Clarify What You Want

And now please welcome Tammy. [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Peterson: Hello Dublin! My grandfather was from Belfast, so when I come here, I kind of... yeah, right on! So, Dr. Peterson's going to come out here tonight. I'm sure you're very much looking forward to it; I'm looking forward to it. And with that, I won't let you wait any longer. I'll invite Dr. Jordan B. Peterson out on stage. [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Peterson: You Irishmen are such an excitable bunch. It's always fun to come to Dublin. I think it's probably too much fun to come to Dublin, actually. Yeah, so, uh, it's really remarkable to see you all here, and, uh, appreciate, as I always do, appreciate the fact that you've all taken the time and expended the effort to come and see this. I thought I would wander through the 24 rules, and I don't know how many I'll address, but we'll see how it goes. So maybe we'll start with a rule from the first book, 12 rules: treat yourself.

This is rule number two: treat yourself like you are someone you were responsible for helping. That's a hard one. There's an injunction, a moral injunction, that you should treat other people like you would like to be treated yourself—the Golden Rule, let's say. And rather than he who has the gold makes the rules, right? Um, that's not an injunction to sacrifice yourself in some unending way for the benefit of other people, which is often how it's interpreted.

And it's not that—it’s advice in relationship to reciprocity. And this is something really worth knowing. I've been thinking about this for a long time, you know, because I got interested in the nature of malevolence and motivation for atrocity. I got interested in the nature of evil, and certainly, as a consequence of studying atrocious behavior at the clinical level and then also at the political, economic, and sociological level, I definitely became convinced that it's a very naive person indeed who doubts the existence of evil.

I think it's easier to become convinced of the reality of evil than it is to become convinced of the reality of good. It's easier to define evil than it is to define good. But if you can specify the nature of evil, you help yourself infer the existence of good because you can say to yourself—you can conclude that whatever good is, difficult though it may be to put your finger on it—it's the opposite of evil.

I did have this inkling, you know, way years ago when I taught at Harvard. I was teaching about very dark things, uh, about individual motivation for the sorts of acts that characterized, say, the worst atrocities of the Holocaust and the catastrophic situation with regard to Stalinist Russia. Those were the two places I focused on the most. And I had this voice in the back of my head always when I was lecturing very serious lectures that if I could really manage those lectures properly, I would do it with a sense of humor.

And I thought that just cannot be right. How in the world can you deal with a topic that dark in a manner that it's playful? I thought that's... but the voice wouldn't go away, and I knew there was something to it. I knew there was something to it.

And so I've been trying to think about how do you concisely conceptualize the opposite of evil? How can you tell when things are going in the opposite direction? What if there's a malevolent spirit that might inhabit you if you walk down the darkest possible road? What would be the opposite of that spirit if it is inhabiting you, so to speak, if you were walking down the most positive of roads?

And I would say, I do believe this to be the case, that that's play. So you know, children play. And it says that there's a gospel statement that unless you become as little children, you'll never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It's a very complicated statement. It means in part to regain the pristine perception of wonder that you had as a gift in some sense when you were a child. If you have children, young children, you get to partake in that if your eyes are at the least bit open.

Because one of the things that's absolutely wonderful about young children and having them around, and the way in some sense they pay you for the painstaking care that you need to exercise when you're caring for them, is that they enable you to see the world through fresh eyes and to see things in their untrammeled by cynicism glory. And it's hard to open yourself up to that, you know? Especially if you're an adult who's built layers of shells around yourself for any number of reasons. But children offer you that opportunity.

And so one of the reasons that you should become as a little child is so that you can see miracles when they unfold in front of you instead of being blinded by your own defense of cynicism. And children can definitely help with that. But also children play, and you know, we sort of stop playing as we grow older, and we think we mature out of it. But that's not right.

What happens is that we can no longer do it, and a lot of that I think is associated with the shock of puberty, you know? Because you have to integrate sexuality into play, and that's really hard. It's really challenging for people partly because you're more likely to be rejected on the sexual front, for example, and that's very hard on people. And then also it's a more dangerous game, that's for sure. And so it's a big challenge.

And a lot of people stop playing when they're when they're teenagers. One of the reasons I think that we've had somewhat of an explosion of unhappiness and mental illness, particularly among women by the way, over the last 30 years, is because a lot of what we've done inadvertently has interfered with children's ability to play.

And so, for example, it's very hard for boys to play in school because almost everything they're required to do is antithetical to the rough-and-tumble ethos of masculine play. That's really hard on young boys. And with young girls, oh, I was talking—believe it was to Jonathan Haidt recently, a famous psychologist in the United States—and he said that girls have almost stopped doing patty cake and skipping and that sort of thing, you know?

And these are deeply embodied forms of play that might be something like the female equivalent of rough-and-tumble play among males. And that rough-and-tumble play is a form of embodied dance, you know? Because if you're wrestling—and fathers really like to do this with their kids, and kids really like it, and they really need it—it teaches you the extent of your body, you know?

It teaches you how to twist your body and to push it to its limits and to expose yourself to fear. You know, maybe your father throws you up in the air and catches you. Can you imagine someone doing that to you as an adult? A 12-foot high person just tosses you in the air and catches you? It's no wonder children sort of scream with terror and delight. But they do, and they really—you just can't believe how much they need that, to engage in that play because they also learn what hurts them and what doesn't.

'Cause the most fun direct physical play with kids pushes them right to the ragged edge of disaster, right? It's like it's right where it almost hurts that it's most exciting. And partly what you're doing when you're playing is calibrating it to make sure that it's as exciting, as intriguing, as possible but not too exciting.

And the rough-and-tumble play is deeply embodied. It's not just abstract, right? It involves pain and anxiety and excitement and frustration and turn-taking and tension. It's very sophisticated, and that's just on the rough-and-tumble front. And then later, you know, as kids develop, they start to engage in pretend play. And there's no difference between pretend play and thinking; they are the same thing, you know?

And children envision who they might be. They construct a fictional character, a father, mother playing house, let's say—that's a very common form of pretend play—and then they act it out. And in doing so, they inhabit the roles that they're going to take on as their adults. And if they don't do that, they don't know how to do it. You know, one of the things I was worried about to some degree when my son was little—he had an older sister about a year and a half older; he was often surrounded by her friends, and they would dress him up like a princess or a fairy.

And I was always looking kind of askance at that, so I didn't want it to go too far, you know, whatever that meant. But then I realized when I was watching, he was having fun, and so were they. And I was watching it very carefully to see what was going on, and I thought, "Oh, oh, I've got to leave this completely alone." Because what he's doing is acting out what it's like to be a girl. And how in the world are you going to understand that if you can't act it out?

And then if you forbid it, say, "You can't do that," well, what's the message? It's like you can't understand females. Well, of course you can't, but you shouldn't stop—[Applause]—you shouldn't stop your son from trying, that's for sure. And so that should be done in a spirit of play. And you know if you have a good marriage, good partnership with anyone, I don't care who it is, but let's say a marriage—the more that you can elevate what you're doing to play, the better off you are in every possible way.

You know, there are preconditions for play among children. One precondition is the person that you would like to play with has to want to play with you, right? It has to 100% be voluntary. It cannot emerge. Even we know this, even psychobiologically—there's a fair bit known now about the underlying neurological circuitry that's involved in play because there's a specialized neurological apparatus in mammals for play, and it's not merely a decoration on top of something more fundamental.

This is a very, very deep and fundamental part of the human psyche and the psyche of any animal that has to engage in reciprocal repeated social interaction. You might ask yourself, you know, how do you know if you're interacting with another person properly? Well, you might ask, what does properly mean? Well, it might mean they want to interact with you, it might mean they want to interact with you in a way that could repeat many, many times and maybe improve as it's repeating.

You want to get along with people, and you want it to work now, but you want it to work now in a way that gets better across time. And then you might think if that's the right way to act, whatever that means—and it's a stable right way to act because it emerges out of iterated social interactions—that you might have an instinct to mark when that's happening, and that's what happens when you play.

And people find that absolutely delightful. If you're sitting around with your friends in a bar, generally you're joking around, and you know that can get kind of rough, but it doesn't have to, but it could edge towards rough 'cause that's kind of fun, and it's a bit proddy, you know, to see where you can find the edge. And that can be riotously entertaining, and that's all done in the spirit of play.

And so you could say that a proper friendship is actually predicated, has its basis in the spirit of play. And then with regards to the atrocity and evil that I was discussing earlier, say, well, if it's power and compulsion and pride, let's say self-centeredness, a kind of narrow self-centeredness, and a narcissism, hatred, a bitterness—all of that mangled together—resentment, vengefulness—that all constitutes the central spirit that inhabits you if you're acting in a malevolent manner. What might be the opposite of that?

And I do think it's the spirit of voluntary play. You know, I had a vision of Heaven at one point. Heaven was a place where people were eternally playing, and it was a place where everything was good, but everyone was playing to make it better yet. So it was a combination of what was really good, but that wasn't the end of it. And maybe that's because being itself is not good enough; you want becoming as well, right?

You don't want things to be static and perfect; you want them to be as good as they can be but dynamic, so there's still something to do. And so you could play at making things better and better, and that would be lovely if that was true, right? If you could have what you wanted. If you really think it through, you might think, well, it would be lovely if everyone could play a volunteer game that everyone wanted to play that was aimed at making things good, but even when they're good, the aim was to make them even better.

And then it would even be better if when you were doing that, it was marked by a sense of—what would you say—a profound sense of positive engagement and the cessation of negative emotion. And one of the other things we do know about play is that it's quite disruptable by other motivational states. So it's not that easy for children to play if they're hungry or tired or anxious or upset or hurt.

If your children are playing spontaneously, it's actually a mark that what you've created around them is a walled garden, right? The walls protect them so there's not too much chaos and uncertainty, and the garden is this place where things can flourish. A playground is a walled garden in any real sense. Walled garden—paradise—paradise means walled garden, by the way.

It's a balance between culture and nature or between structure and possibility. You could also think about a walled garden as a game because a game isn't... you can do anything you want, a game is here's some principles, rules you might say, here's some principles by which you can govern your behavior within that set of principles, here's some play, right? Some freedom to maneuver—not so much that you drown and no one knows what they're doing—just exactly the right amount so that it's playful.

That's how it looks. And so back to treat yourself like you are someone you're responsible for helping. Well, you want to approach other people in the spirit of play, but I would say even though you probably shouldn't teach people to play with themselves, so to speak, it's the right attitude to bring to bear on yourself too, and that's a hard thing to do.

You know, like we tend to think that most people, if we're cynical, we think, well, people are rather selfish; they're self-centered; they only want what's good for themselves. It's like, first of all, that's actually not true. There are some people who will routinely take advantage of other people to get what they want in the moment, but that's pretty rare in its extreme forms, which would be psychopathy, let's say.

In its extreme forms, it's never more than about 3% of people, and then around the psychopaths, there might be another kind of cloud of narcissists who are inclining in the same direction but haven't got quite so far, and maybe you could add another 5% on that, you know, depending on the severity. But it's just not the case for most people. Most people have the reverse problem—they treat themselves worse than they treat other people.

And why? Well, why would you do that? Well, you know, maybe you treat other people not so well because you think they deserve it, and why would you think that? Well, 'cause you know things about them that aren't as good as they could be, and you know that they've made mistakes; they've walked off the pathway; they've done things they shouldn't have done. And so you don't treat them as well as you might otherwise.

But then you know that about yourself more than you know that about anyone else, right? You have privileged access, if you want it, and even if you don't, you sort of have privileged access to the entire panoply of sins that you're responsible for. And that's a lot, you know? And most people bear a pretty damn heavy burden of existential guilt, and some of that isn't warranted, you know?

Lots of times you see people in the Freudian sense who have a superego that's yelling at them too vociferously, you know? One of the things you do in therapy for people who are hyper-conscientious to the point where their own internal voice is a tyrant is you try to moderate that.

And so people can call themselves out on their misbehavior too much. But even if you don't do that, generally, you have quite a lot of misbehavior, and as a consequence of that, you're ashamed and uncertain about your own value. And so then you don't think you really need or deserve to be treated very well, and so then you don't.

And one of the things you do as a psychotherapist is—well, a lot of what I did, for example, people sometimes would fall into a situation where they were being terribly accused of some misbehavior by maybe in a divorce case or maybe at work, and I would help them mount a defense for themselves. It's like, you know, we have the presumption of innocence, right? Which is a complete bloody miracle, that presumption, it's such a miracle that our legal system actually starts from that perspective because it'd be so much easier just to say, "You're accused of something; hell, there's 20 million people in the vicinity; we don't need you; maybe you're guilty; off with your head."

That's way simpler than, despite the fact that 40 people are coming after you with accusations, we have to assume you're innocent. God, it's very hard to do that for yourself, you know, to mount a defense. And one of the things I used to have my clients do if they're in such a situation is write out a defense. It's like treat yourself like you're innocent just for the sake of argument.

We can also do the same thing on the guilt front, you know? Maybe you should make a case when you're in trouble about why you're guilty as well as why you're innocent to lay out the whole territory. But at least you should defend yourself. And then we might say also, if you think other people are worth taking care of, if you think that, if you think that other people have value—well, they're individuals like you.

And it doesn't seem all that plausible that they could have value and that you don't, unless you're the worst person around, and you're probably not. I mean, you're bad enough, but on average, you're no worse than everybody else; maybe in your worst moments, you know, you manage to climb to a new pinnacle. But generally speaking, you know, other people are carrying a fair weight of guilt around on their shoulders too.

And so if anyone has value, then you do. So what would happen if you treated yourself that way? And this is a dead serious question. And it isn't a matter of thought. Can your savings weather another economic storm? Think about what you've put away for the future. Inflation can render cash worthless, and even real estate can crash, as it did in 2008. During times of economic uncertainty or market volatility, investors tend to flock to gold as a safe haven asset. Its value tends to increase during turbulent times, providing a buffer against market downturns. This is why people are flocking to gold now and why Birch Gold is busier than ever.

Birch Gold understands that navigating financial decisions can be daunting. That's why their dedicated in-house IRA department is there to guide you every step of the way. Birch Gold is committed to addressing your questions and concerns promptly. Their team is always ready to provide answers and clarity, whether it's about fees, taxes on rollovers, or the timing of the process. They are here to ensure you feel valued and well informed.

Text Jordan to 98-9898 to talk to one of Birch Gold's experts and claim your free info kit on gold. You'll learn how to convert an existing IRA or 401(k) into a tax-sheltered IRA in gold. The best part is it doesn't cost you a penny out of pocket! Just text Jordan to 9898 98. That's Jordan to 9898 98 today!

You know there's a gospel statement, which is very mysterious: uh, knock and the door will open; ask and you will receive; seek, and you'll find. And that, on the face of it, seems utterly preposterous because could the world possibly be laid out in that manner? That seems too good to be true. And you've asked plenty and haven't received. It's like, yeah, maybe not. You know, because you've got to ask yourself what ask would mean?

That might mean something like, well, first of all, you got to have your head screwed on straight about who you are. It's like, are you willing to act in your own best interest? And that doesn't mean are you willing to give bray to your impulsive hedonism. You know, the problem with impulsive hedonism, and that's sort of at the core of what we tend to describe as selfishness, because a selfish person is an impulsive hedonist who will sacrifice other people to that impulsive hedonism.

And the reason I say impulsive hedonism is because it's impulsive because you want what you want right now, and you want it regardless of its future costs. And that might be future costs even for you. You know, when you act impulsively, you go out and you party too much, let's say, you have too much fun, and you know you're burning tomorrow and the next couple of days to exaggerate the intensity of what you have right now.

And you know that everyone knows or you learn soon that that's just not sustainable. You know, you have to treat yourself in the moment in a way that doesn't interfere with how you're going to function tomorrow and next week and a month from now and next year and five years down the road. You can't sacrifice the future for the present. If you're an impulsive hedonist, you're not exactly selfish. You're selfish and immature.

And you're selfish because it's about you, but you're stupidly selfish because it's about you now, and that's just unwise in every sense of the word. You know, the younger you are—and I mean chronologically—the more impulsive and hedonic, hedonically oriented in some deep sense you are. Two-year-olds are very impulsive, and that's why we don't let them set up colonies and live independently, you know?

They can't govern their behavior with regards to future consequences; they're not mature and wise enough to have that breadth of view. And hopefully, as you mature, you become capable of regulating your behavior in the present so that your own path goes at least stays steady, but hopefully even goes uphill. And so that's back to this rule: treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping.

Is that I think in some real sense—you want to enter into the kind of relationship with yourself that’s also marked in its highest manner by the spirit of play. And we know this too: if we look for experiences like this all the time to put us in that place, although we don't necessarily notice that that's what we're doing.

When you go to a concert, you go to hear musicians play, and when you go to a dramatic production, a movie, you see people playing a part. And the playing part of that isn't trivial, and you go there to participate in the play. And you do the same thing when you go to a sports event, you know? And you do it in an embodied way, and it's so interesting to watch. You know, if you're watching a football game and some remarkable player makes a remarkable shot, you'll jump up to your feet and throw your arms in the air before you even notice, right?

It's completely spontaneous. It's completely bottom-up. It's not that much different than what you do when you're at a comedy show and you spontaneously laugh, right? You don't think, “That's a funny joke. I should laugh.” There's no thought between the joke and the catching of the punchline and the spontaneous reaction, and you do that because you want to experience that sense of play.

And we'll pay for the privilege of being in a place that's setting that up, that's facilitating it, and we all regard that, especially when it's going well. You know, maybe you're going to listen to a great band, it's a genre that really speaks to you, and the band just gets cooking. You know, and everyone knows what that means, and it means they're playing off each other. That often happens when they're good at improvising. You know, so they're not just doing it note for note, although that can be great, but it's even better when they could do it note for note, but then start to play, and they just get into a rhythm—that’s something else.

And if it's really working well, then everyone in the whole place is in the same rhythm, and it's all pulsing with the same beat, let's say, and everyone's just thrilled out of their mind, which is why there's like 50,000 people doing it. And it's useful to know what you're doing there. And the answer seems to be, you're playing along with your favorite band. That's a pretty good deal because you got these highly skilled creative people up front doing their best, allowing you to mimic that in some real sense as part of the experience.

You know, people will sing along, and they'll dance—that's all mimicry. You can't help but dance; that's all part of the spirit of play. And so you treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. It's a serious injunction, even though its aim is play. And this is part of asking too before you receive.

It's like, okay, give yourself the benefit of the doubt, even though it's hard. Give it your appalling, pathetic, ignorant, lazy nature, you know, and all the things you could be that you aren't. You aren't. It's hard to give yourself the benefit of the doubt, but you could say, well, would it really be so terrible if my life wasn't miserable? Would it be so terrible if I got what I wanted and needed, especially if I was doing that in the best possible way?

And that has to be a serious question, right? You can't just tell yourself this; you have to open yourself up to the possibility that that might be true. Then you can say to yourself, well, if I could have what I needed and wanted in a manner that would be best for me—and you can imagine that takes a fair bit of orientation to get that question right—then what would my life look like?

And that's a frightening question. People generally are loathed to ask themselves that question because there's a couple of reasons. One is maybe you feel you don't deserve it. Well, another is you don't know that that's what you should do because we're so badly taught that this idea is generally not presented to people, which is just absolutely appalling beyond belief as far as I can tell.

But then there's more impediments too, because one of the things people do to buttress themselves against failure is to never let themselves really gain clarity about what they need and want. Let's say you try something, but you only do it half-heartedly, and then you fail. And you think, well, I didn't really fail because, you know, I held a bunch back in reserve, and so I didn't get what I wanted. But maybe had I been all in, I would have.

And so you don't have to upbraid yourself too much for the failure. Now, it's a catastrophic way to live to sit on the fence and to not commit because instead of risking the possibility of failure, you engage in what's essentially the absolute certainty of failure. Because if you want something worthwhile and difficult, which you probably do, if you want to have an adventure and go somewhere, then what's the chance you're going to get it if you're halfway in?

It's like if you can, then you didn't aim high enough, obviously, and that's not going to be exciting or engaging. And so if you're actually pursuing something that would motivate you maximally, you can't be halfway in. But that sort of protects you against failure because you can tell yourself, well, if I tried, I could have done it. It's like, you know, you tell yourself that 200 times and your life’s over, and so I would seriously not recommend that.

And then another problem is that if you let yourself know what you need and want, then you can betray yourself, right? So do you trust yourself? And the answer is, well, not really. And the reason is, well, I trusted myself before, and I misbehaved terribly. So why would I do that again? And fair enough, you know? That's a solid question. But on the other hand, if you don't let yourself know what you need and want, what's the probability that you're going to do a random walk in the right direction?

Especially given that there's lots of ways to randomly walk, and there are very few pathways to what you really need and want. And so it's an act of faith, and I don't mean the belief in preposterous things. I mean an act of existential courage to ask yourself what you need and want. Imagine you wanted to live without bitterness; you want to live without cynicism. And maybe even more, you wanted to live in something approximating a spirit of play. What would you need and want to make that happen?

Well, it's very terrifying to allow yourself to envision that, first of all, because you've made your conditions for failure very clear. Second, because you've set yourself up to betray yourself in a fundamental way. And third, often the apprehension of the distance between you and that goal can also be demoralizing and overwhelming.

Now, I think the way you deal with that is you can make a lot of progress incrementally. You know, once you specify a goal, you don't have to leap from where you are to the goal in one swoop. If you could, you probably didn't set a difficult enough goal. It's okay to make incremental movement forward. That's why there's another rule here, which is, uh, compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

You know, if you get the comparison right, you can say, well, here's where I'm headed, and it's worth going to. You have to ask yourself that: is there a place I could head to that would be worth getting to? And that's a question, right? It's a question like you might ask your wife. It's like, okay, if I could give you what you wanted—it's a good thing to ask during an argument, by the way, really, really.

It has to be an honest question. It's like you're arguing with me, I don't know who's right; neither of us 'cause we're both clueless and confused. It's like, like if you could have what you wanted in this moment and I could deliver it, what would it be? That general answer to that is something like, "If you loved me, you'd know," which is not a helpful answer. It's like, how come you know that answer? It's not a helpful answer.

It's like, "No, I'm too stupid to know what you want, that's for sure. You don't even know what you want, so how in the world am I going to figure it out?" But it's a lovely gift to offer your partner, by the way, the conditions for your satisfaction. But then you have to allow yourself to know what they are, and you have to be acting in your own best interest.

And then that exposes you to all these potential calamities that we just described, and uh, that's a big risk. But it's not nearly as big a risk as never getting what you want and need, and that is definitely the alternative, and that's a pathway to bitterness and cynicism and a wasted life. And bitterness and cynicism, that's just where that starts. It gets way worse as it compounds.

And so it's very useful to treat yourself like you're someone you're responsible for helping, and it is very useful to compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. There's no way of interacting with someone, including yourself, that's more productive than to give targeted reward where credit is due, to give credit where credit is due.

And you might say, well, how can I treat myself well, given that I'm nothing but the embodiment of serpentine, uh, what would you call it, errors and sins? And the answer is, well, if you're a little better than you were previously, that's something really. And maybe that's what you want to see in your kids, right? I mean, you don't want to push them too far. You don't want to punish them if they haven't made huge leaps forward developmentally.

What you want is incremental progress that requires some effort. And that's actually what your kids really love too. You know, if they're playing hard, they're on the edge; they're pushing themselves to develop their skills. Maybe they're playing a sport; they're pushing themselves to move incrementally at the optimum rate.

That's another thing that play indicates, by the way, that's and that's so cool to know too—play signals that you're pushing yourself forward at the optimal rate 'cause you can't stay static, and you can't absorb too much change at once. How do you know when it's right? Well, it's engaging; it's meaningful. But at the highest level, it's something like play.

You know when kids, when you're playing a sport, you want to play against someone who's approximately the same level of skill as you or maybe a little beyond, right? If you're playing a game with someone who's approximately your equal, then you're pushing each other exactly enough to facilitate optimal movement forward. And that's actually a very good conceptual scheme for apprehending the nature of a marriage.

So I found out from Ben Shapiro, interestingly enough, that there's a translation in the King James Bible of God's description of Eve before he makes her. The King James version says that God says he's going to make Adam a helpmeet, and that's an archaic word, right? No, no, you don't call your wife your helpmeet generally, or you're going to get a slap probably if you do. But my point is it's an archaic term; the biblical language means something like beneficial adversary.

And that's very nice, you know? It's very nice because a beneficial adversary would be someone that you're pushing against, and that's pushing against you exactly the right amount. And there's this phenomena that's known neurologically called opponent processing, and a lot of the manner in which we make difficult and calibrated decisions neurologically involves two systems working in counterposition to one another.

So imagine I want to move my hand smoothly—as smoothly as possible. That's pretty smooth, but I'm shaking a little bit, and it's a bit jerky. So I'm using voluntary systems to move my hand, and they're a little imprecise. If I want to move it perfectly, I go like this, and then I can calibrate it unbelievably precisely. And that dance that you have with your partner—that's what that's supposed to be optimized: opponent processing.

So imagine why it's like—it's the same as free speech in some real sense. It's a manifestation of the logos, that optimized adversarial process. Why? Well, think about it this way: imagine you have a child, and, uh, or you have three children— they're all quite different 'cause children tend to be quite different, even if they're born in the same family. And so then you might ask yourself, well, how should we treat our children? And the answer is, well, they're different.

So is there a rule? And there are some guidelines and principles. I had one in my book: don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. That's a good rule to turn to. How do you know if you're not being a tyrant? You know, your children act up, and they annoy you; maybe you're just mean, or maybe they never annoy you, but they annoy everyone else, in which case you're not mean enough.

And I mean that definitely because if your children never annoy you but they annoy everyone else, then they won't have any friends, and then they're in real trouble. But your children are different, so how do you know how to calibrate your response to them? And the answer is, well, you push back and forth against your wife or your husband.

And you know, maybe you want to use a bit more encouraging and want to use a bit more sheltering—that's often the masculine versus feminine roles, although that can intermingle, you know? But generally, those are associated with justice in some sense and encouragement with masculinity, and mercy and tenderness with femininity. Probably because women have to care for infants, and so they tilt more towards that end.

In any case, you have to calibrate that for each kid, and the only way to do that is to push against each other, right? Because how else are you going to do it? There's no rule, and it's a dynamically changing situation, and you're too clueless and blind on your own to do it properly. But maybe the two of you, ironing out each other's kinks in some sense in this constant dance oriented, as you might be, to the optimal development of your children—who you hypothetically love—maybe you can calibrate a moving target by pushing on each other back and forth, and maybe if you do that optimally, then that manifests itself as something like play.

And you know that happens 'cause you take your kids out—hopefully this happens at least sometimes—you take your kids out to the beach or something like that, you have a great day, and what does that mean? Well, it means you got the balance right, right? Because there's some freedom and there's some principles, there's some rules; it's a game, and everything comes together in the right place at the right time, and you think, "That was a good day."

You think, "Yeah, every day could—could every day be like that?" And maybe that's too much to ask for every day, but it's something to aim for, and something to try to foster, and it's something to know consciously. You know that that playful engagement—that's a marker of the highest form of being.

It might be easy to just toss all of your discipline to the side for the summer, but a life of greatness doesn't happen by taking the easy route. The Hallow app offers an incredible range of guided meditations and prayers that are designed to help you deepen your spirituality and strengthen your connection to God. With Hallow, you can embark on a journey of exploration, diving into different themes and types of prayer and meditation—from gratitude to forgiveness. Each session offers a unique experience, sparking your curiosity and deepening your spiritual understanding.

You can choose different lengths of meditation to fit your schedule, whether you have a few minutes or an hour. With its user-friendly interface in hundreds of guided meditations, the Hallow app has quickly become a go-to resource for people seeking spiritual growth and healing.

You can download the app for free at hallow.com/Jordan. It allows you to set prayer reminders and track your progress. Hallow is truly transformative and it’ll help you connect with your faith on a deeper level. Don't lose your prayer habits this summer. Maintain your peace and deepen your relationship with God. Download the Hallow app today at hallow.com/Jordan for an exclusive 3-month trial. That's hallow.com/Jordan!

So, that's three rules. So we can talk a little bit more about do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. That's a tricky one, and people are afraid of their children, especially modern people because they're afraid that they're going to interfere with the flowering of their creative potential or something like that.

And fair enough, you know, because there is something remarkable about the potential that you see in children. But they're also, you know, wild and unconstrained in their activity, and so that possibility has to be harnessed in some sense. And I think the right way again to conceptualize that is not so much that the child is moving outward and trying to be creative and free and all society does is constrain that in some sort of patriarchal or radical manner.

I think that's a suboptimal solution. I think what you do instead is you channel that creative possibility into something like well-regulated games, and a game has to operate by principles and has to have a certain degree of predictability, right? So there's some order there. But if you have your disciplinary routines optimized, then much of what governs the household is something like play.

And I can make a technical case for that. So children of two years old, they really can't play with other children, and by the time a child is two, he can or she can do something like play with a truck, right? It's a very abstract thing to do 'cause a little toy truck—that's not a truck, right? That's a representation of a truck. And when the child is playing at driving the truck, they're not driving a truck; they're formulating a very complex representation of the world and acting out a potential role. It's very sophisticated.

When a girl plays with a doll, too, she's not playing with a baby, obviously; she's practicing doing that, and that's very sophisticated. But two-year-olds, they really can't play together. And the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget made much of this. He was a real genius because Piaget was the first person who really understood that the proper basis of social order is play.

And that the reason children play is because they're practicing taking their optimal place in the social order. It's crucially important. And then any social order that isn't predicated on the spirit of play is suboptimal. And that's also very much worth knowing, you know? If you're a business person, a good one, you pretty much only want to enter into business arrangements with people who can play fundamentally because otherwise you have to connive or use force or, you know, get paranoid about whether or not they're holding up their end of the bargain.

And it's so dull, it's counterproductive. What you really want is you want to have something to offer, something valuable, and you want to go to someone, you say, "Look, this is what I've got." They say, "Well, this is what I've got." And then you say, "Well, look, if we put the two things we've got together, here's a bunch of things we could do that would really be good." And that would be good for both of us, and in a way that we couldn't do apart. That's a pretty good deal, so it's probably worth a bit of time and effort.

So back to the two-year-olds, they can't play together. So maybe you put two two-year-olds in a room, and maybe they both want to play with the truck; they'll fight. And maybe one wants to play with the truck, and one wants to play with a doll, let's say. And then they'll play side by side. And if you're a casual observer, you think the kids are playing together, but they're not; they're just in the same room. They're not playing together until they're playing the same game.

And that really doesn't start to happen till they're about three. And when they're about three—and this is where pretend play really starts to dawn—mutual pretend play, they'll do things, they engage in dramatic play. They'll do things like a boy and a girl; they'll say to each other, "Do you want to play house?" which is a pretty bloody fundamental question when it gets right down to it. You're going to be asking women that for the rest of your life, badly or well. And you might not know that that's what you're doing, in which case you're probably doing it badly.

But that is what you're doing; and so kids are practicing that. And the rule is the girl has to want to play —that's a good rule. You could stamp that on your forehead: the girl needs to want to play. And in any case, at about three, kids start to be capable of negotiating a shared play space.

And by the way, just to be clear about that, that's no different than negotiating an identity. This idea that identity is something you define subjectively, and then can impose on other people—that's what two-year-olds think. And that's what the kind of two-year-old who stays unpopular for the rest of his or her life thinks, and now we're making that law—it's not very wise.

And then the other way that you can tell that's two-year-old behavior is that if I don't accept the identity that you're imposing on me subjectively, you'll have a tantrum. It's like, yeah, I knew you were too, and now you just proved it. And I'm actually kind of sad about this because one of the things I have noticed as a clinician is that a lot of this emergent identity confusion that particularly characterizes adolescence—and at the moment, particularly adolescent young women—is likely a consequence of stifled childhood play.

You know, it's awful, and it's causing a lot of trouble, but it’s also... there's something about it that's really sad. In any case, at three, a child who’s developing along an optimal trajectory is now capable of asking—inviting someone else to play. Someone at about their developmental level. And if they're optimally skilled—which means in part that they have parents who haven't paved the pathway for them to misbehave, have taught them to some degree about how to take turns and how to be careful with each other—then at three, they're ready to play with other children.

And then what happens if they're optimized play partners is that they make friends, and then the friends socialize them. So parents are not the primary source of socialization after the age of about four. Peers are—that's partly why adolescent kids are so absolutely obsessed with what their peers think of them, which is appropriate, even though it can go too far, because your peers are going to make up your society as you all mature together.

And you have to adapt to the circumstances surrounding you, and the parents should pave the road for that adaptation. But you make friends, and then your peers play with you, and they socialize you optimally. And if that doesn't happen by the time you're four, then it never happens. There's a huge psychological literature on this. If you're alienated from your peers at age four, as far as we know, there's nothing that can be done to fix that; you're permanently alienated.

And so you're already in jail in some real sense, and then that just gets worse as you mature. That's one pathway to lifelong criminality. An aggressive two-year-old male usually doesn't get socialized between the ages of two and four because aggressive males are harder to socialize. It doesn't make friends; done.

And the reason seems to be that imagine that at four, you need to start making friends, and because you make friends, you start to develop more and more social sophistication. But then imagine you don't make friends; you're already so far behind that you don't make friends, and now all your peers are skyrocketing forward and so you just fall farther and farther behind.

And you get more alienated and still using two-year-old aggression to solve your problems—more bitter, more cynical, more jaded, more isolated. And of course, that's not going to do wonders for your popularity, and so it's a very bad positive feedback loop, and it starts very early.

In any case, why should you not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them? Well, first of all, let's say you and your wife and the husband together, right? If your kid annoys you, well, you maybe you're having a bad day or maybe you know your father was too tyrannical to you, and you have some of those proclivities. Or, or maybe on the more maternal side, you're willing to let your kids run roughshod all over you and not to stop them.

But the two of you together, you might ask each other, "Hey honey, that kid's annoying me," "Is that kid annoying you?" It's like, "Yeah, as a matter of fact, that kid's annoying me too." It's like, well, either we're both crazy in the same way—now you're both crazy. But are you crazy in the same way? The answer is probably not.

So if you're both thinking something together, there's a reasonable probability that the two of you are right. And so then you can think, well if this kid's driving us crazy, given that together we're not out of our minds, hopefully, if he's driving us crazy, then he's probably not going to be very popular with anyone else. And then that's a good time to think, well, do we want an unpopular and miserable child?

And the answer might be yes, you know, 'cause sometimes they won't leave home. And if you have no other purpose in life than to devote yourself entirely to a dependent child, then crippling them socially is a really lovely way to attain that. And if you don't think that happens, then you're the sort of naive person who will eventually run into someone malevolent and learn just how naive you are.

And so in any case, you know, you have a responsibility with regards to your children to not let them do things that make you dislike them. And if they're doing things that make you dislike them despite the fact that you love them, you can imagine the effect that's having on other people. And you got to ask yourself too: how do you want your children to be treated when they go in public?

You know, most people will give children the benefit of the doubt. One of the things that was so lovely—I lived in this... I lived in Montreal when I first had young kids, and I lived in a rough neighborhood. It was very... it was a working-class neighborhood; it was quite poor. Most of the people were uneducated in sort of a multi-generational way. It was a rough neighborhood.

Um, and we had Michaela, my daughter, and we used to zoom around in her stroller, and it was so fun because you'd see these rough guys walking down the street, you know, tough-looking guys; you'd give them a bit of a berth on the street, generally speaking, and they'd just break into a smile and, you know, coochie-coo her and it brings out the best in people.

It's so lovely to see that. It's one of the things that you don't know before you become a parent is that you become a parent, you enter this little club of other parents that you didn't even know existed. But you also get to see the best of people in a way you never did before, and that's lovely.

And so people are willing to give your children the benefit of the doubt. You want to facilitate that by having your child act in a manner that heightens the probability that that's how people are going to act towards them. And then instead, you know, a misbehaving child—I've had plenty of experience with this sort of thing in all sorts of ways—a misbehaving child lives in a world of adult falsity because nobody really wants the child around.

And so everywhere they go, there are forced and strained smiles and bare tolerance. That's a little bit of hell, that is. And the alternative is, well, your child is properly socialized and everyone's happy to have them around. And then wherever they go, everyone's happy to have them around and then they make friends, and adults are much more likely to interact with them in a positive way. And that's what you're... you want to give that to your kids unless you want the other outcome that I described.

You know, or maybe you're jealous of your children 'cause you're old and you're bitter, you know, and you see your child flourishing in some way that you didn't get to, and you want to knock that the hell out of them. And that's another pathway to take, too. But, you know, that's a good little trip to hell if you want to embark down that road.

Here's another rule: pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. This is also a great thing to know. I think that's a tricky rule. Expedient might be, we're going to have a conversation, and I want something from you. And a lot of conversations are like that, you know, because you have a goal in mind; this is what I want from this person.

And so then you craft your conversation to get what you want, right? You subordinate your words to the ethic of your desire. And you might say, well, what's wrong with that? Well, what do you know about what you want? Like, haven't you been wrong about that before?

And you might say, well, what's the alternative? Well, is there an alternative? Well, you have to want something from the person to even interact with them. It's like, no, you could want to see what happens. You could want to play. You could tell the truth—that's an interesting thing to do because you don't know what's going to happen if you tell the truth, that's for sure.

You could let go of what you want and just say what you think, and you could presume—and this is an act of faith too—that the truth does set you free and that the truth that's spoken properly makes out of possibility the order that is habitable and good. And then you could just tell the truth, and you could see what happens.

And that would be an adventure, and that's better than expediency, partly because maybe you're wrong about what you want, you know? And you know that because you're kind of narrow and narrowly self-serving from time to time, and your purview of the world isn't as wide as it could be, and you're a bit bitter. So you tend to be that narrowly selfish because of that.

So you want something from a conversation, and you bend and twist it to get it. It's like, fine, but maybe you'll get something you don't want, or worse, you'll get something that's positively bad for you— that happens a lot. And so part of the reason there's a deep moral injunction to tell the truth in a religious sense is because there's a hypothesis behind that, which is there isn't anything better that can happen to you than what will happen to you if you tell the truth.

Now that might be hidden from you because sometimes if you tell the truth—and I don't mean to blurt everything out carelessly—like this is a sophisticated thing to do; it's not careless. It doesn't mean just say any old thing that pops into your head.

Are you struggling with back taxes or unfiled returns this year? The IRS is actively escalating collections by adding 20,000 new agents. In these challenging times, your best defense is to use Tax Network USA. Along with hiring thousands of new agents and field officers, the IRS has kicked off 2024 by sending over 5 million pay-up letters to those who have unfiled tax returns or balances owed. These guys are not your friends.

Don't waive your rights and speak with these agents independently without backup. Tax Network USA, a trusted tax relief firm, has saved over $1 billion in back taxes for their clients, and they can help you secure the best deal possible, whether you owe $10,000 or $10 million. They can help, whether it's business or personal taxes, whether you have the means to pay or on a fixed income. Tax Network can help resolve your tax burdens once and for all.

Seize control of your financial future now, and don't let tax issues overpower you. Contact Tax Network USA for immediate relief and expert guidance. Call 1-800-245-6000 or visit tnusa.com/Peterson. Turn to Tax Network USA and find your path to financial peace of mind. That's tnusa.com/Peterson.

You have to be judicious with the truth, but the notion would be that if something emerges as a consequence of engaging truthfully and it doesn't seem to be going your way—wait, there's more to the story to unfold. 'Cause like how do you know if it goes your way or not? Like over what time span are you calculating this? Because sometimes things can go pretty badly initially and then much better as they progress, and lots of times the truth has that effect because you know you reveal something that's maybe disturbing or shocking even to yourself and others, and it causes waves, especially if it's a deep truth, and destabilizes everything. It's like, yeah, but maybe that's preferable to a false peace.

You can't find out if it's true without doing it. You're not going to gather the evidence beforehand. So that's the true side of it. Meaning pursue what's meaningful instead of what's expedient. It's another hint, like the spirit of play about the pathway, the yin and yang symbol, you know, the famous symbol. It's two serpents, one black, one white, head to tail. Inside the black serpent, there's a white dot, and inside the white serpent, there's a black dot.

And the representation is something like the world of your experience is made up of chaos and order. And order is where you are when things are going according to what you want, and chaos is everything that can come in and disrupt that. And both of those can be positive and negative—too much order, tyranny, right? Too much chaos, nihilistic uncertainty—optimized balance.

So let's think about what the optimized balance would mean. You have a structure of perception and conception that you inhabit. It's orderly—reasonably orderly—orderly enough so that when you inhabit it, most of the time, things are going the way you want them to go.

But things change and shift, and you don't know everything you should know. So you can't just stay where you are with the good thing; you have to expand. And as you expand, you move out of the domain of order into the domain of chaos or out of the domain of actuality into the domain of possibility. And then you might think, well, how do you know when you're doing that optimally?

Well, one marker, as I said before, maybe that you do it in the spirit of play. But another is—and this is so much worth knowing—things get meaningful. You know, people ask, does life have any meaning? It's like, why is anything worth doing if in 4 billion years the sun is going to envelop the earth?

And the answer to that question is that's a stupid question, and I can prove that in some sense. It's like you're a mother, and your baby's crying, and so you're going over there to do something about it. And someone comes along and says, "Why do you care if that baby's crying? You know, in four billion years, the sun is going to envelop the Earth."

And what's the right response to that? It's like—it's something like, "Go away, are you out of your mind?" And the answer to that question is yes, you are out of your mind, of course. You can find a time frame or a spatial frame of reference that makes everything you do pointless. You know, it's like, what's this going to matter in 20 trillion years? Well, it's like, the only proper response to that is that's not a wise time frame.

Imagine you're in a concert, you know, listening to some great music, and it's got you, you know? And someone taps you on the shoulder, and you know this is going to come to an end, and what's your response? Like, "Go away!" And that's the right response to that voice in your head that does those things to you which says, you know, you're engaged in something, and a nihilistic thought comes out.

Well, what's the point of this, given you know how unbearable the world is and the current political situation and the fact that we're inhabiting some ball of dust on the edge of some fringe part of the cosmos and that everything's dead and material? It's like, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" Right? Really, it's not a mark of [Applause] wisdom.

It's not a mark of wisdom to let nihilistic, demonic voices steal your joy—that is not a mark of wisdom. And you might object, well, at least it's not naive. It's like, yeah, cynicism might be preferable to naivety, but it doesn't hold a candle to wisdom, and that's worth knowing too.

You see, once you've been hurt and you're cynical, there's no going back to naive. But there's no point in staying at cynical, and there are degrees of courage way beyond cynicism, and some of that is the regaining of the faith you had as a child despite your current level of wisdom. And that's something to strive for, right? That's a moral attainment; that's not burying your head back in the sand, quite the contrary.

And so, well, back to the yin and yang symbol. Imagine you have an instinct that orients you. Well, you do, as a matter of fact—there's a reflex that's replicated at multiple levels of your nervous system, and it's ancient. If you have a nervous system as an animal, you have this reflex.

And the reflex is something like surprise. You know, if I walk across the stage and I hear a loud noise behind me, I might go like this, and that would be automatic because I'm gripped by unconscious systems. And what's happening is some chaos has emerged, and it stops me in my tracks because something unexpected happened. My current plan is incomplete, and then I'll turn and orient towards the place of the disturbance.

And that's the beginning of exploratory behavior. Then I might run away, which might make me safe, or I might cautiously investigate, in which case I can find out what caused the disturbance, maybe rectify it, and maybe update my plan so that that sort of thing doesn't happen again. That's a better approach; in fact, that's the optimal approach. That's also the meaningful approach.

And so here's something to know: if you're engaged in something and it's infusing you with a sense of meaning, then your nervous system is signaling to you that you've optimized the balance between stability and transformation, and that manifests itself in the sense that you're in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. And it's not conceptual, right? It's not abstract; it's not a theory; it's an embodied sense.

And you might say, well, I don't know what that sense is exactly, but it's the sense that you have when you're engrossed in a piece of music. And what's music? Well, it's principled and somewhat predictable patterning spiced with unpredictability, creative unpredictability. And if it's optimized, it grips you and it's a representation—in some sense—of optimal being.

And it’s so interesting that that's the case because it does grip us. No matter how nihilistic you are, something I always liked about punk rock—I was a teenager when the Sex Pistols first emerged on the scene—and they’re very interesting to me because their music is so nihilistic, and it's so meaningful, and that's such a weird combination.

It's like, because the overt lyrics are, I just smash everything to hell, and anarchy everywhere, but you know, there’s a great beat, and everybody's dancing away. It's like, and even the skinheads, who were anarchic, they would dance. I mean, they'd smash into each other, and there was often blood, but it was a kind of dance. It was better than nothing, that's for sure, and that's why they went to the concerts.

And so to be imbued by that sense of meaning—even in theiristic anarchism—they were still engaged in that—the sense of meaning that music produces. And it does put you back to the yin and yang symbol; it puts you right in the middle of chaos and order. That's the right pathway, that’s the way to be.

By the way, for the dance, it's the pathway that runs between chaos and order and is signaled to you by the sense of engrossed meaning. And then you could say to yourself, you've got to stake your life on something: one way or another, 'cause you have to move forward in ignorance. So you’re always making a decision about what you're going to take on faith.

I don't care what you're doing; you have to make that decision. Well, what if you stake your life on the intrinsic value of sublime meaning? How would that be? Well, you have to act it out to find out. But you do get hints, you know? If you're gripped by something beautiful, it does that.

Something artistic, that's deep. If you're gripped by literature that stretches you, it does that. A movie that engrosses you does that. Almost everything you do that's entertaining does that. When you're at a sports event and you're watching someone stunningly skilled do something incredibly difficult, that puts you in the same place, that stretches you out and produces this intimation of meaning.

And then you might say as well—and this would be lovely if it was true, and I do think it's actually true, which is really quite something—what's the best antidote to pain? And you might say, well, pleasure. It's like, yeah, that's not going to be forthcoming that much when you're in pain.

And so and then pleasure per se has its own vices, let’s say, that's for sure. How about meaning as the antidote to pain? How would that be? Then you might think, well, where do people find meaning? Well, they certainly find it in aesthetic pursuits and artistic pursuits, in the domains of literature and art, beauty, all that.

But people also find meaning in responsibility, and that's something we've forgotten to a degree that's almost incomprehensible, you know? If you're ever really ill—which you will be; if you're ever really in pain—which you certainly will be; if you're ever faced with hellish circumstances—which you certainly will be—you might ask yourself, well, what do you have under those circumstances?

And maybe if you're fortunate, you have someone to play with. And maybe if you're fortunate, you have the meaning of your responsibilities, you know? And even if you're the sinner who's produced the hell around you and you can say to yourself, yeah, but you know, I've been a good servant to my wife, and I've been a good father to my children, and my family’s been a credit to the community, and I've taken on some community responsibilities to try to set the broader world around me right, and I've shouldered my civic duties, and as far as I've been able to, I've been a good person.

Then maybe while you're suffering, you don't have to scourge yourself with all your sins at the same time, and that's something, man. And maybe in that situation, that's all you're going to have, and that might be the difference not only between life and death but between hell and life because there are worse things than death, that's for sure.

And so then imagine if it was the case that you could have what you needed and wanted, and you could say, well, play is the antidote to tyranny; that’d be lovely. And meaning is the antidote to pain and cynicism and bitterness and social discontent and discord. And so then your life could be meaningful play.

Maybe you can come up with a better optimistic proposition than that, and if you can, good for you, really. But that's not a bad vision, you know? And you can test it out. One of the things I used to do with my clients, this is real useful too, and it's sort of done in the spirit of necessary humility.

So imagine your life isn't everything it could be. It's generally not that hard to imagine. But then also imagine that there's some variation, you know? Week to week, maybe you're pretty damn miserable, but sometimes you're unbelievably miserable, and sometimes you're just sort of miserable, and that's not great, but at least there's some variability.

One of the things you might do as a clinician or as a friend or as a partner is say, well, exactly what are you doing when you're less miserable? And what are you doing when you're more miserable? Don't think about it; watch like you're watching someone you don't know. This often happens with depressed people.

So one of the problems with depression is it's a positive feedback loop, 'cause you get depressed, and then you stop seeing your friends. And even if you're introverted, there are friends you want to see at least one on one, at least now and then. So now you start to isolate yourself, and then you get more depressed, and then you isolate yourself more, then you get more depressed. It’s a downward spiral; you know, it's not good.

A lot of forms of mental illness are positive feedback loops that spiral out of control. So one of the things you might do with a depressed person, they come to see you if you're a therapist, you might say, look, just for the next week or two weeks or so, I want you to just keep a mood record. You know, maybe check in with yourself every hour, scale from 1 to 10, just write down how depressed you are, with 10 being suicidal and one being as good as you get, let's say—or maybe even life is worth living.

And maybe the depressed person never gets, you know, below six or something, but six is way better than 10. And then they come back and you look, and you think, oh look, every time you were at six instead of ten, you were with this particular person or this set of people or maybe you're working in your garden, who knows, right?

Or maybe if you're artistic, you were doing something artistic despite the fact that you're paralyzed by your depression. But notice, your mood improved some. And then look: 10 out of 10 depressed, you're alone in your room in bed—that's like 11:00 in the morning. It's like, okay, so how about this next week? Don't be alone in your bed at 11:00 in the morning and spend like 20% more time or 10% or 2% with your friends or doing something that seems to improve not your mood but your state of being.

And then play with that and see, you know, can you tilt yourself gradually and incrementally, comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, you tilt yourself in the right direction? And then, well, that’s for depressed people, you might say. Well, could you do that in your life? And the answer is yes!

So the Egyptians worshipped this god, Horus—H-O-R-U-S—and Horus, you know, Horus, weirdly enough, everyone knows that famous Egyptian eye, you know, with the arched eyebrow, and you know, on the back of an American dollar bill you have an eye that’s separated from the pyramid; that’s Horus as well. Interestingly enough, that’s the gold cap on a pyramid.

It’s the aluminum cap on the Washington Monument. Aluminum was more precious than gold when they built the Washington Monument. The top of a pyramid is the gold cap, and the gold cap is the eye. And what's the eye? The eye is the thing that pays attention.

And so Horus was the eye, and he was the eye that could see evil and rectify it by the way. And he was also a falcon, and the reason he was a falcon is because a falcon is a bird of prey that flies above everything and that can see. And birds of prey, they can see better than us; we’re very visual animals; we have the second-best visual systems of any animal. Birds of prey see better than we do.

They can see clearer and farther, and a falcon, if a falcon was on top of the Empire State Building, he could see a dime on the pavement below. They're unbelievably sharp-eyed, and ancient people knew this; they hunted with birds of prey and they watched them. They knew they had spectacular vision, and so they used the falcon as an image of redeeming vision, and they associated redeeming vision with the sun setting and rising because the sun shines when you can see.

And so that's a solar god, and that's the hero that fights the dragon at night and that comes up victorious in the morning—a very old idea that's all associated with vision, and vision pays attention. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't. That doesn't mean everything you don't; it might mean hardly anything at all. But maybe you could glean something, and because you're clueless and confused, anything you glean might be useful.

And so it's useful to attend in a manner that's infused with humility. Why humility? Because you need to know that what you don't know is more important than what you do know. That's a hard thing to learn; 'cause you want to fortify what you know, man, 'cause it feels protective, and it's very threatening to move on the periphery of what you know.

But there's a lot of what you don't know— a lot. And you need to know it. And what attitude do you need to bring to bear on what you don't know? It's like pay attention; there might be something there for you. And so then you attend to yourself, and that ties us back up to the first rule, which is treat yourself like you're someone who you might be responsible for helping.

Well, what does that mean? Like, you don't know who you are because you don't—as if you're someone made in the image of God, let's say, someone, despite your flaws, of divine intrinsic value—who could hypothetically be a light on the hill. Hard as that is to believe—and then watch and see when you're... you should be.

And maybe you're only a bit of the way there, you know, and it's your kind of your life is hell to purgatory, that's it. There's very little glimpse of paradise, but purgatory beats the hell out of hell. And so maybe you can move from hell into purgatory, that would be something.

And maybe when you're there now and then, you're getting a little bit beyond that, you think, you know, right at this moment, for whatever reason, I'm not doing something so terrible that I'm in hell. What is going on? What's the circumstance? What did I allow to happen that made this possible?

It's a form of awakening in the most profound sense, to notice when that happens. Then you think, could I be there more often? 1% more often? That compounds very quickly. You know, if it's 1% a week for a year, you're going to be there like twice as long in a year as you were before you started. And God only knows how good you could get at that if you didn't do anything other than that, let's say, if you really committed to that. God only knows what your life could be like in five years or ten years.

Maybe you could be in that state all the time, and who knows what effect you'd have on you and your family and the people around you if you were in that state? And that's something worth thinking about too. And maybe that's a good thing to close—you know, we have this notion developed, not least in your great country, that people have an intrinsic worth, that we're sovereign citizens, that we're all possessed of a voice that redeems the state.

That's why we have an inalienable right to free speech, let's say, because we're necessary corrective to the blindness and archaic nature of the state. We—the living eyes of the Dead King. And maybe that's really true.

Then you think, well, if the world isn't everything you want it to be—set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. If the world isn't everything that you want it to be, maybe you're not acting the way you should. You know, because there's some intimation in our deepest ideas that the weight of the world rests on your shoulders.

Now that's a terrible thing to think, but maybe it's true. And it's an open question how much of the mess that you see around you would vanish if the mess that you could put straight was put straight. And you know, you know this too to some degree.

Because to the degree that you've not become entirely embittered and cynical and hopeless, you know perfectly well that if you put your mind to it and you make the proper sacrifices, there are things you can set straight. And that if you do that diligently, things actually improve.

And so, otherwise, if you didn't believe that, you wouldn't act at all. Like, well, maybe you just turned to completely catastrophic short-term impulsive pleasure, something like that. You have to believe that your action has some redemptive possibility because why would you do it otherwise?

And you might say, well, I kind of believe that. It's like, well, that's not good enough. You know, you kind of got to throw yourself all into it, and what's the cost anyways? You know, it's not like you’re going to get out of this alive, so you're pretty much all in whether you want to be or not.

And maybe if you were voluntarily all in, things would be a lot better than they are, and that's an exciting thing to try to find out. Now, if you allowed yourself to be guided by the intimation of meaning, and I mean defined on your terms in some real sense, if you swore that you do your best not to use deceit and instrumental manipulation, if you decided that you were going to put things straight, what do you think might happen?

And I'll close with one observation. I read something very terrifying by one of my—one of the thinkers who've influenced me the most—Carl Jung, the great Swiss analytic psychologist. He said something very interesting at the end of World War II, apprehending the terrible specter of the atom bomb and the unbelievable destructiveness of the second world war.

He said two things. One