Q&A 05-22-2021 | Jordan B. Peterson

Hi everybody, welcome to the second of the new Q and A's. Uh, we started them up again in 2021, and I'm pulling questions off online sources at the moment, ThinkSpot in part, uh, other sources as well, like Instagram. I've got about 15 lined up for today. I'll start with something that's somewhat of a softball to warm myself up a bit. Thank you for tuning in, and I hope that these are useful to you.

Can I read Beyond Order if I did not read 12 Rules for Life? The answer to that is yes. I wrote the books to stand on their own. I think they complement each other. If I had to recommend a preferred order of reading, I would say read the first one first, 12 Rules for Life first, and the second one, Beyond Order, second. But it's not necessary. Um, if you read Beyond Order first and 12 Rules for Life second, or if you just read one of them, that'll work out fine too. I wanted the books to stand alone, so they're not dependent on one another.

For those of you who don't know, 12 Rules for Life concentrates more on problems that are associated with an excess of uncertainty and anxiety, chaos, and Beyond Order concentrates on problems that are more associated with an excess of order, stultification, boredom, entrapment, and tyranny, that sort of thing. And so they make a match set, given that I view life, I suppose, from a narrative perspective as the battle between good and evil. It's a moral battle, morality because we have to make choices about how to act and how to perceive value-predicated choices. So that puts us into the domain of morality.

So we play out the battle between good and evil on a background of order and chaos, certainty and uncertainty, or explored territory versus unexplored territory, or culture versus nature. Those are some of the antithesis described, in particular, in chapter 11 of the second book, Beyond Order.

So that's the answer to that question. Can I explain what I mean by postmodern neo-Marxism? Well, I hope I can explain it. Uh, since I've been talking about it, it's not that easy to explain because a lot of these terms, terms like existentialism, phenomenology, modernism, post-modernism, they apply to very large domains of thought, and it's not always easy to settle on a definition. Um, but we'll give it a shot.

So hypothetically postmodernism is a reaction to modernism, a critical reaction to modernism. Modernism, if you think about it in the Enlightenment sense, is predicated on the idea that the individual is paramount, is the proper unit of analysis, is a fundamental reality, is a rational being, although also emotional nature, is capable of independent speech and thought, can uh, act rationally and think rationally. And so that would mean weigh arguments according to their applicability, uh, logic, coherence, um, evidence, change perception and action, as a consequence be reasoned with, um, be validly attributed, and independent sovereignty, free will. That's all part of the modernist set of presuppositions.

Post-modernists are hypothetically skeptical of all grand narratives. That might include all religious narratives, might include the claim that there's such a thing as a universal hero mythology, for example, um, and might aim at criticizing the grand Enlightenment narrative. Um, so post-modernism has often been described as skepticism about grand narratives.

Now the problem with that, as far as I'm concerned, is that I don't really see the skepticism. I see skepticism about some grand narratives, so perhaps there's skepticism about the Enlightenment and the modernist view, humanist modernist and religious view of the individual. But what I saw happening and see happening still is that although the formal claim is made that skepticism about grand narratives is paramount, what happens in practice, and also in theory, is that a new kind of narrative is ushered in, and it's one that appears to me to be a not very well disguised derivative of Marxism.

And the Marxist claim, essentially, is that, or one of the Marxist claims, essentially, is that history is best viewed as the economic battleground between oppressor and oppressed, between exploiter and exploited, between bourgeoisie and proletariat, uh, between owners and workers, and that that's there's no more important phenomena at the individual and group level than that conflict. Um, although there is a tremendous difference between people in terms of status, I don't believe that that's a particularly useful way of interpreting the world, and I think that the evidence that interpreting the world in that manner can lead to devastating consequences is overwhelming. There are no successful Marxist governments; there are no successful governments that rely essentially on central planning and that are informed by Marxist theory. There are catastrophic failures that are often genocidal.

Now what's happened with the postmodernists is that many of them were technically speaking Marxists to begin with, especially the French intellectuals. People like Foucault and Derrida were card-carrying Marxists often, or certainly sympathetic to Marxist claims back in the 1960s. And when it became evident to everyone that the application of Marxism almost inevitably resulted in tyranny and genocide, it became no longer intellectually credible to promote those ideas as an intellectual, not that that necessarily stopped everybody from doing so.

Well, what seemed to happen, and what happened as far as I can tell, is that the idea of economic conflict was replaced by the idea of power. That the most important element of an individual isn't their individual identity, but the group that they belong to—the racial group, the ethnic group, the gender, um, the sex, the sexual preference, doesn't matter—some element of group identity. And that the world is best construed as a battle for power between these different groups.

And I don't see that there's really much difference between the proposition that history was driven by economic conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed and the claim that history is driven by power relationships between the oppressor and the oppressed, and I also fail to see how that's not a grand narrative. The idea that— and I also, I should also point out that I believe that the idea is absolutely preposterous. Not only is it wrong—the idea that social institutions are essentially predicated on power so that if you are striving for power, you're more likely to succeed in a given functional social institution.

Um, I don't believe that there's any evidence that that's the case and plenty of evidence to the contrary because the arbitrary expression of power is actually not a very effective means of attaining status and authority; it's certainly a terrible means of attaining competence. So the degree to which our social institutions are predicated on actual competence, the ability to solve problems that we all regard as necessary problems to solve, striving for power is no means to attain competence, and to the degree that our institutions are based on competence, they don't select for power, and people who use power arbitrarily to force other people to do their will are not likely to run stable institutions. They're likely to be overthrown by their underlings, often in not very pleasant manner.

And that's true not only for human beings, but also for animals such as our nearest cousins, say chimpanzees, with the evidence has become quite clear from the work of primatologists such as Franz de Waal that tyrannical chimps can attain the pinnacle of power in a chimp hierarchy for a short period of time but tend, um, differentially to be torn to shreds by a couple of junior interlopers who band together and are sick and tired of the tyranny. It's not a stable means of generating social interaction, and the chimps that de Waal has studied, who managed to maintain power or authority or position, let's say, over some reasonable period of time, tend to be more reciprocal and more interactive than their subordinate peers. They have to spend a lot of time maintaining relationships rather than lording it over others.

And it's also the case that none of the successful people I've ever met, regardless of the enterprise that they happened to be involved in—entrepreneurial, managerial, administrative, um, or academic, scientific, or in creative domains that are more entrepreneurial—the people I've met that were most successful, and perhaps also most satisfied by their success, were people who constantly went out of their way to be of aid to their superiors, their peers, and their subordinates.

And the idea that it's the desire for power that drives all of us forward is, um, well, as I said, it's not a credible idea scientifically; uh, partly because the expression of aggression, which has to be related to the expression of power, if power is to mean anything, so it has to be, I'll use my capacity for aggression to force you to do something that you wouldn't do voluntarily. That's a reasonable definition of the expression of power. It's failures, by and large, who turn to aggression to mediate their social interactions, and people become less aggressive as they're socialized, not more aggressive.

And chronically aggressive children, adolescents, and adults tend to be alienated, isolated, friendless, family-less, and, uh, criminal slash incarcerated. It's not a good strategy. And so post-modernism shouldn't be allied with Marxism because post-modernism is hypothetically skepticism about the applicability of grand narratives, and then the assumption that grand narratives— but then the assumption comes in that the grand narratives were only stories told by people attempting to justify their, um, arbitrary grip on the levers of power, let's say. And that leads us into the entire proposition that our social institutions and our ambitions are essentially predicated on the desire for power. And as I said, that appears to me to be not only wrong but anti-true.

And I've been thinking about the idea of anti-truth lately. I mean, you know, if you lie, the best way to lie is to almost tell the truth. And so, you know, it's false, but it's close to the truth, so maybe you can get away with it. But there are forms of discourse, let's say, or there are theoretical propositions that are so opposite to reality that they're not just lies; they are the opposite of the case.

And I truly believe that our functional social institutions are held together by productive reciprocity. They degenerate into a tyranny that's predicated on power, but the fact that degenerate institutions are predicated on power is only an indication that they're degenerate. It's no indication at all that that's the central tendency of our most fundamental social institutions.

Imagine you believe that—well, imagine that you believe that it's power. Well then you're going to be inclined to exercise power insofar as you wish to be successful. And so maybe that's a way of justifying your own power drive. Um, but if you're guilty about that because you think that the arbitrary expression of power is immoral, and perhaps you should think that, then you're going to view your own ambitions and certainly the ambitions of others with tremendous skepticism.

And how are you going to move forward with any confidence in your life if you believe that your own ambitions to succeed are predicated on nothing but the arbitrary expression of power? And so I think it's also psychologically devastating. So now post—there's another element of post-modernism that we should discuss too, and that's the idea that— and again, these are vague ideas—that there's—how would we put it? There's also criticisms of the idea of objective truth.

And so classically speaking, we would draw a distinction between what's real in the world as such, independent of our interpretation, and our interpretation. There are lines of post-modernist thinking, and these are particularly associated with Derrida, that appear to imply, although it's difficult to pin down, that everything is interpretation, and that's part of the skepticism. Everything's interpretation. But then what that leads the practitioners of those interpretive theories to conclude is, well, back to power because they sneak this grand narrative back in that way.

And as far as I'm concerned, that's just a new justification for old Marxist presuppositions. So I hope that's clear. It probably isn't, but it's as good as I can do at the moment.

Hi JP, given your oft-repeated messages about the dangers of ideology, what advice do you have for your fans who may view your own teachings with such dogma? I guess who may view your own teachings with such—well, I'll just read the question. Given your oft-repeated message about the dangers of ideology, what advice do you have for your fans who may view your own teachings with such regard that those ideas become an ideology themselves? Lots of love from a 98th percentile orderly UK-based engineer.

Well, the first thing I would say is that whenever a developing mind encounters a comprehensive set of novel ideas, there is the initial danger of sliding into uncritical acceptance of those ideas, and that can happen whenever you read anyone who's thought through things with some degree of thoroughness. So I fell into Nietzsche, I fell into Dostoevsky, I fell into Jung, I fell into Freud, I fell into Rogers. The latter are all clinicians.

When I teach my personality course—when I taught my personality course at Harvard and U of T—I would present each thinker in the strongest possible terms, and even though they didn't always agree, there was a central element of agreement, but certainly plenty of disagreement. And that was somewhat disconcerting to the students because they would identify with one thinker, and then we'd go on to another, and they'd identify with them, and then we'd go on to another, and and so on. But I think that's okay as long as you come out the other end, and you tend to.

And so when you encounter a new set of ideas, you do tend to adopt them somewhat dogmatically to begin with, as you're puzzling through them, and then later, with more development and more reading, you kind of come back to yourself. And so I think that's part of the developmental course of expanding your philosophical or psychological knowledge.

Um, I do warn against oversimplified thinking, particularly in chapter six of Beyond Order, which is called 'Abandon Ideology', and that's a method—it's actually a discourse on methodology of thought. You know what I warn against primarily there are low-resolution answers to low-resolution questions. What should we do about the planet's ecology? That's just not a very good question; it's way too vague. How should we restructure our economic system? Well, it's too global and vague. Those questions don't lead to productive answers because they're ill-formed.

How do we make people less aggressive? That's another category, another question of that type. You have to differentiate the questions to a very high degree before you can be reasonably sure that your conceptualization is productive and not dangerous, and so that you have some shot at perhaps answering the question in part.

So with regards to aggression, for example, maybe you're concerned about interpersonal aggression, aggression between people. You might be able to say, 'How could we reduce the incidence of physical aggression, kicking, biting, and hitting, for example, among six-year-old boys in a given geographical locale?' A much more specific sort of question. So I would encourage people to think in detail and not to accept blanket ideological answers.

You do that in proportion to your ignorance of the field. Like we all of us want to have a complete map of the world, but we lack differentiated knowledge of many, many things. And so when an ideology comes along that purports to provide all the answers—not even questions that we haven't yet asked—we're likely to welcome it because it fills in the gaps in our map; but you have to be careful of confusing that with genuine knowledge.

Um, and then you have to strive towards genuine knowledge. So I would say for people who believe perhaps that they've fallen too deeply under the sway of my ideas, the best antidote to that would be to read other people. I have a reading list online at jordanbpeterson.com under books. There's a list of recommended books there, which were books that I found particularly influential.

You know, so maybe that would just cement the dogma, but I don't think it would. And so broader reading is advised, and writing as well, for that matter, if you really want to learn to think in a revelatory manner, creative manner, and also in a critical manner. Writing and editing is an extremely useful thing to do.

So, but I'll reiterate, you know, when you first encounter a set of philosophical ideas, especially if you're not inclined to think philosophically that much in the past, you're very much likely to come under the powerful sway of the first trained mind that you encounter. But well, don't stop there. You know, there's lots of other people to read.

So I guess the other thing I would recommend is— and I outlined this in chapter 12, although it's a very strong theme in my first book, Maps of Meaning. I viewed the teaching that I did and the writing, especially with Maps of Meaning, as an antidote to ideology. And because I came, you know, it's not easy to differentiate ideology from belief or ideology from religion for that matter.

So what's the difference between ideology and religious belief or belief per se? My sense was that an ideology not only provides a very low-resolution representation of the world, but it also tends to only tell part of the story. Now so then you might ask, well, what's the whole story? And that's a very complicated question, but my answer to that—and this is a consequence of reading deeply into the clinical literature—my hypothesis about that was something that was essentially akin to Freud.

Now Freud produced a very balanced picture of the psyche, which is part of the reason Freud's thinking was so influential, and part of the reason why his thinking still saturates our thinking even though we think we've dispensed with Freud. Actually, what we've done is incorporated the most brilliant insights of Freud so deeply that we think of them as presuppositions now, obvious like that we have an ego. Everyone knows what the id is, or virtually everyone, or certainly believes that we're driven by fundamentally, you know, unconscious and biological drives. That's a very Freudian idea.

And that there is some superego; you know, the effect of society upon us, or at least some concept that's akin to that. We've taken a lot of Freud's ideas, but Freud was very balanced because he talked about the id. So you could think about that as nature within; it's the natural world within. It was a positive element and a negative element. It was the source of all energy, but also it was blind in its motivational demands, let's say. Blind and wild in its motivational demands; unruly and dangerous as a force, although completely necessary.

And then the ego—well, the ego had a positive element and a negative element as well. So and then the superegos, that's society. All things considered, that's the patriarchy from the Freudian perspective. It can be overweening and tyrannical, so it can go too far and be negative, but it's also a positive force because it counterbalances the blind, selfish, impulsive, narrow drives of the id and make social organization possible.

So Freud has a three-tier view of psychological reality and each element has a positive and negative pole, and to me that indicates a balanced theory. Um, I believe that an intact religion tends to produce a balanced representation of that sort, and what ideologies do is parasitize that fundamental narrative.

And so I can outline two ideologies. So I would say that the narrative that drove the settling of the United States, in particular the frontier myth, that's an ideology. So it's positive individual—that's the, you know, forthright pioneer boldly going where no one has gone before—because a positive view of civilization and society, because along with the pioneering spirit comes the civilization that's imposed on...

Well then there's nature—negative, it needs civilizing, it's a wild force. And the positive individual bringing benevolent culture to this savage world—that's the frontier myth, and it's very motivating, and it's true because that's a story that can be acted out. But it's incomplete, and I believe that that was compensated for—that incompleteness was compensated for—that this started to happen in the early—in the late 1800s with the rise of the conservation ethic but also really manifested itself in the 1960s with the environmentalist ideology.

And I'm not saying that there are no valid environmentalist claims—that's different, I assure you—but there's a narrative. The individual is a power-hungry despoiler; society is fundamentally rapacious, greedy, and devouring, and mother nature is being her all her innocence raped continually. So, and you see that's exactly the opposite of the frontier myth. Wherever it lacked, so the frontier myth had a negative view of nature, although it could be fertile, but only, you know, if social—if brought under the sway of the proper social processes, civilization, agricultural, that it had to be tamed.

Nature was wild, while the environmental nature is everything beautiful in and of itself; the benevolence of mother nature, and society on the frontier myth side is a civilizing force, and on the environmentalist side, it's a despoiling force. And the individual is a hero in the frontier myth but a villain—essentially a villain, a selfish, greedy, grasping, devouring villain on the environmentalist front.

Now, if you put both of those together, you get a whole—you get the whole story. Now, of course, it's rife with paradoxes, and that's problematic; people don't like that, but it's much more comprehensive. And so I've suggested to people that, you know, if you only have a negative view of the patriarchy, for example, well, where's the positive element? And if you only have a positive view of nature, well, you know, what about cancer and guinea worms?

I think they're called giddy worms—they're a kind of parasitic worm whose nature I don't want to go into, but aren't pleasant and have thankfully been eradicated. Um, and then with regard to the individual too, it's like, well, there should be polarity there. Um, and I think in a well-functioning religious system, it provides you with a polarized view of all these different levels of reality—individual, social, and natural, and ideologies fragment that.

And so they gain their power by writing like parasites on an underlying religious reality, essentially a religious narrative that's necessary to orient you properly in the world functionally—in the world, and functionally both with regard to yourself, functionally with regard to yourself, nature, and society. So, um, well, that's the answer to that question.

Hi Dr. Peterson, I have a 12-year-old sister who's recently been really interested in starting dressing as a boy, even changing her hair and cutting it very short. I'm sure she is in an exploratory phase, but I'm a little worried. Should I or my parents intervene or let her just explore now that she's young? Lovely to have you back, Dr. Peterson.

Uh, well, thank you for that. Um, look, let me tell you a story about my son. Uh, when he was little, three, two, maybe even two—probably really little—his sister, who was a year and a half older, had a bunch of female friends, obviously, and they used to play dress up in the basement. And they'd spend a fair bit of time dressing Julian up in, like, as a fairy or as a princess.

And, um, you know, I kind of cast my eyes upward on that and my eyebrows and, but then I thought about it for a couple of minutes, and I thought, well, look, what's going on here? Well, Julian is engaged in this game, and he's having a good time. And so, you know, he was—I trusted his instincts as a small child, you know, to the degree that you can trust a small child's instincts because they go astray too. But, you know, he seemed to be a well-adjusted kid, and he was playing.

And what do you do when you play? Well, you experiment with different roles, with different identities. That's what—especially fantasy play, that's what fantasy play is. So let's say that you're a little boy, and you want to understand little girls. Well, you're not gonna think them through.

I mean, Jesus, even adult males can't think adult females through. I mean, we're caught— we're very complicated and, um, thinking about it isn't necessarily going to get you very far. It's like thinking about dancing isn't going to make you into a good dancer. And so what Julian was doing, in some sense, was more akin to dancing than to thinking. He was playing at what it meant to be female.

So he was using him—his own body—his own, um, being to act out what was feminine, and the girls were playing with that too. You know, they were trying to assess the difference between male and female and how those might interrelate, and that's why they were fascinated with that kind of dress-up play. So I just let it go, let it happen, and that was the right decision because I realized that had I interfered with it, I would have been saying to him the feminine—the nature of the feminine is such that it presents such a danger to what is masculine or what is young that it can't even be played with in fantasy. And that's definitely the wrong message.

And so, you know, he dressed up like a prince—let them dress him up as a princess and enjoy the door as a fairy and played it out, and that was all fine. And, you know, he did. Now how much this had to do with that play, I have no idea. But he grew up to be, you know, a very diplomatic and understanding sort of person, and although he's tough as a boot, and so it worked out fine.

Now, with regards to your 12-year-old sister, look, there's a huge range of gender experimentation and gender expression among young people, and I would say that your instincts that this is an exploratory phase are accurate, and that you should leave it be. However, I would also say that you should be there and watch and talk, because things are so unsettled now in relationship to gender identity that what could easily just be laudable exploratory play or the exploration of the boundaries of gender identity could easily be transformed into assertions by ideologically adult interlocutors that this is an indication that your sister is in fact male.

And that's a—that would be a consequence of falling prey to the very stereotypes that are hypothetically under attack. The fact that this girl, woman-to-be, is feeling urges to toy with a masculine self-presentation is no indication—that is no necessary indication that at some level she desires to be a man. It's a form of play, and it should—or a form of fashion, which is also a form of play, for that matter.

And so I think your best bet is to say to her implicitly and explicitly—you'd say it implicitly by leaving it alone to some degree, but even explicitly to say, 'Look, if you want to play around the boundaries of identification as male or female, go right ahead, but don't mistake—don't prematurely mistake your interest in the manner in which the other sex presents itself as some indication that there's something flawed about your own or questionable about your own identity as a female.' It's not—it’s not evidence for that.

And so play, but don't assume that the play is manifesting itself because there's some necessarily hidden reality that has to be brought to the surface. And I think that is a real danger in the political landscape that we have set up right now. So it's play, and fair enough.

So, you know, you see this—there's all sorts of play in terms of gender representation. In the 1970s, in the rock and roll world, there’s a whole subset of glam rock which was men—and theatrical men adopting makeup and high heels, platform shoes, tight clothes, long hair—all elements of femininity, essentially, uh, kind of a dramatic femininity. They were still men; it was part of play and entertainment and, and, uh, drama, and that's fine.

The drama doesn't have to take on a physiological reality, you know? At that point, you have to wonder if it's going a bit too far. That should be the first presumption is that it's gone a bit too far at that point. So, so I'd say, lever be—encourage her for that matter—but keep an eye on her, you know, and don’t let her fall prey to any foolish advice, and don't let her get too confused as a consequence of her exploration.

In all probability—I mean, this is the general life course—even children who have gender dysphoria, you know, who are unhappy with their current sex, the data indicate that the vast majority of them settle into identity with their physiological form and their psychobiological form, for that matter, by the time they're 18.

So, and there's a tremendously wide range of femininity to masculinity within women, and a tremendously wide range of femininity to masculinity within men too. So what constitutes normal is a pretty broad category, and so probably don’t worry about it. It's—and there might even be some rebellion in it, and that's not necessarily a bad thing in teenagers as well; they have to push back in some ways.

So, yeah, I hope you're doing well, Dr. Jordan Peterson. Well, thank you for that. Thanks for all your work.

Question: I've noticed in myself that I’m insensitive, and I have a hard time empathizing with others' losses. Everyone was in shock and grief, crying, except me. For example, when my uncle, mid-50s, died in an accident a few weeks ago—sorry to hear that—and I noticed now many times in the past that I'm callous and indifferent to human suffering or feelings. Is it something important to think about and reconcile, or perhaps some people are just born that way? If they are, how can I develop myself?

Well, I don't know because I don't know you, but so I have to give a generic answer. I would first of all caution you against taking this answer too personally because I don't know who you are, and I need to know the details, but I can answer it generically to some degree.

So the first thing I'd like to point out is that despite your claims to be callous and indifferent, you were polite enough to open this question with a query or comment on my well-being: 'I hope you’re doing well, Dr. Jordan Peterson.' So even if you didn't feel that hope deeply, you were polite enough to utter it, and politeness is an aspect—technically speaking, politeness is an aspect of trait agreeableness, which is the empathy dimension.

So there's five cardinal personality dimensions: extroversion—sociability, positive emotion, gregariousness. Extroverts love to be in groups; they like to entertain; they like to be the center of attention; they're energetic, active, and manifest a lot of positive emotion. They're verbal as well.

Um, introverts—they're quiet, they tend to keep to themselves; they'd rather have one-on-one interactions with people. Um, I think introverts prefer nature and extroverts prefer the human social world, but the evidence for the introverted preference for nature is weaker, but it's something that I've noticed, for what it's worth.

Neuroticism—that’s the negative emotion dimension. Some people experience much higher levels of negative emotion per unit of negative experience than others; that might be relevant to you, and we'll get back to that.

Agreeableness, which is the empathy dimension—women are higher in agreeableness; they're higher in neuroticism as well, quite substantially in both cases, although populations of men and women overlap more than they differ. Agreeableness is the empathy dimension; it's composed of compassion and politeness.

And you're describing yourself as relatively low—perhaps relatively low in compassion—that's a more masculine mode of being. And, um, in its extreme, it can produce callousness and insensitivity to the point where the best personality predictor of criminal predatory behavior, antisocial behavior, is low agreeableness. But it has to be pretty damn low, and it has to be combined with other negative attributes before that's a problem, because disagreeable people are also very tough-minded, skeptical, hard to push around, ambitious, forthright, um, and, and, um, well, they're good people to have on your side; they'll tell you bad news when they need to.

Um, so it's in and of itself, it's not necessarily a detrimental trait. So we'd have to look at your entire personality. Okay, the fourth dimension is conscientiousness—that's orderliness and industriousness—and the fifth dimension is openness to experience, which is essentially creativity and intelligence; some amalgam of that.

So the first thing we'd have to figure out is why you are less emotional than other people. Now there's two likely possible reasons. So the first thing I would recommend for you is that you go to this website that my colleagues and I built called understandmyself.com. Understandmyself.com—you can do a good personality test there that'll give you the five factors and break each of them down into their two aspects.

Now, what I would predict in your case is that you're relatively low in agreeableness, particularly compassion, and you may also be relatively low in neuroticism, which means that you're just not that prone to negative emotion. And so the combination of those two, which is very masculine, by the way—low neuroticism and low agreeableness—this masculine personality configuration means that you don't feel negative emotion as much as other people might.

So you'd be much less likely to cry, for example, even under conditions that might evoke grief in other people, and you're not as empathetic; you don't feel other people's feelings as intensely as someone who's highly empathetic, and that's possible. You could be low in agreeableness and low in neuroticism. I wouldn't despair if I was you because that doesn't doom you to a life of callousness.

Let's think about other personality configurations that might be relevant to you. If you're extroverted and low in agreeableness, you tend to be narcissistic because an extroverted person likes to dominate the social circumstance, and if they're disagreeable as well, then they don't really care about their impact on other people, and so extroversion—high extroversion plus low agreeableness can lead to narcissism. And you have to watch that because if you're narcissistic, then you really are the star all for yourself, and that's actually just not a very good way of negotiating the world; people will turn off to you after some time because they'll discover that you're not reciprocal enough in your interactions; you're not generous enough.

It might be helpful if you were high in conscientiousness, let's say, because if agreeableness helps make someone social, one of the things that helps make them socially acceptable, reciprocal, altruistic, willing to do favors for other people, generous, and so forth, conscientiousness also aids in that. Conscientious people are likely to keep their word; they have integrity; they're honest; they'll make and keep verbal contracts, and so if you're low in agreeableness but high in conscientiousness, people can still trust you, even though you're a hard ass; you know, fundamentally you're honest and so you'll do what you say you'll do.

If you're high in conscientiousness. Now, if you're low in conscientiousness and low in agreeableness, well, that can start to be trouble because then you're not likely to work that hard and you're likely to take advantage of others, and so that starts to get into a more serious personality configuration problem.

Now, if you're high in neuroticism and low in agreeableness, that can also be problematic. That's hallmark of personality disorder—not all personality disorders but some of them—because you're—you experience a tremendous amount of distress, and you'll use that as a weapon because you don't really care about your impact on other people, and so that can be a problem.

But I wouldn't presume, on the basis of what you've told me, that you're in trouble. Now, if you are genuinely extremely low in compassion, for example, so take this personality test and find out—and extremely low would be, let's say under fifth percentile. And even then, it's—you're one in 20, so that's not that bad, you know? It's—not that extreme, I don't mean bad. If you're at the first percentile, well, you know, that's starting to get into genuine extreme.

If you're really low in compassion, you might—and this would work especially well if you were high in conscientiousness, but it might work anyways—you might try as an exercise to regularly and routinely think of something that you could do for other people and do it. Like, you might have to do that coldly and cognitively in some sense instead of emotionally and nicely, but I suspect that that would help expand your personality.

So you could still have the advantages of being disagreeable, being hard to take advantage of, for example, but you could learn the advantages of generosity and reciprocity, and so that's about the best I can do with that. So probably you're low in agreeableness and low in negative emotion, and probably not too low in each, so you know, do the personality test and find out.

And if you are really low in agreeableness, then think perhaps of making a conscious plan to be more reciprocal, to do things for other people, to learn how to do that as a skill. That would likely serve you well. If you're really low in negative emotion, neuroticism, I wouldn't worry about that too much unless you're really high in extroversion because that might mean that you're likely to take more risks than you should because you get enthusiastic and carried away, and you're not afraid even when you should be.

So that's that. Pretty much: How to understand God is love. You talk about God as the ultimate judge and focus on accountability, living as if God exists, but how to love God? Is it a feeling like loving a person? Can love balance out the crushing responsibility?

This is a hard question; I'm going to take it apart in a couple of ways. This is my understanding, so it isn't how to understand God is love because I can't answer that question, but I can provide some information about how I might understand what that means. Well, the first thing is that I think that you have to make a decision in your life, and this is a decision—and I would say that it’s a voluntary element of faith, because it isn’t exactly evidence-based.

It's more like something you decide before you even look at the evidence; it's more like you decide to stake your life on this. Like, you know, if you decide to get married to someone, you don't really do it on the basis of the evidence that you're going to have a happy life because you don't have that evidence. You do it—you decide that you're going to make a happy life with this person and that it's worth the risk, so you get married as an expression of faith.

Okay, and— and so faith doesn't mean believing things that no one with any sense would believe. Faith sometimes means putting a stake in the sand and saying, 'Here’s where I stand in some sense, regardless.' And you do that when you get married; you do that maybe when you, you know, pledge allegiance to a friend; you have a best friend, and you want to maintain that friendship as long as you possibly can. It's a decision of faith.

Um, maybe you do that when you decide a career, when you go to university because you could have done something else, right? But you chose that, so that's where you put your faith. And like I said, that doesn't mean believing what no reasonable person would believe.

Okay, so back to God is love. Well, I'm going to talk about being first instead of God. Um, and being is the totality of experience that we're going to define that way for the purposes of this discussion. Being is what there is instead of nothing, and you experience that as a conscious creature. Being is what you experience as a conscious creature. It includes all your emotions, all your motivations, all your subjective experience, as well as everything that's objective.

Okay, so it seems to me that all things considered, it's a useful move of faith to act as if you love being. And if you love something, then you want the best in it to flourish. And so maybe you decide deep in your soul that it would be better for you to act toward an end that makes everything that's good better, that that's the best way to live—to make everything that's good better—and maybe to restrict the development of everything that's malevolent and evil within yourself and in the broader world, in so far as you're able to do that.

And so I think that's an expression of love, is that because when you love something, you care for it. And the proper attitude towards being, I think, is care. And so, so that's one element of God is love. God being analogous in some way to being. Now, we could look at God more classically as the creator of being. If you assume being is good, well, it's not much of a leap to assume the creator of being is good. And maybe you adopt an attitude towards the creator of being, and that's also love.

And you open your heart to existence, and maybe that's the most effective means of having existence open its heart to you. So for example, you know, if you love other people, you want the best for them; you want the best in you to serve the best in them if you love them, and you trust them courageously. So you open yourself up to them.

I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that that's how you elicit the best from them—the best that can be elicited. You're going to get hurt sometimes and betrayed, but that's going to happen no matter what approach you take. I think that's the most effective approach, and that is perhaps the most effective approach to existence per se—to approach it with love and courage.

And so that's how that looks to me. Is it a feeling, like loving a person? Yes, I think it is; I think it is a feeling like loving a person. It’s the generalization of that care that you would have for a child, your child, your brother, your sister, a family member. It’s the generalization of that to the broader domain of existence, to broader domains of existence.

And I think that's a skill, in some sense, right? I mean, if you're good at loving and caring for your family, but you can expand that outward so that more people are brought under that umbrella, then, well, assuming you can manage, that's very difficult. It seems to me that that's laudable. It seems to me that we spontaneously admire and would like to imitate people who are capable of that.

And so you see that when you have a job, or you encounter a boss who takes you under his or her wing and helps develop you, or you find a teacher who's particularly inspiring, or you work for an entrepreneur who's inspiring and who also opens doors for you. Um, they're acting with love, as far as I'm concerned. They want the best in them to serve the best in you, and that's very, very motivating for everyone.

And that's the proper basis of our social relationships, not power, for God's sake. So can love balance out the crushing responsibility? That's a sophisticated question. I don't know the answer to that. Love is warmer than responsibility. Love is part of empathy and agreeableness; it's a different dimension than responsibility, which is more part of conscientiousness than sort of a cold virtue.

I don't know if it balances out the crushing responsibility, but I think it's the emotional analog to the crushing responsibility, right? So maybe there's love and duty, and they run parallel in—in—if you're an ethical person, that's not all there is to ethics, but you know, love and duty—they're important, and and maybe they're better together than they would be as independent entities.

So, okay. Hi, Dr. Peterson. I'm a 25-year-old female. I think I'm afraid of intimacy and closeness. The thought of a man taking care of me and having to cede some of my control to create room for that scares me. I want to try and be in a romantic relationship, but I don't know how to allow it. What advice do you have?

Okay, well, let's take your questions apart. First of all, I think I am afraid of intimacy and closeness. Okay, fair enough. And I—the first thing I would tell you is that does not make you unique, and I'm not saying that in a manner that's designed to be condescending or insulting. I'm just saying that well, that's a very common fear. You're not alone; you may think you're alone in that, but you definitely aren't.

And it's also a justified fear. I mean, if you allow someone to be close to you, then you open yourself up to them, and they can hurt and betray you, so of course there's reason to be afraid. So, so what do you do about that? Well, there's reason to be afraid of lack of intimacy and distance. You want to be alone for the rest of your life? That's a frightening thought. In all likelihood, it's not that easy to get through life on your own; you know it's lonesome and difficult.

And if you're in trouble, you don't have someone to help you out and you don't have someone to help when they're in trouble, and you don't have anyone to share your triumphs with, and all of that, so that's not good. So you might be afraid of intimacy, but you should be at least as afraid of its lack.

And so maybe those fears can balance. You know, you say, 'Well, I'm afraid of intimacy, so I won't go there.' Well, you're not afraid enough of being alone. And so you've got to bring that up. It's like, 'Yeah, well, I don't want to be alone for the rest of my life.' Assuming you don't— it seems like you don't, because you said, 'I want to try to be in a romantic relationship,' so you want this.

And it does look like fear is inhibiting you to some degree because you're 25, and it sounds from the tone of your question that you haven't been in a relationship before, so it could easily be fear that's stopping you. So let's talk about trust for a second. You might say, 'Well, why should I trust when I could get hurt?' And that's a good question. You trust when you're naive because you don't know you can get hurt, and that's not ethical; that's not moral; it's not laudable; it's just naivety.

Once you know you can be hurt, you trust as a courageous decision knowing that if you trust someone, you can bring out the best in them, and knowing that if you don't, you'll never see it. So it's a calculated risk, and it's an intelligent calculated risk designed to move you and the other person to the best. So you can tell yourself that—I'm going to take a risk. I might get hurt, but I'm going to take a risk knowing it's a risk. It's a reasonable risk.

Don't be a fool, but it's a reasonable risk. Um, and remember that you have some reason to be afraid of intimacy and closeness, but you know, you should also see both of those as positives on your side. To be intimate with someone means that you can share your thoughts with them and think things through with them, and you can share your triumphs and your disappointments and all of that. You broaden out your life; you broaden out your ability to solve problems.

You increase the probability, all things considered, that you're going to remain sane because two people who are communicating are generally saner than one person who's only thinking by themselves. So, so you don't want to deprive yourself of that even though it's somewhat dangerous to be hooked up with someone.

Um, the thought of a man taking care of me and having to cede some of my control to create room for that scares me. Well, you've got to think about how you've posed those questions: 'cede some of my control'? Well, are you sure that's what a relationship is about? Are you sure it's about seeding control?

I mean, because there's an idea there that the relationship is going to be based on power. It's—well, more you—you end up with someone and you negotiate with them. And so, you know, where do you want to live? What career do you want to have? Where do you want to be educated? How many children do you want to have? Well, you don't know—not really. You have your opinions, and maybe you think, 'I'm going to enforce those; I want that control.'

But maybe you think instead, 'Well, wouldn't it be good to have the opportunity to discuss all those options with someone reasonable and come to a joint conclusion about what would be best for both of you moving forward?' Maybe you could have your cake and eat it too. It's not seeding control; and I would say don't seed control.

Like, you know, if there are things in your life that you absolutely need, then you want to negotiate for those. But the essence of the relationship should be truthful negotiation, not control and power. And so you may be afraid because you have misapprehension about what an optimal relationship—a reasonable relationship—would be.

Um, the thought of a man taking care of me—well, what do you mean by that exactly? I mean, do you feel that it's that you're going to be infantilized because someone is taking care of you—that they're going to want to decide what's best for you? Well, again, there's a power assumption lurking at the bottom of that that may not be helpful.

To be taken care of means that you know someone is going to be looking out for you, and if they think something is good and helpful for you, they're going to help you find it and maybe help provide that for you. But you're going to do that with them reciprocally, so you'll be taking care of each other, and that should be a positive thing on both fronts.

I know that's idealistic, and it's never perfect, and there are power struggles in a relationship, but that doesn't mean that the power dynamic is the basis for the relationship. It sounds to me like you're afraid of being dominated. And so you—you need to—I would say one thing that you should really strive to do when you enter a romantic relationship is not to avoid conflict, not to pretend that you're something other than you are, because then you won't seed control, and you won't fall prey to a pathological power dynamic that often happens when people hide themselves because they don't trust, and then they don't get what they want because how could they?

They've never expressed it, you know? And then the other person dominates them because they've never expressed any of their own desires. Well, don't do that, you know? Confer with yourself—a very useful marker for that is resentment. You know, if you're in a relationship with someone and you feel resentment climbing up on you, that's an indication of one of two things. You're either immature and unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary for the relationship or to negotiate fairly within the relationship, and then you should mature out of that as fast as you possibly can.

And maybe you can do that through dialogue with your partner. Or the resentment might mean that you are in fact being taken advantage of and that you have something to say. So don't let—if resentment pops up, find out whether you're immature or being oppressed. And if it's the latter, then you have something to say, to enter into a negotiation, and the negotiation should be that you both get something better than either of you would have had if you were separate.

Now sometimes it's a zero-sum game, and only one person can win the negotiation, but that's sub-optimal, and it certainly isn't the typical pattern for a good negotiation. So I want to try and be in a romantic relationship, but I don't know how to allow it.

Well, the next thing I would say is, well, one step at a time: you don't have to do this any faster than you want to, so slow it down. You know, so how would a generic relationship start? Well, maybe you meet online. Well, what do you do first? You email each other. Excuse me if I'm out of touch. You email each other, you know, when you talk about trivial things to begin with just to see if the other person can even talk. And then, you know, you start sharing something, and when you do that, you see if the other person shares something of about equivalent emotional significance.

And then maybe you share something deeper and see if they do the same in return, and you test each other out in writing. Maybe you exchange photographs and you see if you're curious and interested and if you are, well then maybe you meet for coffee in the middle of the afternoon in a well-lit location where there's lots of other people around and you check the person out and you have a conversation and you see if you like them and if there's some attraction and if there's some curiosity and maybe you meet for coffee three times because you're not in a hurry.

You know, and then maybe you go to a movie and you see if you decide which movie or if he decides which movie and whether that can be negotiated about and whether you respond the same way and whether you have anything to talk about afterwards. And maybe that's all you do. Maybe you go to a movie five times—like you don't have to do this any faster than necessary.

And so if you're afraid, don't bite off more than you can chew. You can adjust the rate at which the relationship progresses, and I would say—and I would say that to all the women who are listening—it's like slow the hell down. There, you think that if you don't allow the relationship to proceed sexually, say at a very rapid rate, you're going to lose the interest of the guy. If that's the case, then lose it because it's not worth it.

If he has any sense at all, if you slow things down and there's anything more there than just mere physical lust, let's say, narrow-minded impulsive physical lust, which is nothing to sneer at, by the way, but is hardly the basis for a good relationship—if he can't tolerate it's slowing down, well then he's not that interested in you, or he's immature, or... so don't worry about that. Slow it down. It's to everyone's advantage to slow it down.

So slow it down until you're not afraid. That's part of learning to negotiate with yourself. So get the hell out there and get in the romantic relationship. Try them out, but don't do them quickly, and make sure that you keep your head about you and that you don't, you know, that you don't allow your cowardice, essentially, to interfere with your ability to express what you want, and you want to question your presupposition that the relationship is necessarily going to be predicated on something like power and control, because that's not a good relationship.

That isn't how relationships should function; they're pathological when that's what they're about, and you should be afraid of them if that's what they're about. So get out there and learn how to do it, but do it slow; play a bit, practice a bit, but get at it because you're 25, you know? It's time to get moving. You'll be 30 a lot faster than you think, so get at it.

Dr. Peterson, I'm a recent father. My daughter is one month old, and sometimes I find it hard to deal with my daughter. I feel a lot of frustration when she spends hours crying, and I don't know what to do since you can't reason with a baby. Is it okay not to feel love for my baby during these episodes of frustration? Am I a bad father for feeling this way?

Um, look, everyone is upset, frustrated, and stressed by a crying baby. I mean, that's what the crying is for. Like, there isn't anything that's more upsetting than a baby who won't stop crying. Well, for obvious reasons, right? Because if you didn't care whether the baby cried, well, then you wouldn't respond to its distress. So don't worry about that.

It's like, you know, one of the things I've often recommended to my clients who are driven to distraction by a baby—maybe a colicky baby you know, won't quit crying—is put some earplugs in. Now, you can have a baby monitor; watch the baby, you know? And I'm not saying go deaf and hide in another room so you—if something terrible happens to your baby, you don't know it. But you don't have to torture yourself to death, and some earplugs, if the baby's crying all the time, can bring the level of stress down for you and your wife without interfering with anything. So think about that.

If the baby's crying a lot—babies shouldn't cry constantly, day after day, hour after hour—if you should—if that's happening, if your baby is crying more than three hours a day, especially continually—and it's probably much less than that, but, um, you know, you should probably think about talking to a doctor about that and see if there's some gastrointestinal problem.

One of the things you might check is—and see is what your wife is eating if she's breastfeeding, because infants can respond quite dramatically with intestinal upset to the components of breast milk, and cruciferous vegetables, for example, can be particularly toxic in that regard. So that's something to check out. Um, you could experiment with the baby with different, you know, have your wife eat different foods um when she's breastfeeding.

But earplugs can really be helpful sometimes. You find it hard to deal with your crying daughter? Well, she's only a month old. Well, you don't even know her. You know, when I had kids, my wife, of course, had had nine months, in some sense, to get accustomed to the idea of the baby because she had had the pregnancy, and in some sense she was already in a relationship. But my sense was, who the hell is this? You know?

And I mean, it was a baby, and it was my baby, and so it was a particular baby, but I didn't have any particular relationship with that person to begin with. And something you have to learn—you've only had a month; you don't know this person. You got to get to know a baby.

Even when they're little, you have to spend time with them; you have to rock them; you have to play with them a little bit. It's hard when they're that young. It's particularly hard for fathers, in my estimation. You know, it's easier for fathers when babies become more interactive, say after nine months, so don't worry about that too much. You got to get to know this person, but do what you can to interact. Change the baby's diapers, and you know, patter, and, and, and look at her, and, and babies like massage; it's really good for them.

And you can kind of get to know the baby that way and hold her as much as you can and rock her and all of that, but don't worry. Like, unless you—you wouldn't be worried about this if you were the kind of monster that should worry about it. You know, you're concerned because you don't have always this overwhelming sense of love; it's like you got to get to know this person.

You will in all likelihood; don't be scared away from the baby because of this, you know? And it's only the early months. It took me like six months to really start to get to know the baby, and, and you see the person is there already—like, I have kids who are grown now, and they're who they were when they were babies, like they're way distant when they're babies and they're not well-defined; they're kind of far away in some sense.

You know, they're—they haven't come out into the world, um, but their core character is there, and you have to get to know them. And as you get to know them, you'll get to love them; that—that's what will happen in all likelihoods. Don't worry about that. No, you're not a bad father, and of course you're going to be driven to distraction and frustration by the baby's tears—and maybe by the child's misbehavior, like you have to defend yourself against that.

And you can talk to your wife about this, and you can spell each other too. Like if your baby's crying a lot and there's nothing that you can do about it medically, let's say, maybe you need to go for an hour-long walk and then come back, and your wife needs to go for an hour-long walk so that you can get away from the crying because it can drive you to bloody distraction, and it's not good to be pushed beyond your capacity for tolerance.

But I don't see any reason for you to be concerned. You have a one-month-old daughter; you're—Christ, you’re still so sleep-deprived, you know? Likelihood, you don't know which way is up. Um, the first year is very intense and although extremely interesting and compelling because of all the transformations, it's quite challenging.

And so just hang in there; you'll— you'll do fine. Um, massage—you know, babies like touch; they like skin-to-skin contact. That's another thing you can do is put the baby on your chest, you know, without any—the baby can have a diaper on, obviously. But skin-to-skin contact, babies like that; they like to be touched; they like to be patted.

Get to know the baby; don't be afraid. And like I said, earplugs can really help. You can still hear the baby crying; it just won't drive you out of your skull. And what good is that if you're all frazzled and stressed? The baby will pick that up too, so yeah, yep. Good luck; you’ll do fine, I suspect.

How did I balance marriage, fatherhood, and a demanding career? Well, um, I stopped wasting time; that helped a lot. I stopped drinking; I stopped going to bars. I really didn't spend a lot of time with my friends when I had young kids in particular. I had friends, and I saw them, you know, with some degree of regularity. But where I cut corners was more with social life outside my family.

So I spent a lot of time with my wife, and I spent a lot of time with my kids, and I spent a lot of time on my career. And, you know, sort of a multi-dimensional career, and I was always a challenge to me too, to see how efficient I could get. And you can also, and I've really recommended this for relatively higher income dual-income couples who are trying to pursue dual careers, kids, and marriage, you can outsource, you know, hire a cleaning lady if you can afford it.

Um, buy restaurant food if you can afford it, etc. No, you can outsource; get—you can have someone do your laundry; then you can concentrate on your marriage and your kids. I know that that, you know, is only an avenue available to people who have relatively high incomes, but people who have dual incomes have relatively high incomes, and so outsource what's unnecessary so that you can concentrate on what's necessary.

I mean, I didn't do that when I was beginning my career because when I lived in the United States when I was in my late 20s and starting my family, we had one income. You'd think a Harvard beginning professor makes a lot of money, and I suppose that's true in some absolute sense, but relatively speaking, you know, we didn't have enough money to buy magazines. All our money went for housing cost and the basic necessities of living. I had a car that was 20 years old, 25 years old. I think it was old; it was a bloody thing. The doors fell apart on the person I sold it to, you know, like six months down the road. They knew it was a wreck at that point, but we drove that thing right into the ground.

So I know that's not necessarily possible for everyone at the beginning of their career, but if you have two incomes, you can manage it. Um, I concentrated on my marriage and making time for it. I concentrated on spending time with my kids consciously, and I concentrated on developing my career. Those were the three elements of my life, and I had some time left over for creative pursuits and, and for friends, but most of it was a matter of getting rid of time wastes of any sort, you know?

And I just pushed that out of my life, you know, day after day until I wasn't wasting any time or virtually no time. And, you know, I've asked my undergraduates frequently how much time they waste per day, and general estimates are like six to eight hours of time they regard themselves as wasting. Like, that's a whole career right there, right? So if you just stop wasting time, you can do a tremendous amount, especially if you also try to maximize efficiency.

And I always found that incredibly motivating. You know, I'm a motivating game: how much can I do in the least amount of time possible? That was—that's fun to try to do that, as far as I'm concerned. I know may—you know, that’s maybe undoubtedly a temperamental thing, but if you're built—if you're wired that way, that's a great meta-strategy: become efficient.

I always ask my graduate students when they were designing experiments. They'd come with a proposal; I'd say to them, you know, is there any way you could do this 10 times faster? What would you have to cut? What would you have to change to do this 10 times faster? And you can learn to do that. I also learned to force the task to fit the time. You know, there's this dictum—work expands to fill the time allowed for its completion.

Well, there's a corollary to that which is work becomes more efficient in proportion to the restrictions of time placed upon it. So if you say, 'Well, this could take me two weeks, but I'm going to do the best job I could in one day,' you'd be amazed; you can get 90 percent of the way or 95 percent of the way or sometimes even farther in that day.

So that's another way of becoming efficient; you know, if you only have 10 minutes to do something that should maybe take you two hours, maybe you can figure out how to do it in 10 minutes; you can get dreadfully efficient.

So that's very much worthwhile in my estimation. If you want to do a lot of things, what else are you going to do, you know, rather than become efficient? If you want to do many things, you don't have much choice, but I found it extremely entertaining to try to do that.

And when I was healthy, I could do a tremendous amount in a very short period of time. I'm very frustrated that that's not so much the case now, although perhaps it's coming back to some degree. I have recently found a passion in studying psychology. I can relate to that. What book should I read to expand my interest? Anything written by the great clinicians? Assuming that you're us interested in clinical psychology—I presume that because when people think about psychology, they generally don't think about research psychology, which is a different endeavor.

They usually think about clinical psychology. All the great clinicians: Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung. Um, who else? I'm—it's silly; I, I—I guess I'm running out of steam here. So let me just look them up for a minute. I was going to try to help. Eric Erikson. Yes, Eric Erikson, Jean Piaget, great developmental psychologist. Um, that's a good start.

More practically, go to my website under books—jordanbpeterson.com/books—recommended books. There’s a whole list of books that were extremely influential to me. Some of them were more research-oriented like Jeffrey Gray's treatise on the neuropsychology of anxiety, and there's a great work on higher cortical functions in man by Alexander Luria and some other brain function books there as well. You can go read all those books; that'll inform you.

And, and, you know, when you read those people, you'll find out what they read, and you can go read them too. So that's a good start. So do that; that'll keep you going for a good length of time. Um, do you have any interest in the new biblical lecture series? Yes, I have much interest in that. I have started reading Exodus.

I would love to do a lecture on a lecture series on Exodus. I'm thinking, hoping, praying that I can do that in the fall of this year, if COVID vanishes, if the theaters open up, so I could rent a theater again. I'd like to do a dozen lectures on Exodus in October and November, and, uh, it’s a great story, Exodus. It's—it's, you know, the story of tyranny, the collapse of tyranny into an interregnum period of chaos and the promised land.

That's the story of human adaptation—go from a terrible place that is full of restrictions, you have to blow it apart because it’s too restrictive and tyrannical, but you don't immediately go to a better place; you go to a worse place. You cross the sea where you could drown. You are in the desert for 40 years, and then you struggle back towards a new state of equilibrium. It's psychological—it's the narrative of psychological transformation upward.

That's a political narrative; it's an economic narrative; it's a battle between the forces of water and the forces of stone—water representing chaos; that's Moses, and stone representing tyranny. It's brilliant and deep and profound, and I would love to do a lecture series on Exodus if I had the intellectual wherewithal. And so it's one of my great hopes that I would be able to do that, so that's my plan.

And, you know, if I'm healthy enough, I'll try it and see if I can manage it. Um, God willing and all that. So what are your thoughts on superheroes? Well, they're quasi-religious figures—they're, you know, they're literary figures, symbolic figures. They're amalgams of what's admirable.

So imagine that we have this instinct to admire it, and it takes us over; it doesn't happen voluntarily, exactly; you admire someone sort of despite your will, and you tend to admire the ideal. So here's an example—I was talking to a great biologist this week, Randy Thornhill, Dr. Randy Thornhill, who discovered the role of symmetry, bilateral symmetry in sexual attractiveness.

While he showed, for example, or people who were influenced by his research showed that even babies will look longer at a symmetrical face, and a symmetrical face is more attractive. Or an average face is more attractive; an average symmetrical face is even more attractive, and newborn babies, even our very young babies, will look much longer at an attractive face than a non-attractive face, and that's because they are primed to admire the ideal that they need to strive to become.

That's the instinct for admiration; it's part of the fundamental religious instinct, which is the instinct to admire the admirable as such in some sense, to feel awe in the presence of what's great and to wish to develop towards that, spontaneously. Um, and so superheroes, in some sense, you really wouldn’t need superheroes in a culture that had a fully functioning religious structure because the religious structure would fill in the superhero gap.

But since the death of God, so to speak, well, we need superheroes because that’s part of the way that we rebuild our gods. And so you take a given superhero, and he's an amalgam of some admirable traits. You know, he might have some flaws too just to make it more interesting, or sometimes because an admirable trait comes along with a flaw, and that—that's part of the complexity of the world.

But the superhero is not a normal person; he's a super person, obviously, and super means superordinate; it means above. And so, you know, if you took three people and took the best from each of them and made them into one person, they would be a sort of superhero. And so, you know, there's a fictional element because the powers are expanded, but that's also a way of exploring the fact that with admirable qualities comes an increment in power.

So, um, that's perfectly fine. And so superhero—the reason our culture is so enthralled by superheroes is because we're nowhere near religious enough, obviously; that's the reason. It's the same way—same reason we're in trans especially the engineering types, who tend much less to be classically religious because of their thing-like orientation rather than their people orientation.

They get all their religion through science fiction. They don't even notice that it's happening, but it doesn't matter; it's happening. If you're interested in that sort of thing, you could read The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. That's a great, in-illus—a great representation of the emergence of heroic themes in literature across cultures, literature and religious thinking.

Or you could read The Origins and History of Consciousness by Eric Neumann—Neumann, N-E-U-M-A-N-N. Eric is E-R-I-C-H, Eric Neumann—the Origins and History of Consciousness. Both of those books I think are on my list of recommended books on my website; I'm not sure about The Hero with a Thousand Faces; it should be there if it isn’t because it's a great book.

Um, in any case, superheroes are quasi-divinities, and I mean, obviously, look at Thor and, and I mean, Marvel Comics has divinities in its superhero pantheon, and they fit in perfectly because what's the difference between Iron Man and Thor? You know, immortality, I suppose; although Thor's immortality can't be absolute or he wouldn't be interesting because you couldn't kill him, and you're not interesting unless you can die. So, so you know, superheroes evoke the—the—the evoke admiration and the desire to emulate.

And, you know, the superheroes are always battling; they're always good against evil, and so the landscape that superheroes inhabit, which is good and evil against the background of chaos and order, is the mythological or the religious landscape. So it's—it's all religion just repackaged, so that people don't notice because they have to be religious. If they notice, they criticize the religion, and then they can't be religious, and then they can't orient themselves.

So it sneaks up on us and takes us over in forms that we don't tend to notice consciously are religious, but nonetheless that is what they are. So— and they're so successful today because, well, like I said, our culture is—is—had the slats kicked out from underneath it. So it doesn’t have a traditionally functioning religious substructure, and it has to— it has to, um, partly what I've been writing about recently is the contamination of political belief with religious belief because religious belief isn't put in its proper place, and then politics becomes religion, and then that's a bloody catastrophe, literally.

So, yeah, so that's why. Have you done any more reading about Islam? Not in the last two years; I haven't done much reading at all, although I've been reading a lot, I suppose, in preparation for these podcasts that I've been doing. But other than that, I haven't really been able to read. So I've bought lots of books about Islam, and I have read a fair number of them previously.

Are you planning to have a debate with a Muslim on my podcast? No, but I am—I do have two Muslim scholars scheduled for the next month and a half. One more liberal, um, who wrote a book called Reopening Muslim Minds, and another, Hamza Yusuf, who's more conservative, who's been recommended to me by, well, the liberal—more liberal author of this book was one, but, oh, by many, many people on YouTube.

I mean, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, but I didn't believe that I had the intellectual wherewithal to manage it. It's not going to be a debate, though, because what the hell do I know about Islam? You know, I mean, I can—I can talk to whoever I'm talking to like an ignorant Westerner, and that's what I'll do; and I’ll put up whatever objections a said ignorant Westerner might have and questions.

But mostly what I want to do is listen and ask questions. I don't have anything to debate because I just—I don't know the culture well enough to debate it. I mean, I can put forward my objections to what I see as certain attributes that appear to be associated with the culture, like the fact that women's rights construed from a Western perspective tend to be, um, what? Less than manifest, let's say, in countries that are Islamic.

So I'd like to talk about that, for example. So, and especially given that there is overwhelming empirical evidence that rights granted to women is one of the best predictors of economic well-being, you know? So I don't know how Islamic fundamentalist cultures deal with that particular fact. They don't tend to score all that well in terms of economic freedom or productivity as well.

So, you know, those are incendiary claims, but those are the sorts of things I'm going to say. Perfectly willing to be revealed as wrong, but, you know, the best I'm going to be able to do because I'm not that informed—it's a very complex culture; it's not easy to unpack, and it's also not a culture that has really unpacked itself, right? It's still, in many ways, a functioning religious society; it hasn't subjected itself to analytical self-criticism.

And so that makes it very difficult to understand philosophically from the outside. So, anyways, you can see how this discussion might go