The Development of the Individual Requires Sacrifice | Russell Brand & Mikhaila & Jordan Peterson

There's some real utility in shouldering the sort of responsibility that stops you from wasting time. And you asked about negative elements of having children. Yeah, I feel, I think in some ways similar to Russell, at least with regards to what he said so far. There was virtually nothing about it that was negative as far as I was concerned.

I suppose I was somewhat... it was difficult to sort out how the attention was going to be split in the household. I missed your mother when she was so occupied with the infants. But having children more than made up for that. And you know, kids get a bad rap, and people think of them as an impediment to freedom. It's such a foolish way of thinking because it's so remarkable to have children.

You can have the best relationship you have; the opportunity of having the best relationship with anyone you've ever had in your life when you have children. And then also, someone is finally more important than you. You know, I mean hopefully when you get married or you fall in love with someone, they're as important as you or perhaps even more so. But when you have children, it's definitively the case that now someone is more important than you, and that's such a relief.

It is a crucial part of maturation to have that happen. And I don’t believe that people... I’ll get pilloried for this, or maybe you will because it's your podcast. I can take the blame; I can handle it. I don’t think it's possible to grow up without having children. Oh, it's unlikely.

He's still got it. What's that? I said he's still got it! He can still drop a bomb mop that's going to stir people up. Yeah, well, it’s hard to grow up until someone's more important than you. So why wouldn't you continue being sybaritic and living, at least to some degree, for pleasure?

So it's true, but children are amazing. So everyone out there who's thinking about having children, you should do it because they add to your life. And then when you're older, like me... I'm almost 60 now. I have grandchildren now, and I can't imagine how empty my life might be without that. And more of that on the way.

So yeah, I know some rather brilliant people, as I'm sure you both do, that have foregone or decided against or are unable to have children. I suppose the values that brought to the surface in parenthood—perhaps duty, devotion—and perhaps if there is a sort of some transcendent component to your life, and I don't mean that in necessarily in a spiritual way, but it's difficult to avoid the connotations of that word.

Then perhaps maturation is possible if you take, for example, like a straightforward mendicant's life: monasticism, celibacy, devotion in a very explicit way to God. Then would you say that they are unable to reach maturity? Or what if it was a secular version, like devotion to the arts or to a political cause? Do you not think that that could... well of course.

I know that reminds me of something I wanted to talk to you about. I read your book "Mentors," which is this book right here. And one of the things that it made me think about was I’ve thought for a long while that one of the processes that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood is apprenticeship. And so one of the things Nietzsche said about the Catholic Church was that the European mind—this is speaking in Nietzsche's voice—the European mind disciplined itself by adhering to a single interpretive strategy for centuries to explain everything under the conditions.

To explain everything using the axioms of a single intellectual system. And that disciplined the European mind and enabled it then to go off and use other disciplinary strategies to discover other ways of dealing with the world; maybe to develop science, for example. And Nietzsche was very convinced that you had to enslave yourself in one manner or another before you could be free, and that's an apprenticeship motif.

To me, that's what you explored in your book "Mentors." You present yourself, I believe, as someone who was striving in various ways to mature and that you identified people who came into your life as targets for emulation that could impose a discipline on you and help you mature. You would hunger for that like people do. Yes, I do think that if you don't have children, there are other disciplinary strategies that you can use to further your maturation.

But it isn't obvious to me that any of them are as profound as having children. And I mean, I've had a good career, and I've been very interested in intellectual pursuits as well, and I suppose have disciplined myself in some manner because of that. But I still stand by my statement about children. They're in a different category of profundity.

It's partly because you have to take on so much responsibility when you have children. Is it the sacrifice too? I mean, if you think about people who work in churches or what Russell is saying about people who devote themselves to God, and it's kind of what they do is sacrificial. And I suppose part of what you do when you have kids is sacrifice that hedonistic part if you're going to be a good parent.

So is part of what helps you mature the sacrifice associated with having children or is it something else? I don't know if that's part of what helps you mature or if that's a definition of maturation, is that it's a sacrificial act. But you know, people often think of sacrifice in terms of loss.

But the reason you sacrifice fundamentally is to gain something higher. That's the sacrificial motif: you give up something that's attractive in the present. But the purpose of the sacrifices is to organize things more effectively at a higher level of being. So and that is maturation; that's the forestalling of immediate pleasure for medium to long-term well-being, and maybe for more than you as well.

Okay, um, I have a question even though I know it's not my podcast. When you transduce a metaphysical idea, like sacrifice—not as an evocation of a greater power further down the line—and you transduce it into materialist and rationalist terms, perhaps to make it more relevant to a cultural group that don't think in that way anymore, do you think that we risk missing part and the essential part of the mystery— that much of the devotional life by its nature doesn't have a direct translation in secularism?

I.e., of course, yes! You know, I've heard you say before, Jordan, that it's as if there were a father, that's a stern father, that's going to guide you and discipline you and chide you into being a stronger man or woman. But like, I feel too that there is something that through sacrifice we are also acknowledging that on this plane of being all our needs cannot be met.

In fact, really all we can do is generate need and by sort of sacrificing food or sacrificing something important, we reaffirm our connection to the sublime. Okay, well, I think that whenever you bring a transcendent concept in some sense down to earth, you risk inappropriately constraining it if you assume that your act of bringing it down to earth has explained it fully.

So I don't believe that my explanation of sacrifice explains it fully, and so I think you can retain that... you can retain enough; you can retain the advantages of ineffability, for example. If I assess a piece of literature or film and make its metaphysical presumptions more explicit, I don't believe that that necessarily takes away from the film.

It can, because it can be reductionistic, but it can add an additional... by furthering understanding, it can add an additional layer of utility to the experience. I've tried to do that with the biblical lectures I’ve done, for example. I’m not trying to explain everything away, although I do think that generally speaking you should use the simplest explanation that's at hand. So it’s a risk, but hopefully it can be a risk that is fundamentally productive.

Yeah, I reckon I said, I suppose that mentorship and education is dependent on crossing this space between the ineffable and the at least palpable or the apprehendable. Justice is that if the ineffable stays entirely ineffable, then you can't put it to use. And I think you're absolutely right that the mentorship does that because... and there's a profound religious instinct there, and I think it was really operating in you.

You make reference to it a number of times. For example, you have, by your own admission, a strong tendency to romanticize the women in your life. You say you deify them in some sense, or maybe more accurately you perceive them that way to begin with. And then over time, in some sense, the stars fall away from your eyes.

But that's the action of an instinct that would be the anima projection from a Jungian perspective. There's an instinct in you that's pushing you towards development, and the way it manifests itself is by illuminating certain elements of your experience. And those might be... that might occur, for example, when you meet a male figure who you admire, whom you then start to imitate.

It's the deep workings of your unconscious that illuminate that figure and make him stand out against the background. Because you've apprehended that there's something about his pattern of being that addresses a lack in yours. And the same thing can happen in romantic relationships. And that can also not be purely illusory.

In some sense, when you have a romantic relationship with someone, you are chasing the divine in each other. Now both of you may fall short, and the relationship may fall apart. But by seeing the divine in the person that you fall in love with, you also invite them to manifest that. And by opening the door to that, they're actually more likely to manifest it.

It's a very complex and sophisticated instinct. I understand this. I understand this; I have experienced this. I recognize that I have spent a lot of time projecting, through my inability to comprehend my own psychic energies. I've projected onto another resources that were available, perhaps through tutelage within myself.

One of the mentors that I write about in that book, who's been incredibly valuable in my life, when we first met by, you know, synchronicity or chance, gave me a copy of the Robert Johnson's book on gold. In "Gold," which is a sort of an essay on mentorship and having... you know, holding one another's goal.

And I think yes, that how mentorship has functioned in my life has... I’ve gained a great deal of perspective. I've understood that they are kind of psychic synapses holding for me a space, holding meaning. I recognize the fallibility of these people that I adore or aspire to.

But in my psyche, they function as coordinates. I was just talking to a brilliant therapist today in therapy, and he said that you don’t need to overcome your father and mother in the physical world with them. You need to overcome the imprint of them in your psyche. And I said yes; in a sense, they are hollowed out carapaces in reality.

I don’t mean that of any disrespect to my actual mother and father, but like the mother and father that I deal with and live in my psychic landscape, they don’t live in Essex, England, you know? So like I recognize yes, that we can use relationship as an external coordinate to activate dormant psychic energies.

So there's a kind of reductionism in that too in some sense, right? Because by doing that, you reduce the experience of the divine in someone else to activation of an unconscious complex, let’s say. But one of the things you point out in the book—and it’s possible to go deeper than this too—one of the things you point out in the book is that when you allow or ask or invite someone to be your mentor, you also allow them to manifest that element of them that's most mentor-like.

And they can do that independently to some degree of their other flaws. Just like when you're a parent, a father, you can act paternally as a figure of authority, even though you are by no means a perfect figure of authority. The child still needs you to be the best authority figure that you can be despite your flaws, and you will manifest that.

But that’s also not false, because the ideal that we’re all chasing—we don’t know what its ultimate reality is, you know? If you have an instinct towards further development, let’s say, what that means is that there’s something about you that could be greater than it currently is. And we don’t know the limits to what that currently greater could be.

And that's where the idea of mentorship, let’s say, shades into something like religious worship. Because I suppose if you think about the Christian world, the ultimate mentor is Christ. You could say that being a Christian—or you could say that being a psychologist—and if you said it being a psychologist, you would say, well, by definition, the ultimate mentor is Christ.

And what Christianity has been, as it unfolds itself over the last two thousand years, is an attempt to engage all of the people within that belief system in a dialogue about what that ideal actually constitutes. You know when there’s tradition that feeds into that—the biblical stories and the corpus of tradition that goes along with that—but all of it is a collective attempt to specify that ideal.

So that people can use it as a target to further their development. And that's not delusional. That furthering of development is unbelievably useful practically.