Q&A 05-01-2021 | Jordan B. Peterson

Hello everyone and welcome to my Q&A. I'm answering questions today that were submitted on the in-beta stage social media platform ThinkSpot, which I had a hand in developing over the last few years as an alternative to Patreon. Although others have contributed far more, these answers were posted on ThinkSpot before their release on YouTube. So if you want an earlier view of such things, you might consider checking out the ThinkSpot platform.

I've edited the questions a bit and grouped some of them together so I can address the broader topic. I hope you find this worthwhile and interesting. I also hope to start live Q&As at some point again in the future when I'm healthier and sharper.

I would like to know how to believe in the divine even though it is a loose end. I know that without some sort of grounding, any hope about a positive future falls down. Could you please tell us how your conception of God has changed in the last year or two? And has your wife's burgeoning faith had an impact on this conception?

I was rather taken aback when you said in your return home video posted five months ago that with the grace and mercy of God, you might be able to generate original material once again. Why do you think there are so many people who are prone to just following an ideology seemingly blindly today, especially in America and maybe especially among younger people?

Why do people seem to cling to what a doctor, an organization, a political stance, or what a news network or source says seemingly religiously? I'm not talking about religious religion specifically, I don't think, but maybe what I seem to see as replacements for faith, or a good family/meaningful life, etc.

Having listened to you for many years now in this minor clergy in the Orthodox Church, my questions are: Have you attended any services in the Eastern Orthodox churches, or have you done an in-depth exploration of Eastern Orthodox Christianity? How do you respond to the idea that your personal theology aligns so well with what is taught by the Eastern Orthodox churches?

Well, I'm going to try to answer all those questions at the same time. Let's start with the third set. Why do you think there are so many people who are prone to just following an ideology seemingly blindly today, especially in America and maybe especially among younger people?

Why do people cling to what a doctor, etc., says seemingly religiously? Well, I would say that something has to be done with the religious impulse. And we could think about what the religious impulse is critically and deeply for a minute.

So imagine that you might consider defining the religious impulse as the consequence of the necessity of having the highest—having a goal at the highest possible level of conceptualization and organization: psychological organization, social organization.

We have goals on a daily basis and a weekly basis, and a monthly basis, and personal goals and familial goals and social goals. But all of that has to be nested in the broader world of value. Let's say all of that has to be nested within something like, well, what is the ultimate goal? What is the final goal underneath which all of those more proximal goals are subsumed? And that becomes a religious question.

I would say, by definition, it's an impossible question to answer in some sense because to provide a definitive answer would mean that we would have to possess the classic attributes of God, at least His omniscience, to be able to finally answer, well, what is it all for? But we're still stuck with the necessity of identifying the highest level goal.

And that's really that—the identification of that goal was exactly what our traditional religious structures were attempting to do, for better or worse. And they did that with practice and with ritual and with drama and with symbolism and with music and with art and with literature, with dance—um, all of which are integrated in more archaic communities, let's say.

Those were all our attempts to orient ourselves at the highest possible level of being. Perhaps we're all striving to—at least in our more noble moments—we're trying to be good people ethically and to serve the good, whatever that might be. And it's the religious domain that strives to answer those questions at the highest possible level of abstraction.

Now, if you lack that answer, if you're divorced from a religious structure, then you have to find a replacement somewhere because the question isn't going to go away. The question, "What's it all for? What should I orient myself toward? Or what should I imitate? Or what should I be in awe of?"—you're stuck with that.

Or even in its negative sense, "Well, what's the purpose of life anyways, and why bother?" And so that can lead you into a very destructive nihilism. And so you're stuck with the problem. And if your culture hasn't provided you with a solution, or you've rejected that solution, or the solution no longer seems tenable to you—maybe because it's fallen prey to a rationalist critique— that doesn't mean the problem goes away.

You find a replacement for it, and for better or worse. Now, the first of the set of questions I grouped together will turn to: I would like to know how to believe in the divine even though it's a loose end. Well, it is and it isn't.

I'll answer that in relationship also to: Could you please tell us how your conception of God has changed in the last year or two? Well, one thing I've been thinking about lately is the idea of thought as a dialectical process. So imagine that you posit a question in your imagination. Your life presents you with the question: What should I do today? What would a person do? What should a person do in this situation? What should I do with my life? What should I do with this relationship?

Answers appear in the theater of your imagination, or doubts arise. But something happens—you send out a call, essentially—and you respond, or something in you responds with the generation of an answer, or maybe multiple answers. And in the case of multiple answers, you can then undertake an argument in your head—that's the dialectical process—between the two positions that might have emerged in the course of these revealed answers.

So there's a revelatory element to thought, which is the appearance of new information in the theater of your imagination, and then there's a dialectical element, which is the combat between different revealed thoughts to evaluate them and rank order them in terms of their credibility and applicability.

Okay, so now imagine that we have that faculty. We have the faculty for revelation, and we have the faculty for dialectical thought. Now imagine that you formulate in your imagination—or perhaps your culture helps you formulate—the image of an ideal being. That might be God as such, but it also might be, say in the case of Christianity, Christ; or Buddhism, the Buddha; or Islam, Muhammad— the idea of a person who's divine in some important manner, which brings the divinity down to earth.

In any case, whether the imaginary being in the theater of your imagination is purely divine, God Himself, or incarnated in some sense in a human figure, it enables you to produce an avatar of your imagination with whom you can converse.

And so you could ask yourself, well, you can ask yourself such questions as if you're plagued by doubts about what you should do in this situation: "What would you do if you were trying to do the best possible thing?" Or "What would someone who was always striving to do the best possible thing do?" You formulate that question and you might get an answer that this is the proper pathway forward.

Now, that doesn't mean you'd be necessarily inclined to implement that; it might be too difficult, or maybe you even might doubt that that's a practical way forward. But not only can you produce avatars in your imagination and then use them as sources of revealed thought, but your culture can fill in the attributes of that avatar.

So for example, if you're Christian and you've been taught about the life of Christ as it's portrayed in the gospels, all those descriptions flesh out the personality. And then, of course, the image of Christ is reflected in Western culture in a multitude of ways, all of which inform the structure of that internal avatar and which, in principle, flesh it out so that it's the potential source of revealed truth in imagination, buttressed by all that cultural input.

And so you would say, well, in some ways, that avatar with whom you can converse is now the internal embodiment of all the ideas about what constitutes the highest good that our entire culture has been able to create and communicate, insofar as you've been exposed to that and are able to understand it.

And then, so you could imagine that that could be of substantial practical worth, regardless of the ontological reality of that avatar of your imagination. But then I don't think that the issue necessarily ends there because you can then ask yourself, well, does that imaginary avatar share in any real being?

And then you ask yourself, well, is there anything real about the hypothetical ideal? And it seems to me that there is something real about the hypothetical ideal. We recognize its manifestation in other people, and we're happy about that. We're inspired by that. We might be in awe of that. We certainly recognize it as a good thing.

We're pleased when that manifests itself in us. Its manifestation in us certainly makes us more attractive to other people and also, I would say, of more use to other people and also more likely to be truthful and perhaps able to take proper care of and love other people.

And I don't think any of that isn't real, and so that means that there's some relationship between the imaginary ideal and reality itself that's not trivial. And I don't know what that might mean in the final analysis. You have a God in the imagination, which is our conception of God, and does that bear any relationship to the real God or indicate that there is a real God?

And the answer to that is: We don't know. I wouldn't dismiss the idea so rapidly. So that's pretty much now. There's something else, I guess. How do I respond to the idea that my personal theology aligns so well with what is taught by the Eastern Orthodox churches?

I don't really know that. I don't know how to respond to that idea because I don't know the theology of the Eastern Orthodox churches that well. I do know something about it. I know that the Eastern Orthodox churches stress the idea that the fundamental ethical responsibility of the individual is to become as Christ-like as possible.

And I think that that is the fundamental ethical responsibility basically by definition because, at minimum speaking psychologically—which is the safest way to speak about such things—the figure of Christ is the ideal avatar of the good in the Western imagination. And thus, by definition, your ethical obligation is to imitate that in every way that's possible and that's specified to some degree.

It means to treat being itself with love, even your enemies, to not wish them ill but to wish the good for them as well, and to tell the truth, and to live by the dictates of your conscience. And that's the pathway to divinity. I think that's all true.

So, you know, I was deeply influenced in my thinking, as most of the people who are watching this would know, by Carl Jung. And he was certainly influenced by his knowledge of the Eastern Orthodox doctrine. And so I've been influenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church via that route.

I think that there isn't any more serious question than your relationship to the ideal, again virtually by definition, and that there isn't anything better that you can do than attempt to embody that good as fully as possible. And I've tried to make a practical case for that, I suppose.

And perhaps that's why—with respect for the idea—and perhaps that's why so many people from the Eastern Orthodox Church, in particular, seem to find resonance in my ideas. Has my wife's burgeoning faith had an impact on my conception of God? Well, some impact.

Tammy, my wife, has always taken the idea of truth very seriously. Her recent brush with death has deepened her religious sense and impelled her towards a life that's more consciously focused on service to others—her family, in particular, but not only her family, people beyond the family.

And I also think that's a function to some degree of our stage of life. She's a grandmother now, and her children are grown and able to take care of themselves. And so she can turn her attention to other people, maybe farther afield from the immediate family.

I'm watching what she's doing and listening to her and watching her practical application of her faith. That affects me just as everything she does affects me because I watch what she does and take it seriously. And her recent actions have indicated she's helped a number of people quite substantially in the recent past with a group that she's been communicating with.

All of that's very interesting to me. She's showing me—I mean, I've taken the idea of God seriously for a very long time, and I've said on multiple occasions that I try to act as though God exists. And that's essentially my definition of belief. When people say, "Do you believe in God?" belief is a multi-dimensional word, and the question—one question is, well, what do you mean by belief?

And for me, the proof of belief is to be found in action. And I decided that I would act as if God existed a long while back, and of course, I'm imperfect in that—inevitably. Now she's doing that more explicitly as well.

Not she wasn't doing it quite well to begin with, but she's doing it more explicitly and also more within the confines of traditional religious conceptions, although she's not attending church. She's associating with a number of people who are formally religious, and all of that's informing the way that she conducts herself.

So watching her do that has also highlighted for me the missing praxis in Western Christianity. If you want to be a Christian, let's say, if you think that's necessary, it's not exactly obvious what you should do. You should go to church, but that's not enough, I don't think.

I think that's enough said about that for the time being. I find it useful to contemplate the highest good on a continual basis. That sounds so—I'm trying to keep myself oriented in that direction. It's a religious orientation, fundamentally.

It's an overwhelming orientation, but there's no escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of life, I don't think.

Next set of questions: How can responsibility be differentiated from imposed guilt? That's one question. How can one tell if one's inner voice, judgment, or conscience is a healthy one and not a voice that is the result of an unhealthy mind due to past experiences? How do I decide if my inner voice is healthy or not, and how do I maintain it healthily?

Now, that's a really interesting question. It's a question of conscience. I continually ask my—frequently, let's say—or yearly ask my personality class attendees if they heard the voice of conscience.

If they had a feeling, an emotional state, let's say, or a voice that informed them when they had done something ethically wrong and that perhaps made them guilty as a consequence— and it was essentially a universal experience. That's the voice of society within, I suppose. That's one way of thinking about it.

The Freudians would think about that as the voice of the superego. Carl Jung would take that conceptualization somewhat farther. He would have considered it the voice of the self, which is in part the voice of the ethic that's derived from the broader community, insofar as that ethic is valid, let's say, but also in part the voice of the more thoroughly developed self that's still striving to be born.

One thing you could say is that you experience violations of your conscience when you're not acting like the better person that you could possibly become. And so, to some degree, that's your higher self updating you for failure to develop in the appropriate direction, and that seems to me to be a reasonable way of conceptualizing it.

Now, the one question might be how error-prone is your conscience, given that you're not omniscient? And I have an endless fascination with the movie Pinocchio. Part of that is because it taught me something very sophisticated about conscience.

In that movie, Jiminy Cricket is given divine attributes. He has the same initials as Jesus Christ, for example, and he is deemed the voice of conscience itself by the magical properties of Mother Nature, essentially. But in the movie, it's necessary for the puppet, who's still wooden-headed and still a marionette whose strings are being pulled by others, it's necessary for the puppet to engage in a dialogue with his conscience because both of them have to inform the other.

And that seems to me approximately right, because I certainly saw people in my clinical practice and know people in my private life who seem to labor under a too authoritarian—labor under the dictates of a too authoritarian conscience. Maybe that's the internalized voice of a relatively tyrannical father, for example, or exaggerated sensitivity to the moral pressure exerted by the broader social world.

You have to attend to your guilt and your self-disgust and your self-contempt and your self-consciousness. You have to understand that the manifestation of those emotions might well indicate a moral failing on your part or a lack that needs to be addressed.

Well, at the same time, considering that it is not a straightforward matter to deal fairly with yourself and you can be too tormented by your conscience, too rigid, too responsible—take on too much weight onto yourself, deny yourself in a manner that isn't sustainable, and so forth—that a moral code, a moral way of being, can become too rigid and inflexible and, despite its putative aim upward, be something counterproductive.

I think most of the way out of that, if there is one, is careful thinking. You have to see what your conscience says. You have to see how you respond. You have to capture that voice and your responses, and you have to think it through.

But most of that is done in dialogue with other people rather than as the consequence of internal thought. You know, if you have a dispute with your wife or your husband, your intimate partner, sibling, your parents—anybody close to you—and it's useful for each of you in the dispute to ask yourself and the other person very seriously if you're at fault or if they're at fault, and for both of you to be able to contemplate that you might be at fault and so might the other person.

And that it's in your best interest to sort out exactly who's made the error and where—and maybe it's both of you and maybe at different levels of analysis. I think the same might be said about your reaction to your conscience.

It's not uncommon for me to talk to my wife, my kids, my parents, my friends for that matter about something I might be feeling. Maybe I'm guilty about something. I'm self-conscious about something. I'm angry about something. I feel impelled by my conscience to do something as a consequence, to change something.

It's very helpful to discuss such things with other people to say, "Look, here's what I think I did wrong, and here's how I'm punishing myself, but I'm not sure that I'm not doing it in an exaggerated way." And you gather other people's opinions and listen to them carefully.

And that can help you calibrate it. So I think most of what we do to decide if our inner voice is healthy is discuss it with other people. And I believe, as I pointed out in my last book explicitly, that tremendous amount of our sanity is maintained as a consequence of social interaction.

So you can't find your authentic self merely as a consequence of a journey within, I would say. You're not—there's just not enough of you. You have to be informed by the broader social world.

There's more about that too: How can responsibility be differentiated from imposed guilt? Well, I think you adopt genuine responsibility—let's say healthy responsibility—I think you adopt that more or less voluntarily.

I mean, there's an element of necessity and compulsion in our lives as well because there are things we have to do to survive. But if you've explicitly formulated a set of goals and you're pursuing them, then you've adopted the responsibility to act in a certain manner to make those goals realize themselves.

That's responsibility that you've adopted rather than responsibility that's been imposed on you, assuming that you've thought through the goals and you find your spirit in harmony with those goals. You can consult your resentment. I think that's a very useful step.

If you find yourself angry and bitter about the things that you are responsible for doing, then that's an indication that you might be operating under some unhealthy compulsion that you're rebelling against. And that's the reason for the resentment against the insistence that you act in a certain way.

Although, it's also possible that you're just immature, and that you're rebelling against the discipline that's necessary to attain the goals that you genuinely do want to attain and that are valid, and that you are actively engaged in constructing. So you have to get that straight, and some of that's a consequence of thought, and again, some of that's a consequence of discussion with other people with whom you're intimate enough to have a conversation like that.

And perhaps they have conversations about similar things with you if you're fortunate.

I'd love to get insight into why it seems inevitable to become frustrated or annoyed with a loved one's chronic, although usually non-fatal, illness symptoms. I'd love to know how, even while caring deeply for someone with a chronic physical condition, it seems impossible to suppress what might even be anger while witnessing them suffer even minimally.

Well, it's one of the terrible things that you see in any case of illness, especially chronic illness, is that the person with the illness is often blamed for the problems that the illness causes.

And some of that's just difficulty in differentiating between the person and the illness. When my daughter was ill with rheumatoid arthritis, she had to sleep a lot—16, 17, 18 hours a day—and even during her minimally awoke times, she was likely to nod off.

And that made getting her to school and so forth quite difficult. And it was very challenging to not be morally judgmental about that when she was a teenager. It's often difficult to get teenagers out of bed.

It was just very challenging to differentiate the illness from the person, and it's very helpful to have other people around you under such circumstances so that you can discuss the issue. Of course, you can always discuss it as well with the person who's ill, and we—I talked a lot to my wife about such things, and to my parents, and also to my daughter and to my son as well.

All of us were trying to calibrate this properly, her as well, because she didn't want to misbehavior to the list of illness symptoms. We told her not to use her illness as an excuse ever because then she wouldn't be able to distinguish between what she could do and what she couldn't do.

If she used her illness as an excuse, that was a difficult job of discrimination for her as well. And then I would say, well, you get angry because you're upset about the fact that the world's unfair and tragic. So there's an existential level there too.

It's so heart-wrenching and burdensome to note that the universe is constituted so that people you love suffer unreasonably and unfairly and constantly and often without relief. And that anger can easily—that manifests itself as a general irritability that makes you more susceptible to being angry with the person who's ill and with all the other people in your life and with yourself as well—with everyone.

It's best, to the degree that it's possible, to dispose of that generalized resentment because, justifiable as though it might seem, it is not—I've never seen it to be helpful. Shaking your fist at God is not a constructive way of dealing with the world, even though it does appear that there are plenty of reasons why such shaking might be justified.

It's not a place that the human soul should go. And then the third factor that's important, I would say, is that if you find yourself angry when you're in the position of chronic caretaker, it's really possible that you need more help.

If you're dealing with someone who has Alzheimer's disease, for example, or any chronic degenerative neurological condition, or any chronic degenerative condition in general, there's only so much you can do before you can't do any more or even that much. And it could be, assuming that you're reasonably well constituted and reasonable, that you're being called on to deliver more than you actually can sustain across time.

And two seriously ill people are not better than one. And so if you find that you're resentful and angry and therefore lashing out at the person you're taking care of, you might ask yourself whether it's time to do whatever is necessary—if that's possible, if you have the luck and the resources—to bring in more help.

If you're in it for the long haul, it has to be sustainable. And you can't ask yourself to continually do the impossible. It has to be sustainable, and you can have an honest discussion with yourself, and although this is also something useful to discuss with other people, about just what you can take without breaking morally or physically or emotionally—and for how long.

And if the resentment is building and the anger is building, maybe you have to change the manner in which care is being offered and given. You have to hire a nurse, if you can. You have to rely more on other members of the family. You have to consider institutional intervention.

All of these things are very difficult. You have to ask others for help, but like I said, two sick people aren't better than one. So those are the reasons why you might get frustrated or annoyed with a loved one's illness symptoms.

I think—I don't think it's a mystery at all why you get annoyed and angry. The mystery is how it's possible for so many people to engage in long-term care of others without being angry and irritable. That's the—that's the miracle—that's the mystery.

I've seen people provide levels of care to members of my own family recently, for that matter, that went far above and beyond what I considered the reasonable call of duty.

So, and I would say too, don't torture yourself too much; if you find yourself being angry or annoyed at a loved one's illness, I understand why you would think that that's a terrible thing, and it is in some sense, but it's also virtually inevitable for the reasons I just described.

And you do what you can to keep it under control, and you also learn as clearly as you can what you can tolerate and what you can't.

So in regards to your notion of the importance of romantic relationships, I presume that also means long-term committed relationships. What are the requisites for opening the relationship to other sexual partners?

Well, I don't think that's possible; that might just be conservative me. I don't think I've ever seen it work. People—and I think the evidence that it doesn't work is manifest in the fact that people almost never do negotiate that openly; they sneak around if they're going to have an affair.

And the reason they feel compelled to sneak around is because they know perfectly well that the probability that their partner is going to grant them wholehearted permission and encouragement while simultaneously maintaining the intimacy of the relationship and the desire for it to continue is virtually zero.

I think a simple relationship is complicated enough. It's very difficult to negotiate intimacy with one other person, let alone a number of people. People might wish that their sexuality could find its free expression, untrammeled by the arbitrary restrictions of a judgmental society, inappropriate—disgusted by, ashamed, and frightened of sex.

But I think that's all most all wishful thinking. I would put in the coda that I have seen people in my clinical practice who were too restrictive in their sexual morality and that that was doing them harm. People from a fundamentalist background who were in their mid-20s with no partner—marital partner on the horizon, who'd never engaged in any sexual activity of any sort—that, on a case-by-case basis, seldom seemed to be a good solution.

But I don't think there's any evidence that at the personal and social level simultaneously—and considering the long term as well as the short term, there isn't any viable alternative to committed monogamy. And wish that there were is fantasy, in my estimation, and generally counterproductive and generally very destructive.

So now, you know, people differ, and highly open people who are low in conscientiousness, let's say, by temperament, perhaps low in agreeableness—this is all speculation—might find the possibility of open relationships over some period of time.

I'm skeptical. I've never seen it work—not without a lot of lies and deception of one form or another—not without a lot of begrudging acquiescence on the part of at least one party in the negotiation. You know, sometimes people will agree to something that they don't agree to because they feel it's the only way of hanging on to something they truly value.

So one partner might say, well, shall we open up this relationship to further exploration? And the other agree merely out of fear of losing what they have. That doesn't mean that there's been a negotiated settlement.

So I think there are no requisites for opening a relationship to other sexual partners.

A set of questions again—I have been reading through Carl Jung's work, and more specifically his work on integrating the shadow. What is the best way of integrating the shadow in a person's life without sacrificing their ethics or the well-being of others?

I am way too agreeable. What steps can I take to integrate my shadow and stop being a doormat? All my life I've had so much anger, but I don't know toward what or how to get rid of it. I've been through a few different types of therapy, and it's a bit better, but still takes me over from time to time. What advice do you have for me?

I don't think that there's a better pathway to the shadow, let's say, than resentment. If you're feeling resentful about something, there's a shadow that reveals itself in two ways. One is it's a pointer to your immaturity. You need to be more disciplined. You have set goals hypothetically, and if you haven't, then you're under the sway of someone else or you're undisciplined and unintegrated and incoherent, which is all shadow life in some sense.

You're pursuing short-term impulsive goals because you haven't thought it through. You're pursuing goals that other people have established for you. You're not pursuing any goals at all because you're too nihilistic to believe that life has any purpose. All that's shadowy, let's say.

But maybe you have set goals, and now you're resentful about all the work that you have to do in order to acquire those goals. And maybe that manifests itself as a broad-scale critique of social structure. It's—that's a maturity, and so you can delve into that, and you can find out where you're still a spoiled child and hopefully take action to rectify that.

Or you may find that you're being compelled to do something that violates your integrity, and you need to stand up for yourself and say something that you don't want to say. And then you may have to learn how to incorporate your anger into your actions so that you learn how to say no when you need to say no.

And so that actually means that you're furthering your ethical pursuit as a consequence of integrating your shadow rather than deviating from it. Aggression, which can be repressed; sexuality, lust, let's say, which can be repressed; those things are extremely useful servants when they're integrated into the whole.

If you're without aggression and anger and incapable of it, that doesn't mean that you're on a good path and that anger knocks you off it. That can happen. But it's much more appropriate and sophisticated to note that the probability that you're going to pursue a higher good is magnified by your integration of all your emotional and motivational states—even the ones that can cause a tremendous amount of trouble when they're left to manifest themselves in isolation.

You're way too agreeable. Well, I would say you could practice saying what you really believe. You can take a vow to tell the truth, and that will make you much less agreeable. Agreeable people are perfectly willing to sacrifice what they know to be the case to maintain short-term social harmony.

And it's not so much that they repress what they think; it's often that they don't even allow themselves to fully realize what they think. So a commitment to the truth can make an agreeable person will stop an agreeable person from being a doormat.

I mean, if you're in a relationship and the person is irritating you with something they've done, you might be highly motivated not to say anything about it because you want to keep the peace. You don't want to upset them; you don't want the conflict. That's all characteristic of high agreeableness.

But once you decide to tell the truth, then if you're annoyed, you don't get to hide it. You don't get to assume you're right. You don't get to grab the person by the shirt collar and say, "Look, I'm annoyed and you're wrong."

You get to say, "I'm irritated about this situation and I need to think through that irritation to find out if I have a problem or if you have a problem." But there's—or if we both have a problem, or if it's a different problem altogether—but you can't hide the fact that the problem has made itself manifest.

And so if you're agreeable and you tell the truth about your emotional state, that will propel you out of that agreeableness by necessity.

So with regards to anger, I don't know toward what or how to get rid of it. Well, something a cognitive behavioral therapist might recommend is for a week—and maybe this is already a therapy you've been through, but this exercise is generally quite useful—first, you have to note when you're angry and admit to that. And maybe you have to practice that, so you have to decide, "I'm going to pay attention. I'm going to see when I'm angry and I'm going to admit to it," at least to begin with without judgment, I'm just going to observe it, I'm going to allow myself to observe it.

Then you have to allow yourself to see what angry thoughts you have, and you can ask yourself: What angry thoughts do I frequently have? They'll likely come to mind, maybe many of them you can jot all those down. Those are ones you're familiar with.

And then you can notice when you're angry, and you can ask yourself, "Well, what am I thinking right at this moment? What angry thoughts am I thinking?" Some of them might be quite shocking. You might also manifest themselves in destructive fantasies.

You know, maybe you have a fantasy of grabbing somebody by the shirt collar and pushing them up against a wall, or dumping hot coffee on your boss, or some impulse towards aggression that might manifest itself as a flashing fantasy and perhaps one that you're shocked by and don't want to admit—you don't want to admit to the existence of it, but you need to see what's happening first in your own imagination if you're going to cope with it.

And you also—it's also possible that a fair bit of the anger that you have is actually useful if you could just find out what it is and what it's directed toward. So the first attack is to explore the anger. What gives rise to it? What situations give rise to it? What people give rise to it? What are you doing when it happens, and what is the phenomenology of the anger?

How does it make itself manifest in image, fantasy, and thought? And then, now you have an anger inventory. Is anger in this situation warranted? What steps do I have to take in order to become less angry? And sometimes that might be an adjustment of internal—as an internal psychological adjustment.

Sometimes it might require changes in the world. Maybe you're in a relationship that's oppressive, and you have been for a long time, and the way to fix that isn't to adjust your attitude, although it could be, but it might be that it's time to get out of the relationship.

And so differentiation: when are you angry? What elicits it? Why are you angry? Who are you angry at? What are the nature of the angry thoughts? What are the nature of the angry fantasies? All of that, you have to get that out where you can see it, and you have to walk through it.

And you can do that by yourself; you can do that while writing. You can produce counter thoughts, so if you're angry about something, you could outline the reasons why anger is not productive, or you could outline the reasons why it's productive and the reasons it's not productive for a full exploration of the issue.

So then I would ask you too, if you're angry all the time, is well, are you depressed? Have you been evaluated clinically? If this is a major problem, is it a manifestation of depression? Because anger is an underdiagnosed symptom of depression.

Do you have well-thought-through goals and plans and strategies? All of that—that's a more comprehensive evaluation of your entire life. And maybe you have something to say or do that you're not saying or doing. It's highly probable most of us have that problem.

Do you have sympathy for the left politically, particularly the Marxist or group identity focus types? I feel like the left has a point, and a lot of leftists—many leftists have their heart in the right place, even though they may be misguided in some aspects of their thinking.

Well, I have plenty of sympathy for the left. The left speaks, when it's speaking appropriately, for the dispossessed, and there's an unequal distribution of talents and resources in the world.

That doesn't mean that that's all a consequence of inadequate social organization, but it's nonetheless a painful fact, and people who are relatively powerless, let's say, or who are relatively deprived, need their voice as well. And the left can do that.

The leftists that I've met who I've admired were people who genuinely had the interests of the working class uppermost in their minds, and they were usually trying to facilitate the ability of working-class people to move forward in the world and to negotiate as well, rather than focusing their attention on punishing the hypothetical oppressors.

So yes, I have sympathy for the left. I also understand the temperamental advantages of people on the left, who tend to be higher in creativity and lower in orderliness. They're more entrepreneurial in their essential orientation to the world. They're more favorable to the free flow of information at the cost of the borders that divide things, and that's a valid point because the free flow of information has utility, even though borders and boundaries also have utility.

And so hence the utility of the right. It isn't the left per se that I've ever objected to; it's radical, bitter utopians who place evil somewhere that's convenient for them morally and then have a target for their unexamined malevolence. The same thing happens on the right.

So of course the left has a point. You discuss almost any thinker's flaws in their thinking except for Jung's. What were his?

Well, I think Jung over-generalized his experiences, his clinical experiences. He conceptualized the hero's journey as something that was fundamentally creative and interior, and I think that that's probably true only for people who are really high in trait openness who are creative.

And I suspect that Jung attracted a tremendously disproportionate number of creative people to his practice given the nature of his personality and his interests. I found in my own practice that when I had creative people, they were very inclined towards the discussion of literary themes.

They framed their life in literary terms. They were prolific dreamers, very interested in dream analysis. They enjoyed a literary approach to life. My more conservative clients, often equally high-performing—although I had a practice that spanned the entire range of human ability—they weren't interested or captivated by that at all.

And for them, the primary adventure of life wasn't internal or literary; it was external and practical. And the more agreeable types—their life was primarily social rather than symbolic or creative.

They found most of the meaning in their life as a consequence of the intimate relationships that they were able to establish. It wasn't infrequent—and this was more true of women than of men, and they are higher in agreeableness on average—I had conscientious clients who would frame their life in terms of their accomplishments, their career accomplishments. That's how they parsed their life up temporarily.

First, I was in school, and then I went to university, and I studied this, and then it was all extra. It was all achievement-oriented, whereas the more agreeable types would say, well, you know, when I was 12 years old to 14 I had this relationship, and then I moved to this relationship—usually the intimate relationship, so sometimes familial—framed their life that way.

Jung was an introverted and highly open person, and so that skewed his view in a particular way. And then, because he was psychoanalytic, he also tended to view the psyche as sane as a consequence of its internal organization and even its internal ethic, and placed much less stress on the role of social interactions and society as a whole in producing sanity.

You know, a sane person is not only organized internally, but they're integrated with their society, and the internal organization actually reflects the social organization—they mirror one another.

And although Jung, being a very sophisticated person, of course, knew that social adaptation was necessary, it was more his colleague Alfred Adler who was more politically on the left, by the way, as well, who concentrated more on the interpersonal aspects of life and the role of socialization in the maintenance—and in the maintenance of social and intimate relationships, say—in relationship to sanity.

That's not stressed much in Jung. If you immerse yourself in the Jungian world, you'd end up convinced that we were all creative religious mystics, and that was our essential destiny if we were going to realize the highest reaches of our being. And there's some truth in that, but there's also truth in the proposition that you can find your pathway as an agreeable person in your relationships or as a conscientious person in your duty.

You know, a Jungian might argue that all that still has to be nested in something transcendent at the outer reaches of personality. And I suppose that's possible, but that's what I would say with regards to the limitations of Jung's thinking.

It's also the case that although he identified at least one of the major personality traits—extroversion—although the modern version of it is somewhat distant from his original conceptualization, he didn't notice that one of the major personality traits was neuroticism, the tendency to feel negative emotion.

He never formalized that idea in his thinking, and it's a great oversight in some sense because the capacity to experience negative emotion, when that's exaggerated, that seems to be the core feature of everything that we regard as psychopathology—psychiatric and psychological illness. It's not the only thing, but it's the primary factor.

So, what is the best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and thinking? Well, a large part of that I would say is habit—the development and maintenance of good practices, habits.

If you find yourself dissolute, neurotic, if your thoughts tend in the nihilistic direction and you tend to fall apart, organizing your life across multiple dimensions is a good antidote. It's not exactly thinking.

Do you have an intimate relationship? If not, well, probably you could use one. Do you have contact with close family members, siblings, or children, or parents—or people who are even more distantly related? If not, you probably need that.

Do you see your friends a couple of times a week and do something social with them? Do you have a way of productively using your time outside of employment? Are you employed? Do you have a good job, or at least a job that is practically sufficient and that enables you to work with people who you like working with, even if the job itself is mundane or repetitive or difficult?

Sometimes the relationships that you establish within an employment situation like that can make the job worthwhile.

Have you regulated your response to temptations: pornography, alcohol abuse, drug abuse? Is that under control? I would say differentiate the problem—there's multiple dimensions of attainment, ambition, pleasure, responsibility—all of that that make up a life.

And to the degree that it's possible, you want to optimize your functioning on as many of those dimensions as possible. You might also organize your schedule to the degree that you have that capacity for discipline.

Do you get enough sleep? Do you go to bed at a regular time? Do you get up at a regular time? Do you eat regularly and appropriately and enough and not too much? Are your days and your weeks and your months characterized by some tolerable repeatable structure that helps you meet your responsibilities but also shields you from uncertainty and chaos and provides you with multiple sources of reward?

Those are all the questions that I would decompose the problem into: the best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and thinking.

How can you tell if the person you're in a romantic relationship with is the right person to spend the rest of your life with? Ah, you can't. You actually decide that rather than discovering it.

I might say what I might suggest what you might look for on the way to making that decision—all things considered, a certain amount of similarity on the personality dimensions between the two of you is probably to be recommended.

If you differ tremendously in trait conscientiousness, one of you is going to find the other unbearably rigid, orderly, and workaholic-oriented, and that person is going to find you dissolute and undisciplined. And those are temperamental differences, and if the gap is large, it's hard to bridge it.

Agreeableness, it's the same thing. The warmer person will find the colder, harsher person cruel, and the cruel and unkind person will find the more agreeable person soft, a pushover, and contemptibly unable to stand up for themselves.

And the extrovert will want to be out partying all the time, and the introvert will have had his or her fill of that very rapidly. So you want some temperamental similarity across the major personality dimensions, with the possible exception of trait neuroticism, which is the generalized proclivity to experience negative emotion.

I would suggest that a person high in neuroticism seek out someone low or very low because, first of all, neuroticism is one of the best predictors of unhappiness in a relationship.

And so if you're both high in neuroticism, you're very likely to be unhappy in the relationship. And it's highly probable that the person who's higher in neuroticism needs the stabilizing influence of someone who's lower.

So then I would say, well, this is based on my clinical observations as well as my experiences of my life. I think it's necessary, or at least highly desirable, that you find the person that you're with sexually attractive.

And that's somewhat ineffable. You can be confronted with two people who are by objective standards equally attractive and perhaps equally unattractive and find yourself very physically attracted to one of them while the other one will leave you cold.

And that's a deep mystery. And I've seen couples try who get along as friends try to bridge that romantic gap by will, and I haven't really seen it be successful.

So I think you need that spark that ignites sexual passion. Then you have to ask yourself if you can trust the person, if you can—if there are activities that you can share with them that would make up a life.

If you're oriented in approximately the same direction with regard to your goals, especially important goals, career and children being foremost among them. If you think you could come to some agreement about how the economic resources could be distributed or at least how that might be negotiated.

If you can negotiate with the other person, and again, if you can trust them—and I would say, of all those, trust is the most crucial component, maybe followed by the ability to negotiate. The right person is someone you can negotiate with because there's going to be differences between you and them; there's going to be differences in your approach.

There should be, hopefully; they'll be because that means that the two of you are bringing different skill sets to bear on the problem. That means that you have a more diverse range of potential responses, which can be good, but also that there's going to be conflict.

The issue then becomes, can you negotiate through the conflicts, and will the other person stick to their negotiated solution? And then if you find someone like that and they're of approximately the right age and everything else seems to be in order, then in some sense they're as good a bet as the next person.

And life doesn't last forever, and so there are real reasons to get on with it. So you have to understand that even in the best relationships, the best relationships are predicated on attraction, trust, and negotiation.

And it's constant. You're constantly negotiating to maintain the relationship, to expand it, and you don't find the right person and live happily ever after. That life is far too complicated for that.

Does the intellectual dark web exist? Did it exist? Does it exist now? Do you believe there is something that has or needs to emerge to replace it? And with you back to your normal self, such as that is, what do you think the IDW members should be doing now?

Well, I think the IDW was more—did it exist? Well, I get parodied for saying this all the time, but it depends on what you mean by "exists." No, in that the people who were nominally part of that group had never come together and said, "We're part of a group."

Yes, in that there was a web of interconnected social communications that were made public among an identifiable subset of people who were active on YouTube six years ago, five years ago. So it existed as a pattern of communication or as a social network—an implicit social network.

And then it was given the name by Eric Weinstein and popularized by Barry Weiss, the New York Times columnist. At that point, it existed as a social network that was named, so it was observed and then named and then popularized.

And then of course what happened among us who were deemed part of that was that, well, we were flattered, I would say. Pleased at being recognized, pleased I would say as well to be part of that group, which was very intellectually diverse on the religious front and on the political front, although I suppose to some degree it tilted in the conservative direction.

But even that wasn't that clear. Certainly, Sam Harris and Joe Rogan weren't clear conservatives. I don't think I'm a particularly obvious conservative, all things considered, either.

But be that as it may, why did the idea catch on? Well, I think a lot of it had to do with the specifics of revolution in communications at that point. This group of us who were in contact with one another were in contact primarily through YouTube.

And so we were all early adopters of this space that computer-mediated video communication opened up for philosophical/political/intellectual or pseudo-intellectual debate, depending on your stance. Discourse—we were early venturers into that domain, and there weren't that many of us to begin with, especially that many in cross-communication.

And so the IDW name stuck in some sense because it did give a terminology to an emergent phenomenon that was new and different. It was the development of the alternative media that has now become widespread that was oriented around long-form conversation, which is a revolutionary concept, especially as well as revolutionary technology that you could engage in free-form communication around a set of questions or about a specific topic and broadcast that publicly without any real editing, without any real a priori restructuring.

I still think that's completely revolutionary. So I think it—the IDW did exist. And then once we were named that, increased the probability that we would mutually communicate, although to some degree that's fallen apart over the intervening years, partly because of political differences between members of the group, but also partly because it was a very loose group to begin with and each of us had our independent existences that weren't predicated on anything like a centralized administration or bureaucracy.

So I still communicate with many of the people who were nominally part of that group and I would say feel a certain amount of affection and certainly respect for all of them, regardless of how their opinions might have differed from mine.

I mean, I had a sequence of conversations that I felt were highly productive from the purely personal perspective with Sam Harris and it was never obvious to me that I was completely right and he was completely wrong. These were very complicated issues we were trying to hash our way through, and it was certainly worthwhile to have made the effort and to have done it publicly and other people seem to also found that useful.

What should the IDW be doing now? Well, they should continue doing what they did well, and many of them are. Brett Weinstein has a very good podcast, and Ben Shapiro's media empire keeps growing as he incorporates cancelled people in.

I'm still producing podcasts and writing, and I'm hoping that all of us—what we should do is what we and Joe Rogan, of course, is extraordinarily successful and doing what he's doing, and many and many other people are doing the same thing now.

So what is it that we're doing, and what should we be doing? Well, we should be trying to have interesting conversations—the interesting conversations that this new technology make possible and to disseminate them as widely as possible.

We should also be—to the degree that the IDW was a cultural, a countercultural movement in some sense—what we all should be doing, and I think are doing, is exploring the narrative space, the narrative space of politics and philosophy and spirituality to some degree.

We're trying to tell different and hopefully better stories and to help other people enact those stories, understand those stories, and enact them to the degree that they find useful.

And so what should we be doing? Well, we should be trying to make things better and telling the truth while we're doing so. And I do think that that was, in the main, something that characterized all the members of the IDW, is that they were committed to the truth in their speech and in and in their mode of being, in their exploration, and I think that was recognized by their audience members and appreciated.

I don't think that stopped as well, so there was an IDW and there still is to some degree, but it's expanded greatly. There's so many people now doing long-form YouTube interviews and podcasts that space has exploded, and that's really good, as far as I'm concerned.

That's associated with another question: How significant a role do you think social media has played in the disintegration of political discourse, in terms of how it enables people to form echo chambers and also for the social media platforms such as Twitter engaging in censorship favoring their vested interests?

Well, social media, I think, has played a bigger role in broadening the political discourse and bringing it to a much broader—a wider audience and changing the way that political discussion takes place.

And YouTube in particular and podcasts, and I think that's all to the good. Political discussion no longer comes in the form of discourse generated from on high; it's become democratized, and I think that's better.

It looks to me like it's better. I think the new media forms allow for more, for deeper and more precise truths. There's no bandwidth limitation; you can expand on ideas indefinitely.

You can allow the conversation to go where it will. You're rewarded for honest, engaging conversation. There's no administrative or bureaucratic intermediation. I think that's all good.

It does face us with the problem of what to do with an overwhelming plethora of ideas, but there are worse problems than that. I don't think there's any evidence that social media has actually produced increased tendency for people to exist in silos.

I know that's a popular conceit, but the research that I've looked at suggests that it's not really the case that people are not more—they're not in a mirror chamber now as a consequence of social media any more than they were when those forms of discourse didn't exist.

In terms of Twitter, etc., censoring—well, that's obviously a problem. So far it hasn't become a fatal problem, and I think that the—I’m hoping that the forces of innovation and diversity in terms of technological development will always stay one jump ahead of the more censorious types.

It's certainly the case that the IDW, such as it is, has not been censored to the point of that threat, although that has happened in some instances, and I'm not trying to make light of that. I know it's an important problem, but I don't see that it's a dire—that the state is dire—or more that I don't see that it's irreversible.

I think that this opportunity for free dialogue that the long-form platforms like YouTube and podcasts allows is a very powerful counter force to whatever censorial tendencies might exist.

Can I see a way forward from this that is positive? Sure, I hope that people—and I'm trying to outline that— I hope that people take responsibility at the individual level, that they do what they can to orient themselves so that they're working for the betterment of things consciously.

And note their counter tendencies, like I understand that because life is so difficult, it's easy to become bitter and cynical and to work to make things better, and to find yourself facing something within that's compelling you to do precisely that.

It's part of the eternal battle between good and evil that goes on in the human soul. It's not trivial, but you can attempt consciously to orient yourself to the good and to tell the truth and use social media to facilitate that, and insofar as we're all doing that, things are going to be better rather than worse.

I mean, I see quite frequently on the comment section on my YouTube channel when there's a particularly positive discussion. I had one with The Cure, The Dawn, recently that was marked for this, and also with Chris Williamson, and most of the others with Russell Brand—this happens to after virtually all the conversations I have with people, by the way.

But those three particularly—the comments, and there's thousands and thousands of them, are all incredibly positive. Even in when a comment is generating replies, not only are the comments positive, but the replies to the comments are, in the main, overwhelmingly positive.

And so my observation has been that if you engage people in a meaningful and truthful manner about something interesting and important and you explore that and you bring them along for the ride and you do that with respect and you do that as part of the audience as well as, you know, the voice from on high, then that's a very positive experience for everyone who's involved—the discussants as well as the audience members.

And that all pushes strongly against malevolence and deceit and bitterness and cynicism and corruption and political polarization and all of that.

So that's the way forward. It's like love and truth—that's the way forward—meaning the pursuit of meaning—that's the way forward. And there isn't anything more powerful than that.

Perhaps you could throw beauty into the mix, although it's not so obvious how that's related to, you know, a YouTube discussion specifically. I suppose there's elegance of speech and cadence and rhythm and poetic discourse, and that's all beauty.

So yes, there's definitely a way forward. Be a good person—that's the way forward. Be the best person you can—that's the way forward. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that.

Thank you very much, and that's enough for today.