And it's also the case that substitutions tend to make things worse. We don’t have anything—well, what do we have except for the free expression of ideas? We have tyranny and conflict, because the alternative to politics is war. It’s not peace, that’s for sure. Peace? That's hard, man, that’s a hard thing to attain.

And so you have the intense battleground of ideas, and you know the people who are concerned about, let’s say, offense, like—they have their point, you know? Words can hurt, and they can hurt deeply, but they don’t hurt as much as sticks, and they don’t hurt as much as knives. So it’s a little bit of what ails you, you might say, to stave off something far worse.

And that doesn’t mean that the intensity of discussion—I mean, you can have discussions that are incredibly upsetting. But the question is, well, what do you have when you don’t have them? And if you think that what you have by not having those discussions is peace, then you’re either naive, willfully blind, or malevolent. Those are the options.

So, I mean, I’ve seen in my clinical practice—one thing I got deeply convinced of, and it wasn’t something I wanted to be convinced of, I would say—is I never saw anyone in my clinical practice ever get away with anything—not even once. You know, so they’d come because they were miserable for one reason or another, and sometimes deeply miserable, and we would trace back the genesis of the mis-misery.

There’s almost always an act of deception at its root, either their own deception of themselves or some other person who putatively loved them deceiving them, and so it was unbelievably painful to walk through that in this free speech sort of manner. But the alternative—which was living with the insane tension that accompanies the unrevealed truth, let’s say, in the bosom of a dysfunctional family—like as terrible as it is, wading through the monstrosities, living with them endlessly as they grow—that is no solution.

And so we don’t want to be Pollyanna about this. Like, there’s nothing—free speech does not lack savagery, but compared to the alternative, it’s infinitely better, and it’s the only valid pathway to peace, except maybe the peace of the grave. You know, I mean, if you and I disagree and I kill you, well, that’s the end of that argument.

But it’s not so good for you, you know, and it’s really not the end of the argument anyways because the probability that you are revealing in your opposition to my thought something that will then reveal itself within me in opposition to my thought is almost certain. And so we have to hash through the ideas to make peace.

And you know the idea, if free speech—you say free speech has fallen out of fashion, like was thought fallen out of unfashion because they’re the same thing. Like most people, I would say 95—six percent of people buy books, okay? How many people engage in internal dialogical critical self-evaluation? 10, maybe? You—

It takes a lot of training! You think what you have to do? A thought has to reveal itself to you in the theater of your imagination, and so that happens to everyone to a lesser greater degree. You know, some people have a thought a month, and some people are just flooded with them constantly; it’s a temperamental variable and variable associated with intelligence.

But once the thought emerges, you can either accept it as a revealed truth—which is the general course of action. You know, a thought occurs to you and because you’re a naive thinker, you just think, well, that’s how it is. But let’s say you’re a bit trained, you can divide yourself into two avatars; one takes the pro side and one takes the con side, and you can have the debate internally.

But you have to be unbelievably highly trained to do that. Now all of you people, or the vast majority of you, do that as a matter of course, but don’t be thinking that’s the way people work because it isn’t. Most of what passes for thought—and I’m not being cynical about this, and I’m not looking down on people. You know, people—all people have their talents and their abilities and some people are good at dialogical dialectic thinking; some people don’t have that skill.

Particularly the way that most people think is by talking. You know, and you see this if you have a close relationship with someone perhaps who isn’t as intellectually inclined as you. They’ll be pondering something, and they’ll sort of offer a thought in it in a questioning sort of manner, and it’s an invitation. It’s like, well, I thought of this, and I'm kind of scared of it, or I'm doubtful about it.

And what do you think of it? And then you play the role of what would otherwise be an internal avatar, and they play the opposite role, and maybe you switch from time to time if it’s kind of playful, and you evaluate the thought. Well, that can’t fall out of fashion. It’s like reading a map has fallen out of fashion! We need to get somewhere!

But reading a map has fallen out of fashion. It’s like, well, we’re not going to get anywhere then, are we? Because that’s how you get places, and there’s no—that's why I said earlier, freedom of speech is not just another freedom among freedoms and certainly not another right among rights.

It’s certainly not, and that right is certainly not granted to us by the social contract or a derivative of government fiat. That’s an absolute misapprehension. Which is why I think as well that there has to be something like—for atheists and believers alike—a divine hierarchy of value outside the political process to which the political process refers.

And one of the wonderful things about the English law, common law tradition, is it's grounded in such a metaphysical reality such that we have all the rights there are except those that are expressly forbidden to us by the common law tradition. It’s like, yes! Good work, English people! So, you know, as opposed to French civil law, let’s say.

So, because there, your granted rights are by the state, and that's just your rights are not a social construct; that’s just simply not the case. It’s not the case psychologically or physiologically, for that matter.

Audience Member: Hi. First of all, I’d like to say thank you for having the courage to pursue the truth. And I'm very proud that you're Canadian, especially since truth has been so fraught lately in Canadian politics. My question is: what would you say to someone who has been through a traumatic experience and wants to avoid the culture of victimhood that encourages people to identify with their trauma and capitalize off of being the most victimized person?

Dr. Peterson: Okay, well, there's two things that I address there. People say this courage; they talk to me about my courage fairly frequently, and that’s not right exactly. Like, I just learned to be afraid of the right thing. And I really mean that. I mean I saw an endless repetition in my clinical practice and in my own private life when my eyes were open, the consequences of not saying what was true.

It's like whatever hell you might fall into by opening your mouth when you have something to say that isn't popular, it’s nothing like the hell that you’re going to envelop yourself in if you lose control of your own tongue and mind. And like I said, in my clinical practice, I never saw anyone get away with anything even once! And so all you have in a situation like that is what is the truth? Now, you know, of course you only have your approximations to the truth, but that’s better than nothing.

And so you need to be afraid of the right thing, and you should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deceit; that’s what you should be afraid of. That will definitely do you in, and I know exactly what happens. You know, garbage in, garbage out, the old programmer’s saying goes, and so you’ll fill your head with nonsense, and no one will call you on it except you. But you can steal that voice if you try hard enough.

You just wait until you get in real trouble, you know? One day there’ll come a point where you have to make a decision, and the decision is the difference between life and death, or worse, between someone else's life and death, or worse, between health and the suffering that's worse than death. And because you've compromised yourself to such a degree, you will not be able to rely on your judgment—and you will make the mistake you shouldn’t make, and then you’re done.

And that will absolutely happen. So you tell mistruths voluntarily at your exceptional peril—and you avoid the unpleasant truths that you might have to delve into in all their messiness at your absolute peril and the peril of everyone around you. And so if you see that, you become afraid of that; that’s hell, and hell is worse than death. So—and I mean that most sincerely.

So, okay, and so that’s the courage issue, and then you asked about, sorry, I'm sorry—I obliterated the last part of your question.

Audience Member: Traumatic experience and wants to avoid the culture of victimhood.

Dr. Peterson: Um—or ideas? Yeah, well, the first thing is, well, if you want to avoid that, you're sort of on the right path already, right? Because you have some vision of what it might be like not to be traumatized, to not be a victim. Well, first of all, I mean, in some sense, there's no shortage of victimhood. I mean, you know, the existential psychotherapist in the 50s, taking a page from Heidegger, talked about throneness, right?

The arbitrary nature of our existence. I mean, here you are; you have the ethnicity and race that was bestowed upon you; you had no choice in that. You’re the victim and the beneficiary of this particular historical moment, you know, and you’re the victim and beneficiary of all the atrocity and the wonders of the past. You deal with your own emotions; you deal with the fact of this specific time and place—all of that.

And there is a sense of, well, there’s a sense of mortality, certainly, that’s associated—as with finitude and mortality—and you can easily say, in some sense, that we’re all victimized deeply by our own susceptibility to vulnerability and tragedy, and I think that’s true. But then the question is, well, what’s the best way of dealing with that and falling prey to it?

When my daughter was young, she was very ill. And one of the things we told her repeatedly—and which I think she did very well to her credit—was often she was too ill really to be able to go to school because she couldn’t wake up in the morning, and she was in pain. But she needed to go to school.

And well, one of the things we told her was, don’t use your illness as an excuse, you know? Right? Because you're already in trouble, kid! You know, you got your problems, and they’re serious, but if you can hold on to the distinction between the part of you that can in spite of this and the part that can’t because of it, and not blur that distinction, then that’s one more thing you have on your side while you’re attempting to struggle through this.

And to her credit, she managed that quite pristinely, and that was extraordinarily helpful. It was very difficult at times. After she had had her hip replaced, she couldn’t get around that well. And so we decided to put her in a motorcycle course, which was a rather terrifying thing to do since she just had a hip replacement, but she needed to have a scooter to get around.

So she went with her mother to this motorcycle course, and they were driving motorcycles, not scooters. And at one point, one of the people who was being trained wiped out on the motorcycle, and you know, it was rather traumatic, let’s say. And she woke up the next day and was too afraid to go to the course.

So we said, well, you know, it’s understandable. Why don’t you just get in the car and go to the course and see when you get there if you can manage it? And she got herself out of bed and went and managed it, and then she passed the course, and then she had a scooter and could zoom around the city for the next couple of years.

And so that was really good, but it was very hard to draw that line, right? Because in some sense, she’d been victimized by this arbitrary illness, and you know, you tend as a parent to have an outpouring of empathy— the empathy that can destroy under those circumstances, because you cuddle the person more than is absolutely necessary, right?

And you have every reason to because they’re suffering like mad, but you don’t want to be a victim and be a tragic figure, you know? And you might say yes, but you wouldn’t if you thought it through. So, and then if someone asked me that question in a clinical setting, I would do a little analysis of, it's like, okay, well, you’re suffering from this traumatic experience; you want to get over it.

We’d have to figure out what the practical steps might be, and that might be finding somebody to talk to, or there's other ways of dealing with it, but you delve into the practical realm to sort of address that.

Audience Member: Thank you so much.

Dr. Peterson: Okay. Thank you so much for your talk.

On a couple of occasions you mentioned Judeo-Christian values during the talking, and in the recent question you talked of the English common law, which sort of alludes to the divine. One in six people in the world live in India today. India has a democratic secular constitution, and yet the culture is Vedic, and caste is central to society.

How would you speak about the freedom of speech into a culture that has that in its faith and beliefs, and at the same time in certain fringes of the political movement, certain radical ideological movements, there’s a belief that these freedoms are a Western import? So how would you healthily speak into that culture about upholding the freedoms?

Dr. Peterson: Well, the first thing I would want to do if I was doing that—practically speaking—is I would like to talk to as many people who hold those particular views as I possibly could to find out why they think the way they think. You know, when they say that it’s a Western import, well what do they mean? Because in some sense it is a Western import.

I mean, India has a body of laws that at least in part is derived from the English common law tradition, and so it was imposed upon or introduced into that culture. Now it took to a large degree, and I don’t believe that you can import a propositional structure without the underlying imagistic ethos and behavioral proclivity—it just won’t work, right? Because the infrastructure, so to speak, isn’t there.

And so the fact that it has worked, at least to some—I would say some remarkable degree, because India is really a remarkable success story—indicates that there is some correspondence between the English common law tradition, which emerged gradually and in some sense incrementally and organically out of the will of the English population, and it matches the same strivings and proclivities that you might find elsewhere.

I would also say that the relatively radical comparative economic success of states settled by England in its history of colonization, let’s say, also points to a decent fit between the English common law tradition and a whole variety of other cultures. That doesn’t mean the match is perfect, and so to some degree, the argument is correct that it's imposed, at least as a set of propositions.

But it's incorrect because I think it reflects something that’s fundamental at the level we've been discussing today. But if I was trying to mediate those disputes and I’ve been having increasing numbers of conversations with people on the Islamic side of the world trying to do exactly that, the first thing I want to do is listen a lot because I don’t know what I’m—I’m so ignorant about such things. I just don’t know what people actually think.

And so you can’t begin to address a question like that till you find out why those who stand in opposition to your claims, let’s say, why they think the way they think. Now, the probability that there’s no tradition, say, within Indian families that approximates free speech in flourishing families is like—that’s zero, because it’s not possible, you know?

And if it’s just a tyranny—let’s say it’s a tyranny—well, tyrannies aren’t sustainable. Chimps can't even sustain tyrannies. You know, and I'm saying that for technical reasons. You know, because there is this idea that's quite promoted that complex animals like chimpanzees live in dominance hierarchies, and it’s the meanest, toughest male chimp that rules the hierarchy, right?

And he’s like Stalin, except in chimp form—which actually places them somewhat higher on the evolutionary scale than Stalin. And so—but Frans de Waal has investigated the structure of those societies in great detail, and it’s simply not the case that the most tyrannical chimp is on top.

In fact, the chimp males who sustain leadership across reasonable amounts of time are unbelievably reciprocal in their interactions, especially with other males, but they’re also particularly attentive to the females and the infants. And part of the reason for that is, well, let’s say you’re, you know, Joe Brute Chimp, and you're strutting around like a fullback in Georgia, constantly showing off your physical prowess.

It’s like, well, one day you’re a little thick or a little tired, and two chimps that you’ve tyrannized will tear you into pieces, and that happens quite frequently in chimpanzee disputes where a tyrannical male will be literally torn to pieces because chimps are very brutal when they get their mind to it, and they’re just taken out.

And so this, this—there’s a principle of reciprocal altruism, let’s say, that’s associated with the free exchange of ideas and something like mutual valuation and that’s recognition of the soul, I would say, on a metaphysical level that’s a precondition for peace everywhere, not just in the West.

That’s been propositionalized and formalized into law in different ways in different cultures, and sometimes not formalized so much yet, let’s say, because many cultures are governed primarily by ritual and custom rather than a fully articulated body of laws. But the fact that that does not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that English common law is somehow purely arbitrary social construction—it’s like, that’s such a—it’s a preposterous claim.

So I would start by listening and finding out exactly what the issues are, and then, well, then proceed from there.

Audience Member: Thank you so much, Dr. Peterson, for what you've given us this evening. You've spoken now in a very complimentary way about English common law, and I’m very pleased to hear it. But freedom of speech is something novel, largely in our civilization. You just have to think about how dissenters and Catholics were treated in this country not too long ago. You couldn't go to this institution if you were not a communicant of the Anglican church.

I'm not an Anglican, but I sympathize with them because if you've got something good, you want coercive and directive measures to protect that thing. And in fact, you might be committing a very serious injustice if you don’t put the context and structure in place to prevent people who want to repudiate that good thing from invading and corrupting what has taken so long to put together.

Dr. Peterson: Spoken like a true conservative! And that's not ironic or denigrating; I mean, yes, absolutely. So how do you reconcile that?

Well, there is no permanent reconciliation of that conundrum, right? Because—and I've traced the development of that paradox back as far as I'm concerned back into Mesopotamia, past through Egypt. The Egyptians had two primary fundamental male gods, and one of them was Osiris, and Osiris was the founder of the Egyptian state, mythologically speaking, kind of like George Washington.

But he was also the spirit of stone, and so he was the—he was the representation of conservative order. That’s a good way of thinking about it. But the Egyptians portrayed him as old and willfully blind—specifically willfully blind—which is extremely interesting. And subject, as a consequence of his willful blindness, to the evil machinations of Set.

And the sun sets, and so Seth was the evil uncle, essentially, and he cuts Osiris up into his pieces, which were also, by the way, the provinces of the Egyptian state, and sentences him to the underworld and then rules instead. That’s the danger of unthinking conservatism, because all our cognitive and social structures deteriorate with the passage of time.

Because time changes all things, and so we're always fighting to maintain what we have, and that includes our categories of perception themselves in the face of a continual onslaught of novelty at virtually every level of analysis. While the second god of the Egyptians—this is a very cursory overview, obviously—was Horus, and Horus was the son of—the rightful son of the true king, raised outside Egypt and alienated in some sense from the tradition that gave rise to him, but he was simultaneously the falcon and the Egyptian eye—that famous Egyptian eye, that open eye.

So he was the god of attention, and he—his mother is Isis and she’s the chaos that arises when order disintegrates, gives rise to the hero. Horus goes to the underworld to rescue his father, and the Egyptians conceptualized the soul of the Pharaoh, so that would be the proper source of sovereignty itself, as the union of Osiris and Horus—the living union of Osiris and Horus.

So they would celebrate the Pharaoh like you do when a new king is crowned in the aftermath of the death of a reigning monarch. The king is dead; long live the king! Right? The kingship passes, but the tradition has to be living. It has to be allied with attention, and the Mesopotamians put a modification on that—which was also magic speech.

So tradition always has to be allied with attention, and it’s like you know this is true. If you own a house, you know, especially if it’s an older house. Well, the four walls are there, and they’re necessary, and you want to protect it and preserve them, but you have to maintain them, and sometimes you have to replace them.

And how do you tell? And the answer is, with a careful and judicious eye, with some humility and gratitude for what you already have, but with some understanding that in the face of continual transformation, some change is necessary. And then you might ask, well, how do you decide when change is necessary? And the answer is by engaging in political dialogue mediated by free speech.

That is literally because this is an insoluble problem. The conservatives are not correct, but neither are the progressives. It takes a dialogue between them to specify the target, and it’s partly because the environment itself shifts and changes literally unpredictably.

And so all we have is—well, consciousness itself is the mechanism that mediates between order and chaos, and political dialogue, when it's done in goodwill, is the manifestation of consciousness in the repair of mechanisms that need to be sustained and transformed.

And so there’s no end to the necessary dialogue because the future differs from the past, and that’s the limit of conservative thinking, right? It’s like, well, the noble traditions—it’s like, fair enough, man. If you can walk down a road that’s already been walked down successfully, that’s a wise choice. But sometimes, you know, there’s a flood, and the road is changed; the underlying tomography has shifted.

And then you wander blindly into a cliff or into a pit. So even as a conservative—and conservatives have more of the temperamental proclivity, let’s say, to preserve and to respect—but they still have to be open to the transformations that are necessary to keep abreast of the times.

So we try, right? We winnow through the wheat and the chaff of the past and we attempt to garner the wheat and dispense with the chaff. The only way we can do that is through continual dialogue—with ourselves, honest dialogue with ourselves and with others.

Audience Member: So, you speak about the concept of the soul. Do you associate this with any psychological constructs?

Dr. Peterson: Not any psychological constructs that are more valid than the notion of the soul. You know, there’s—I would say what we mean by soul is something like animating spirit. And you might say, well, what’s a spirit? And well, that’s actually rather easy to answer.

So when a child of four is playing house, let’s say, when a child of four is playing house, she acts out the role of the mother. But acting out—that's a strange thing, right? Because she doesn’t literally duplicate in her actions or her perceptions in the game what she observed her mother literally doing.

So for example, she didn’t go into her mother’s bedroom when her mother awoke and watched her turn her head in a particular way to awaken and count the number of blinks so that she can mimic that in her play. And you know, you think that’s absurd, but it’s not absurd if it’s just mimicry.

It’s not; it’s unbelievably sophisticated. So what the girl does is she watches her mother manifest maternal behavior across a vast array of instances, and she integrates that with the image of the mother she’s received from all the books she’s been read and all the little movies she’s watched—the Disney movies and so forth—and she abstracts out the animating principle of the maternal, and then she embodies that in play, usually with a little boy.

And that’s practice for what’s going to come later. It’s unbelievably sophisticated, and she’s embodying a spirit, and the spirit there is the abstraction of the central animating principle from multiple embodiments of its manifestation.

And if you think children can’t do that, well then you don’t know anything about children, because they do that all the time in their pretend play, which is a necessary precursor to healthy psychological development. And so part of what we refer to as the soul is the presence of that spirit—or maybe even the capacity of embodying such spirits.

And it’s very difficult to know how deep that goes. You know, I had a vision at one point of all the men in my life who’ve been particularly influential in a benevolent way, you know? And you think, well, just the mirror notion of the idea that there could be a benevolent way that would unite the acts of benevolence across a series of men—that’s all comprehensible to you.

That’s—you take that as a matter of course when you say that there are such things as good men, and you can identify them, right? Something stable about whatever is good across multiple manifestations of incarnation, let’s say.

And I saw that transform into the father person of the Trinity as the embodiment of that benevolent spirit. Now, I don’t have any idea what that means metaphysically because who does, but that spirit manifesting itself within is certainly part of what we refer to when we talk about the soul.

And you can see that shine through people. I mean, it’s part of what gives someone charisma; it’s part of what elicits the instinct to imitate in you. You know, when you see that, even in simple things, when you see a remarkable athlete do something incredibly athletic, to put the goal—to put the soccer ball, the football ball through the net to score the goal, and everybody leaps to their feet in celebration of that—well, that’s a celebration of the divine capacity to hit the target dead on.

And it grips you at such a low level, way down inside your soul, that you’re compelled to your feet to cheer, and you don’t even know what you’re doing, but you enjoy it, that’s for sure. And that enjoyment is also a sign of the depth and utility of that response.

You see this in all the things that people do that are, you know, so-called popular entertainment. It’s unbelievably sophisticated; the soul is participating in that in the fullest extent. And, you know, you can say, well, there’s no use for the religious; there’s no necessary use for the religious terminology.

It’s like, well, until you come up with a better word, there’s plenty of use for it because it’s a very complex and deep phenomena. And to, you know, just cast it into the realm of superstition in some casual manner—is just not helpful. Not in any possible—it’s not helpful scientifically; it’s not helpful ethically; it’s not helpful existentially.

Try treating someone for a while as if they don’t have a soul, just really. I mean, just treat them like a deterministic machine if that’s your belief. Really act it out. You’ll be like the most hated person in town in about 15 minutes. Well, I mean, what do you make of practical evidence like that?

I mean, you interact with people as if they’re free souls capable of choosing between good and evil—that's what you do all the time. And maybe you can addle yourself out of that by some ridiculous rationalist ideology, but that just means you’re kind of a gambling fool, and it’s just going to make you trip over things you don’t even notice in all of your social interactions.

And you tell me—I don’t care how you think philosophically or ideologically—you bloody well know that what I just said is true. So, and that’s true even when you’re interacting with an infant or a small child; it’s true when you’re dealing with someone who’s elderly and virtually incapacitated in every way.

You still see that divine spark, for lack of a better term, and we do lack a better term, by the way—you see that everywhere if your eyes are open and if you’re willing to see it. And to the degree that you’re responsive to that, then your actions are guided by love, and your words are guided by truth.

Thank you very much.

[Music]

Um, well ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the formal part of the evening's proceedings. Thank you so much for coming along. It would have been so easy for our speaker tonight never to set foot in this university ever again. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to go to any of the other hundreds of universities that would have rolled out the red carpet and had him back after his marathon bout with all sorts of difficulties over the last two or three years.

And I think it’s a testament to the caliber of his character, his generosity, and above all, his graciousness that he was willing not only to come here and speak to us this evening but to spend the best part of two weeks with us, opening up all his views to scrutiny, to criticism, to debate. Arif and I have been going at him pretty much all morning, and he’s got more of that to come.

And this is just a slice of some of the engagements that he’s going to be undertaking here, and I think it’s quite remarkable that he’s got that kind of resilience, stamina, that raw authenticity that has moved and changed the lives of so many. So it’s been a great privilege for me to be part of this, and I hope that the same is true for you.

Thank you all so much for coming. I believe that Colin Hewlett here will be taking photos with Jordan as he may be tempted to come out, so you won’t have to fumble awkwardly with your iPhones. And I’m sure he’ll be around for a few minutes just to speak, if you would be cognizant of his time, but I’m sure he’d like to say hello to as many of you as possible if the last few days walking around the streets of Cambridge are anything to go by.

Thank you all so much!

[Applause] [Music]