Archetype, Reality, Friendship and Literature: Peterson/Hurwitz

All right, so I'm sitting here with Dr. Jordan Peterson. We were gonna talk about the weird overlap between our books. There's a sort of metafiction aspect of it because Jordan had written the rules for I Was a Korra entry. Yeah, it’s 32 rules in Korra, that's right. 42 rules got pared down, so there's gonna be like 19 sequels, right? That's right, rolling him out.

And I thought they were amazing. So I was writing Orphan X, I was writing the first book in the series, and in Orphan X, my main character is an assassin, and he has these sort of 10 commandments that are the operational rules for an assassin. I wanted something to offset that for a kid who's in his life, who lives downstairs from him, who's being raised as a good human instead of as an assassin. I wanted to set rules that would kind of counterbalance that.

At the time, I was reading Jordan's rules that he listed, and so I sort of used those as a counterbalance, as sort of positive masculinity— to use this horrible phrase, that well-trodden term— but to actually show how somebody might be raised properly instead of as an international assassin. And at the time, you know, you were a mere professor at U of Toronto. I thought, what could possibly be controversial about this?

Yeah, right. And so that's how it sort of started.

Yeah, well, it was fun to see. You know, when you create something like those rules— I wrote them for Korra, and I had written like 50 Korra answers, and some of them got disproportionately popular, which is exactly what you'd expect because some things get disproportionately popular. That Korra rules attracted a lot of attention by Korra's standards or by the standards of what I was reading on Korra. Then you picked them up, and I thought it’s one of the things that’s very interesting about doing something creatively is that you sort of launch it like you launch a note in a bottle on the ocean, and you have no idea where it’s going to end up.

So that was the first interesting manifestation of those rules outside of the Korra container, so to speak. And then, of course, part of our discussion about the rules also led to their encapsulation in "12 Rules for Life," and that was much later. It's been interesting to see how that overlap has developed as well.

Well, it's also weird to see what connects. Like, it's so funny with Orphan X, when I was first adapting. The big thing with that is that my character kind of interacts— he's an archetypal character like a Jack Reacher, Jason Bourne— but lives in the real world with you and me. You know, so it’s like you never see James Bond go home, you know? Just what an archetypal character should do, right? It should exist in abstraction and also be embedded in the real world.

Yeah, but usually, you have like the High Plains Drifter who's like off feeding his horse and like moving on to the next town. Yes, I thought it'd be so fun to have them, like, interacting with the annoying Jewish woman who lives upstairs and having an awkward confrontation with the woman who lives downstairs, who his chemistry with.

So it’s an archetypal character wrestled into the real world. That's what the Spider-Man people did really well, the Marvel with Daniel and Spider-Man. They said extraordinarily well, where he has to like re-stitch his costume. You had no one thought about that, you know? And he's like late for school and all those problems.

Exactly. Exactly. So that was sort of the motif.

Well, that is also the problem of— it's a more complex psychological problem of integrating the archetypal with the real world. Because there's an element of everyone's psyche that's transpersonal, that’s archetypal, right? Because to some degree, you should manifest the mythological hero in your life.

But the critical issue there is in your life, right? Because your life is like your life is like the bottle, or the lamp that the genie is in. It's like the genie is God for all intents and purposes, but it's in this little tiny container. It's like, well, that's what you're like— you have this archetypal element to your personality, which is your capacity for heroic endeavor, but it's all constrained by the hypothetical or the trivialities of your life, and you have to mediate between those.

Well, and that's the weird thing, like you were saying. One of the things when you write is you don't always know what's gonna connect, right? You never knew that those rules would become, you know, number one best-selling book everywhere in the world.

What was so interesting is there’s this one scene at the opening of Orphan X, where he's in the elevator, and he's got a cut on his arm. We don't know what it's from, and he has to fake to kind of pass as a real person among all the people, and he's kind of covering it up. But he's got suppressors, and he used the sock as a tourniquet, so he's missing a sock, and he's kind of trying to pass his secret identity among other people.

That seemed connected unbelievably with readers. It would be like the last scene that I would have thought. And when I did the book initially for Bradley Cooper as a feature, and I remember I was like, well, if I have Bradley Cooper, let me open with some big action, show off your thing. Both his production company and the head of the studio were like, we need the elevator scene.

That elevator scene became the iconic thing, of course, because it does what you’re talking about. There should be some music playing in the back. Like, there's something— yeah, if you get caught between the beard in New York City.

Right, right. But it's weird, 'cause I never would have thought that would be the thing.

Mm-hmm. So the stuff that you send out, I have any idea why that was so attractive to people?

Well, I think it's exactly the thing that we were talking about. It's like you don't see James Bond in that circumstance. It's so— it's like this archetypal guy has a mission, has a knife cut that he tourniquets his arm with, and then he's in the elevator that you and I have been in, and everyone's nagging him that he's, you know, missed the HOA meeting, the homeowners association meeting, where they're voting on like the new carpeting in the lobby.

And he's just trying to get out of it, and he's covering. So there’s this wish fulfillment fantasy aspect to it, but it’s almost like our own lives. Like, everyone knows what it's like to be dealing with annoyances and logistics, but then he gets to go back to his life as like a super-secret assassin who helps the helpless.

Well, there's another element of it too, I would say, which is that that scene and that context also suggests that one of the ways that you— one of the things that you have to do in order to put up with those mundane daily elements of life is also to have your adventure along with you.

Yeah, yeah. So, and I mean, one of the things that I've been talking to my audience about continually is that you need to have meaning in your life that's of sufficient grandeur, let's say, or sufficient power, so that the petty sufferings of life now become not only justifiable but acceptable in the broader context.

And sufficient risk, and sufficient risk, because all that— and that’s what puts the adventure into it, right? It's like in the elevator scene. It's not only that everyone can relate to the mundane; it’s also that everyone can see that what transcends the mundane is also fundamentally necessary, because otherwise you are nothing but a collection of trivialities.

And life has so much suffering that if you're just a collection of trivialities, you're not gonna be able to bear it. So you need your heroic adventure, which is what’s animating you. Literally, anima is the soul, right? That's what Adam in means— so that’s literally animating you while you have to put up with being trapped in this little tiny conveyor.

Right. I thought about this a lot when I was writing Batman. I wrote Batman for tutors for DC, and I was fascinated by this sort of seesaw tilt between perfection and intimacy, which is so Batman. You know, he doesn’t have a magic ring; he can’t fly. He just represents the pinnacle of human discipline and achievement.

It's ‘cause his parents died when he was young, right? He's alone in Wayne Manor. There’s Robin— Robin always dies. He’s a playboy; he doesn’t have anyone intimate.

And if there’s no one in your life, you can maintain perfection. But the more you inch into intimacy— a dog, a spouse, a partner, children— the more that you get this sort of conflict and complication that starts to take over and detract from that version of perfection.

So it’s like you can be perfect without intimacy, but then you’re not perfect because you have no intimacy. So the more that you integrate it, it’s almost like the more that you’re accepting the realities of life.

But also, I think it’s also one of the things, it’s interesting in the Batman reference because one of the things you see in the Batman-Joker dynamic, especially the one with Heath Ledger, was the Joker was always pushing at Batman because of the evil of his perfections.

Like, you're this far away from me, and that perfectionistic drive— there’s something totalitarian and single-minded about it, right? And then it’s the encapsulation of that in intimacy that humanizes it and perhaps it’s sane, right?

And so, that uni-dimensional perfection can go very, very badly when it goes uncontextually constrained. Like, that is actually like a definition of sanity. It’s something that Jung talked about when he was commenting on Nietzsche.

And people like Nietzsche said he believed that Nietzsche would have been able to maintain his sanity for much longer, assuming no physiological degeneration, had he been able to incorporate himself within a profession and a family who nailed him to the earth right in a healthy way.

Exactly right.

So I thought we’d just talk briefly about the editing process for "12 Rules." It was a lot of fun because I got to read it all early, which was— yeah, this was fun.

So I had it featured in the Orphan X books like two years before it came out, right? Which is why I always like to remind you that I’m mostly responsible for yours.

Yes, well, I do appreciate that. Well, I sent all the chapters to Greg. I had an editor at Penguin, Craig Pyatt, who was very, very helpful. So I had two editors, really, and other people commenting on it. But I sent each chapter to Greg, and he would just shred them. He’s really, really good at that, and well, very comical.

And so he’d just be absolutely brutal with his criticisms, but it was also always extremely funny. It was a fast—

Yeah, well, and then I was also absolutely staggered by how rapidly you could do that, to point to what was working and to tell me what wasn’t working. That was exceptionally helpful, and you’re very, very skilled at that.

So there’s the compliment you’re gonna get from me now. It was very—

Others— look, now the insult first! You leave me— you soften me up with a compliment, and now—

But I think what was helpful is, so I mean, I took three courses from you as an undergraduate, so it’s like we’ve been swimming in the same waters for a long time. So it was really interesting for me to see, you know, through the process. You know, I have a sense that goes kind of all the way down of the ideas room— going back to before Maps of Meaning, going back to the sourcebook articles and stuff you lectured on. So it was really fun to see them take hold and move from the abstract into the ever more accessible and specific.

Yeah, well it was useful too because you've developed this intense skill in producing commercial, widely publicly accessible fiction. And you have a sense of what works in terms of narrative flow, and that was very useful to have that perspective on the way the stories were laid out in each of the rules, to make them— to give them that narrative punch, which is necessary to add an additional dimension of— what would you say— quality to the writing.

I'm glad, but it’s good working with you. Like your learning curve was like this. So it's like the first one that we went through— you know, if there was something— the speed with which you can sort of implement and assemble nuance and reflect that in writing is unbelievable.

Yeah, well that’s fun. There’s a benefit of being sort of experienced in multiple dominant arcs, I think, because there’s so many things that you’ve done at such a high level that when you add a new one, the learning curve is like this.

So it’s also really fun 'cause it’s like, you know— if— well, we’ll have a chance to do it again.

Yeah, all right. I would expect when I write the next book or maybe an extension of "12 Rules for Life," I presume so.

It’s fun bumping into you here ‘cause we just bumped into each other at this studio today.

Yeah, actually halfway around the world in one studio part.

But so that’s great. So you work on the next one, and I'll work on the next Orphan X and go from there.

All right, good to see you, man.