What’s the Most Effective Way of Overcoming Self-Deception? | Q&A 06-17-2021 | Jordan B. Peterson

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What's the most effective way of overcoming self-deception? Well, that's a complicated problem. But I suppose there's some relatively simple answers to it. I mean, I guess the reason I commented on it being complicated is that you can ask a question like that in a very short period of time, and that sort of implies that there's an equally short answer in some sense. But the problem of self-deception is extremely thorny, and it's tangled up with the issue of ignorance as well, right? How do you know when you just don't know something? And how do you know when you're being willfully blind? And how do you know when you're outright lying? All of those things, especially to yourself, are very complicated.

So to some degree, the answer is well, you have to develop a philosophy of life that's detailed and that contains within it an assessment of your thoughts about the relationship between truth and deceit. So, for example, do you believe that it's okay to lie? Is it okay to deceive other people to get what you want? Are there occasions when it's okay to deceive other people if that helps them get what they want? So that would be an instance, for example, of what people perhaps call white lies—right? Lies that are designed to be of benefit. Are they appropriate? Do you feel that it's okay to deceive yourself or other people in the pursuit of things that you believe are valuable? None of those are trivial questions, and they can't be answered with trivial answers.

So to some degree, you need a moral philosophy that privileges the truth above all else if you wish to cease engaging in self-deception. And then you might ask, well, how would you develop such a philosophy? Some of that might be, well, reading about moral philosophy, reading literature because it often deals with questions of good and evil and deception, thinking about it, writing about it, reading about it. I said that, um, and also contemplating how central an issue this is for your life. How important is this? And why is it important? If it's important, have you lied and got into trouble? Do you believe that you can lie and get away with it? If you don't believe that you can get away with it, do you still engage in it? If so, why?

Alright, so let's leave the complexity behind, though, but that's a necessary part of the answer. How do you stop deceiving yourself assuming that you want to stop doing so? Well, I don't believe that you can tell unerringly when you're telling the truth. I think that some of the time when you lie outright, you know, and so what I would recommend and have recommended in my writings, in my books, especially in "12 Rules for Life," the first of my last two books, said, "Tell the truth or at least don't lie." And I added that codicil to the phrase "tell the truth" because it became evident to me when I was writing that, you know, I don't know the truth, certainly not in its fullness, and so I can't say to someone, "Tell the truth." But I can say, if you believe that the truth is valuable and if you believe that living your life according to the dictates of the truth is for the best for you and everyone else, let's say, then you could at least stop lying.

Then I would say that as you pay attention to what you say, so that you're attending to your deceptive statements and trying to stop making them—some of them maybe you know outright they're not true, some of them make you feel uneasy and weak. That would be a less evident criteria of falsehood but still a reasonable one. You stop doing that, and then your eye for such things, or your ear for such things, or your embodied capacity to evaluate such things develops just as everything develops with practice. Your intent, which is to maintain truth in your speech, becomes sharper and more focused across time. Perhaps you get, as you eliminate the obvious untruths, better and better at detecting the more subtle untruths and better and better and better and better at avoiding being entangled with those as well.

So the first issue, I guess, is the decision that it's best to live in truth. Then you have to decide how far you're willing to take that. If that becomes an absolute, for example, or if it's a, you know, an important guideline, but you know, perhaps to be superseded by other things, you have to sort that out for yourself. Once having established that, then I believe that you decide and practice not lying. Then possibly, if you're fortunate, that the world smiles on you, you'll engage in less self-deception.

I guess the last thing I would add to that is that there's another form of self-deception that I wrote about in my— the second of my last two books, so the last one "Beyond Order." There's a chapter in there called "Don't Hide Things in the Fog" that really deals with self-deception too. So you might say, well, there's one form of self-deception that occurs when you say something that you know not to be true and pretend even to yourself that it's true or even act as if it's true or base other statements or actions on it as if it's true. But there's a more subtle form of self-deception, which I think is more pervasive, which is the unwillingness to look at or the willingness to turn away from evidence that you know would undermine something that you want to believe or make things inconvenient for you.

You know, I think a cliched example is maybe someone runs a company and they have a chief financial officer, and they know that person is not exactly straight, but it's convenient not to look at the books. So maybe when they're around that person, they feel guilty and uncomfortable, and that's a sign that, you know, something's rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak. But then the self-deceptive act is to not look where you know you should look. You know, that's the sort of thing that people refer to when they talk about the elephant under the carpet or the skeleton in the closet.

And sometimes, to mix metaphors terribly, it's better to let sleeping dogs lie, but often, you know, if you have the sense that there's something more to the story, it's painful and difficult to delve into it. But to not do so, which is the easy route, is a form of self-deception—a very common self-deception.

And I don't think, my experience as a clinician and my personal experience as well, is that when you have a sense that something's up and you fail to act, you almost inevitably pay a much higher price for it at some point deferred into the future. So you have to think that through for yourself and ask yourself if you believe that's true and if it is true. Unless you want more trouble in the future, then perhaps you investigate when your moral unease, let's say, alerts you to the fact that there's something to investigate.

As a woman, and this is a completely different topic: as a woman, I have fantasies about bad boys. Is this something I need to mature out of or realize in my sex life in different ways?

Well, I can't say for sure because I don't know anything about your sex life, and I don't know anything about the fantasies. I would say, however, that you know, it's not that easy to maintain sexual interest on a continuously rewarding basis across long spans of time, say with the same partner. Now, maybe it's not that easy to maintain it, period. You know, as we age, say, fantasy can provide pointers to overcome that proclivity for the deterioration of sexual interest.

I remember reading, I think it was in Raymond Carver, whose works I love, a detective he wrote the greatest of detective novels, a private eye. Really, um, no, it was Raymond Chandler, sorry. Raymond Chandler. He talked about the beauty industry in the fashion industry and the hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars that people spend on that enhancing sexual interest and came to the conclusion that it was all worth it because it's difficult to do.

It's difficult to pull beauty into sexuality. It's difficult for each of us to maintain our attractiveness to other people. It’s difficult under many circumstances to maintain being attracted.

Well, so you have these fantasies, and that's the part of you that has a proclivity towards sexual gratification. But, your best bet—and so those are fantasies that you could hypothetically talk about with your partner, assuming that you have a partner that you could talk to about such things. And maybe that would free him or her up to talk about such things with you.

And maybe your partner might be more interested in your fantasies and helping you along with them than you think. Now, you also asked the question about immaturity. I think I would look for the wheat instead of throwing it all out as chaff to begin with. Take your cues from your fantasies. Now, I'm assuming that, you know, you do that in a relatively intelligent way and that it doesn't hurt you, it doesn't hurt the other person, and that it’s, you know, there’s mutual consent involved in all of those things that a wise person would do.

But I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And the reason for that is that if you have fantasies about something that you need sexually, say, and those aren't satisfied in your life, they're not realized in your life, then when the opportunity to realize them comes up in the form of the possibility of an affair, let's say, or a betrayal, you're much more likely to be tempted in that direction than you would be if you had incorporated that into a broader conception of what your sex life might be.

So, you know, one way of maintaining satisfaction with a monogamous partner is to vary what you do with that partner. And if that variation is fueled by your mutual sexual fantasies and then those fantasies are gratified, then one source of motivation to look elsewhere and potentially blow your whole life up and that of your partner as well while doing so is ameliorated.

So Eric Neumann, famous student of Carl Jung, said, “Don’t pretend to be better than you are.” Now, he didn't mean don't try to be a moral person, don't try to improve yourself, or any of that. He meant don't lie about what you are and what you want. And you know, maybe you're ashamed of it. Well, maybe you should be, but maybe you shouldn't be.

Assuming that those basic moral preconditions that I described earlier are met, think about it as an elaborated sexual game and as something that you might play in a sophisticated and aware manner with a willing and able partner.

What did I teach my children about sex? Is there a healthy middle ground for them without being naively celibate or damagingly promiscuous? And how did you communicate that?

You know, I didn't teach my kids much explicitly about sex. I actually don't remember any conversations about sex per se. I can't even really remember how they found out about sex. I'm certain that they knew the basic mechanics plenty early enough, so it wasn't like it was a taboo subject. It just in some sense never seemed necessary.

Now that doesn't mean that there wasn't any instruction about sex in our household. I mean, the kids watched. I mean, what do you teach children about sex? While you teach them how to be good people in the broadest possible sense, and so one element of that would be: don’t casually use and hurt other people. You act that out as a parent to the degree that you're capable, and your children observe that. They also observe how you treat your wife or husband. They're observing that all the time, you can be sure of that. And then they also observe how you treat your son and your daughter and how you differentially treat them as well.

And so they're learning about sex in the broader context of human relationships all the time, and most of that's implicit. You know, my wife and I, my wife Tammy, and I have a strong monogamous relationship. That's what we explicitly committed to and what we both implicitly desire. And physical affection, some of that demonstrative, some of that the kids witnessed us hugging or kissing, that sort of thing, nothing more than that.

But they certainly weren't strangers to the idea that we found each other attractive and that we wanted to be with each other without them, with some degree of frequency. And all of that is instructive to children, and I think that the most important lesson about the morality of sex was probably taught to them merely as a consequence of observing how we treated each other, and also by extension how we treated them.

I think that the expectation that they dealt with sex wisely was part of a broader expectation that they dealt with temptation wisely with drugs, for example. I thought about this a lot because this has to do with your issue of, you know, is there a reasonable middle ground, healthy middle ground?

I knew from the psychological literature that there was a healthy middle ground with regard to rule breaking in adolescence, right? So, you see pathology at both ends of the normal distribution. There are kids who break rules all the time, the antisocial types, and they, you know, they're at risk for being arrested and for long-term criminal behavior. They're at higher risk for that sort. They've been getting in trouble at school, getting in trouble with the police as teenagers—all of that, that's obvious, right?

But then on the other end of the distribution, there are kids who never break any rules. You might think, well, that's optimal. You know, they don't break laws, they never shoplift. And this is not a pro-shoplifting message, by the way. But, you know, healthy teenagers push the limits. They break some rules. The ones who never do that sort of thing tend to have a proclivity towards internalizing disorders, that's what they're called. Externalizing disorders are disorders of acting out, and internalizing disorders are more like depression and anxiety. They tend to be over-inhibited and over-emotional in a negative sense and suffer more from depression and anxiety because they're terrified.

And that's partly why they don't break any rules. They're too afraid, and that has a detrimental long-term consequence for them. So, you know, you don't want your children to be unable to take risks because they're terrified of doing something wrong, of breaking the rule. And they need to test limits.

With drugs, I told them I better not ever be able to tell that you've been using something because if I can tell, then you can't handle it, and that means that you're not doing it appropriately. And that was about the best I could muster because it was complicated. You know, I mean, I knew that they were going to smoke pot. They went to alternative schools; that was a given. It's like, well, what's the rule exactly? Don’t do drugs? Well, you know, they probably observed Tammy, alright, taking the odd puff and maybe having the odd drink.

And so, you know, that rule wasn't abided by rigidly by either of us. We certainly didn't abuse anything, or if we did, it was only on very special occasions. So I thought a lot about what the rule is, and the rule is don’t be an idiot. You know, if you're going to smoke pot, don't smoke so much that you're drooling and everyone can tell you're stoned from two blocks away because that's humiliating to you and to the observer as well. It's degrading.

So, sex is like that too. It's like who's got the upper hand? You or the sex? So, I think the kids just knew that. I watched their relationships. They had serial monogamous relationships in team as teenagers, which is par for the course, and by and large, they handled them as well as you could expect two reasonable people who were teenagers to handle them.

I generally like their choice of partner, thank God, although not always, and that was awful when that was the case, but it didn't happen that frequently, so I didn't have to teach them explicitly what they had already been taught implicitly. You probably can't teach things explicitly to people if they haven't had the groundwork laid for that teaching implicitly.

So as it pertains to beauty standards, do you think that progressive social pressure can overcome what appears to be our ingrained attraction to, for example, physical markers for biological health?

Okay, so this questionnaire is influenced, hypothetically, by literature indicating that we value such things as physical markers of fecundity, which is fertility, and that's associated with health. Well, of course, we'd value that because, obviously, assuming that you give some credence to evolutionary theory, a species that didn't find markers for reproductive success attractive wouldn't last very long. So it's in some sense self-evident.

Well, what are some of those markers? Symmetry in face and body, in gait—more symmetrical people are more attractive, and they are healthier because illnesses of various sorts during the development produce asymmetries. That preference for symmetry is marked in many species— even butterflies, for example, are vastly more attracted towards perfectly symmetrical mates. Physical strength in men, particularly so—shoulder width, shoulder-to-width ratio in men is another marker. Height, voice depth—there are some markers associated with testosterone like jaw width in men.

In women, like for men, women find younger women more attractive all things considered. That's younger women who have reached puberty, obviously, in the vast majority of cases and in the reasonable case, let's say.

And I think that attempts to push back too hard against that kind of proclivity are ill-advised, all things considered. But, you know, I would modify that to some degree because one of the things that we have decided in the last few generations, let's say, is that people should be older than mere post-pubescence before they are reasonable targets of sexual seduction.

Now, if you go back a hundred years ago or farther than that, it wasn't particularly uncommon for girls who are very young by today's standards to be engaged or married or involved in the kind of relationship that might lead to those two states—14, 13, 15.

Now, girls of that age frequently date in our society, but we've decided that sexual activity, especially if there's an age gap of any substantive degree, can be statutory rape. So progressive social pressure, so to speak, has produced—not in a precise decrement in the perceived attractiveness—but it's definitely produced a change in behavior and expectation.

And so, you know, we have biological proclivities, but we're also an extraordinarily malleable species. You can see too that different cultures specialize in different markers of beauty, and some of those specialized markers of beauty don't translate well from one culture to another.

So there's a central human tendency associated with perceived attractiveness, but any of the dimensions of variability that compose that central tendency can be altered substantially by social pressure and social expectation. So it's complicated, like any issue of nature and nurture.

My basic sense is that you leave people the hell alone with regard to what they find attractive. And you know, we hear stories that there's a corporate construction of beauty that's fed to us, and I think that's fundamentally rubbish in some sense because corporations who use sex to sell are much more likely to succeed if they merely provide gratification for the instincts that are already there rather than trying to create them out of nothing for their own purposes.

Now, you might say, despite that, the fact that stereotyped portrayals of beauty are put forward to us by powerful media organizations every day intensifies our focus on those attributes, and that might be true, but that's not the same argument as trying to make the case that that's a construction and nothing else. I think the evidence for that is weak to the point of non-existence.

Despite the variability that I described, so yes, I think that progressive social pressure can overcome certain ingrained attractions. And we've deemed that necessary in many cases. I mean, it's also the case, at least we've... we've stopped action on those attractions to a great degree.

And the same thing happens when you get involved in a monogamous relationship, and does I decide to forsake all others. You might again argue that, well, the attraction to others isn't ameliorated, but I would say it is to some degree, partly because people who are in a committed relationship just don't allow themselves to go there, right? So they might note attraction, but they don't dwell on it, and they don't pursue it, and so that is some amelioration of the attraction by social pressure—not necessarily progressive.

So, I'm worried I will never find love. What do I do?

Well, the first thing I would say that you should do is understand that you are not alone in that worry. A more common worry could hardly be identified. So, and if you find love, then you'll probably worry about whether you'll keep it or whether or not that's the right love for you. So, I guess part of the answer is you act in spite of your worry, and that's actually the best treatment for your worry.

You know, you might be so concerned that you're unwilling to put yourself out there and face rejection. I would say the best way to overcome fear of rejection is to put yourself in a situation where you're pried for rejection and have that happen to the point where you're not devastated by it. I'm not saying that's easy, and hopefully those attempts will also be punctuated by some success.

So, I would say, despite your worry, get out there. You know, ask someone for his or her phone number, put up a profile on a dating site, or at least create a profile. Maybe you can wait a week or two to post it, but put some effort into it and get a nice photograph taken. I think, and then you could also ask yourself, are you worried about being alone for the rest of your life too? And that's a good thing to worry about.

So, you might say, well, that's the same as being worried I'll never find love. But if you let that stop you, then there's this alternative danger, isn't there, that you'll just be alone. So, accept the worry as part of the likely content of human existence and do what you can to make yourself attractive to the people that you wish to be attracted to you, and then put yourself out there, and the probability is quite high that you'll find someone who will love you about as much as you love them.

And maybe that'll be good enough.

I'm having a hard time disciplining myself. I particularly struggle to establish a schedule. How did you make a schedule so that many of your highest goals could be attained? I know that you've talked about making a schedule on many occasions, but I would like to look inside your schedule from the time that you think was your prime.

Well, some people find it harder than other people to make a schedule. You know, one thing you might consider doing is doing the personality test at understandmyself.com and seeing what you're like. You know, maybe you're particularly low in conscientiousness, in which case, making a schedule and sticking to a routine, an orderly routine, is going to be quite difficult for you. But that'll at least help you understand perhaps at least some of the problems.

Maybe you're high in negative emotion or neuroticism, and so you worry too much about making a schedule that just stops you from doing it. I would say, well, the first thing to do is—there are two things you could do. First of all, the first thing you might want to do is figure out why you want to make a schedule to begin with.

So you talked about goals. Well, what is it that you want to accomplish? The Future Authoring program at selfauthoring.com, another one of our websites, helps people make a detailed plan for the future. And so you can't really have a schedule without having a plan because the activities you schedule should be intelligently related to the goals you wish to achieve that are important to you.

And so you need to have goals that you wish to achieve that are important to you, and you have to know what they are. And that's complicated, right? That's like a plan for your life. So it's very difficult. And so that's why we produce this exercise, which helps step you through the process of deciding what you want and need.

There's a present authoring program there too that helps you identify your virtues and your faults, and part of your plan can involve capitalizing on those virtues and rectifying those faults. And so that can be an interesting addition to this process. But in any case, you have to figure out what you want, and then you have to figure out how to decompose what you want into actionable steps, right? And those would be the sorts of things that you could put into schedule.

Now that would mean that your schedule would hypothetically consist of things that maybe you don't exactly want to do, although that would be good, but at least you understand the importance of doing and are therefore somewhat motivated to do. And then you need to break those steps down into small enough increments that you're highly likely to undertake them.

You know, so for example, this is a trivial example—maybe you have to do a report on a given topic for school and you're not very good at that. Well, you know, maybe you could go to the library one day and just check out the library—that might be enough. And then maybe you could go to the library and take out a book, and then maybe you could open the book and look through it. Those would be on different days.

And then maybe you could sit down and read the first page of the book. And if you can't do that, then the first paragraph. You know, you have to negotiate with yourself and figure out what the largest step you would take towards your goal is that you would take, and if you don't do it, then you make the steps smaller and smaller until you find something that you would do.

The next thing you need to do potentially is to familiarize yourself with a scheduler like Google Calendar. So the first thing to do is open it and then maybe figure out how to put in a task and then a repeating task. And it might be a pretty simple one to begin with. It's like, well, why don't you list waking up and specify a time or going to bed and specifying a time—an approximate time anyways—or put in the schedule when you eat. And those are things you do every day.

And so that's something you're pretty likely to do, and so that's a success for you. And then, well, then you can start by putting in something small—maybe you need to read, maybe you need to exercise, maybe you need to have a social event with people, maybe you need to watch TV, a movie, whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, hopefully, it's something you want to do. Put it in the schedule.

You could start by scheduling the things that you would like to do. So you can imagine, well, I like going out to movies, I like going to the mall, I like hanging around with my friends, I like watching TV, I like reading a book, I like listening to music. Well, then schedule those things.

And so then you think, well, that means I'm forcing myself to do them. It's not that. It's that now you're allowing yourself time to do them, right? So the schedule becomes a means of you getting what you want instead of an external jailer who punishes you every time you deviate from requirement.

So, you have to make friends with the schedule. The schedule has to be your friend, your ally—I shouldn't use that word, but you know what I mean. It should work for you and not against you. It's not you're not generating an external tyrant; you know you are generating something that you could be held to, you know, and that’s being responsible too, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It can be somewhat burdensome, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. But generally, you should approach it as if this is something that will help you get what you want, and it's also a pretty good way of controlling anxiety. You know, because one of the most common sources of anxiety is just not knowing what to do. People often think about that as boredom, and it is boring to some degree, it can be, but it can also be very anxiety-provoking. It's like, well, what should I do? I don't know what to do. Well, I have to do something—there's all these things I could do, and I don't want to make that decision every hour.

So a schedule that you designed that you like can be an incredible relief. One thing we do know is that conscientious people tend to be lower in negative emotion, and it looks like that's a causal consequence, that orderly people, for example, because they order their environment and make it more predictable, then they're less likely to be anxious because we're often made anxious by what is unpredictable.

So generating a view of your life that consists of valued goals that you want to attain and then steps by which those might be attained—and the Future Authoring program helps you figure all that out; well then you can ally that with a schedule.

And then you know, not only do you know what you're doing, you know that what you're doing is moving you towards something you want, and that's rewarding, and having your time structured like that and attaining those goals is pleasurable and anxiety-reducing. So, you know, that's pretty good deal all things considered.

You can start stupid and slow, like I said, just throw some things in that you're pretty high, pretty likely to do and fill in the schedule with broad strokes. And then as you get familiar with it and comfortable with it and maybe even happy with it, you can fill in the details and start to use it in a more sophisticated way.

But everyone I know who's accomplished—almost everyone I know who's accomplished—does structure their time explicitly in that manner. They've learned to do that over the years. Now, not everyone does that. Really, really entrepreneurial people might have a harder time with it, especially if they're low in conscientiousness.

And then, with regard to the personality test, you know, maybe you do the personality test, the personality test I mentioned, say, and you find out that you're agreeable but low in conscientiousness. Well, it's going to be harder for you to stick to a schedule, but you do like to please other people. So that's one of the things that you could schedule. You'd be highly likely to do that.

If you're extroverted, you could schedule time socializing with people. If you're introverted, you could schedule time by yourself—walking in nature, for example, or doing whatever else it is that you might want to do by yourself. If you're open, you could schedule in creative time, and then you'd be motivated to do those things.

So you're having a hard time disciplining yourself—that's par for the course. You know, I mean, like I said, really conscientious people are more inclined in that direction. But it's hard to discipline yourself in relationship to a goal. You know, it's like training a cart horse to pull a cart. It's difficult.

So start with little things, and maybe little things that you want to do, and then you can proceed to harder things that you don't want to do so much—you know, further extrinsic or intrinsic utility. But you have to do them because they're related to something important. You'll get disciplined across time if you do that. Incremental improvement that's sustained is extremely powerful from the perspective of transformation.

How do I know if I'm a good or a bad person? I struggle with viewing myself as a good human being who deserves good things in return even though I try my best to be decent and add light into this world in a multitude of ways. What are some steps to take in order to become better than the person I was in the past?

Okay, well, there's a question that you didn't answer that's a logical consequence of the question you did answer. You said you struggle with viewing yourself as a good human who deserves good things in return, so now you have two problems. One is: well, how can you be a better person? But the other problem is: well, how do you treat yourself as the good person you already are?

You said you have trouble with that. So, the other question might be: how do I treat myself? How do I reward myself for being good? Or how do I value the fact that I am good at least some of the time?

Okay, you struggle with knowing whether you're a good or a bad person. Well, you're probably a good and a bad person, right? Just like everybody else. And so the first thing to understand is that that's part and parcel of being human, that we're insufficient embodiments of our own ideals, and that's always the case. And even if we do progress, our ideal becomes more sophisticated, and so we still exist in a relationship of judgment with our ideal, and to some degree, that's permanent.

Having said that, just like it's reasonable to assume someone's innocence before having their guilt proved rather than the other way around, it's useful for you to reward yourself for being good on those occasions that you were good. And so that'll also help you accept yourself more completely as a good person to the degree that you are.

So, you know, when you do something good, you might try to make it a habit of noting that, maybe telling someone about it, or at least telling yourself about it, and maybe rewarding yourself in some way for it, at least by the recognition, and then you'll come to accept yourself as a good person more easily, right? And you imagine if you had a child around you, and you were trying to reward them for being a good person and also encourage them to be good, you would notice when they've done something good and tell them, you know, and make a bit of an issue out of it.

And being specific about it really helps. You know, I noticed that when you cut up that apple, you gave a little more than half to your sister, and you didn't have to do that—that shows you're paying attention, and that's very powerful. You can do that with yourself too, you know? You notice when you did what you were supposed to that day or when you did something kind for someone else or when you did something creative that worked out, or at least when you attempted to do that.

You know, or when you managed to control a very tempting bad habit. It's very hard to learn to reward yourself properly for proper action, but it's very much worth doing and it will spill into your relationships with other people. And so you treat yourself like someone you're trying to do the best for.

It's hard to do that because you're acutely aware of your own faults, let's say. But you don't want to dispense with your virtues.

What are some steps to take in order to become better than the person I was in the past? Well, I talked earlier today about the Future Authoring program. I'm going to return to that. I mean, we built that for a reason. You need to lay out a vision of yourself as an ideal—like who do you want to be five years from now? What do you want your life to be like across the most important dimensions of your life? We need a vision of that, first of all—something to aim at.

You know, what would you like your family relationships to be like if they were ideal? What would your intimate relationship be like if it was better? What would your job be like, or your career? How might you take care of yourself mentally and physically? How do you regulate your proclivity towards harmful temptations? How do you make intelligent use of the time that you have for yourself? How do you continually educate yourself? How do you illuminate yourself philosophically and spiritually?

You need a vision for that and a plan, and then you have to decompose that into steps that'll lead you in that direction. That's how you incrementally move towards being a better person, and maybe as you do that, you have to revise your ideal version of yourself because of something you learned. But that's okay—that's part and parcel of the process. So because you're not going to specify the ideal with 100% accuracy the first time you specify it.

I'm 40, but I feel like a child watching everyone around me get older and die, so I'm homesick for the past instead of accepting the terrifying present. How can I stop mourning the past?

Well, I grouped the last three questions together, including this one because they all allowed me to talk reasonably about these programs. The Self-Authoring Program has a past authoring component that helps people write out an autobiography. Now you're suffering from what Freud described as reminiscences of the past. You're possessed by reminiscences—they won't get out of your mind, and what that means to me is, well, it's one of two things. One is that there's things in your past that you need to understand more deeply, and that's why they're still calling to you.

And there are things in your past that you had, perhaps, that you need to have in the present and the future. And so you could do the past authoring program and write out your past. It asks you to detail the most emotionally significant events that occurred during different epochs or stages of your life. So you have to break your life into a number of stages. I think we recommended six, but you can break it into as many as you want or as few.

And then deal out detail out the significant positive and negative occurrences, you know, that stand out in your memory from those times. And that'll kind of help put the past to rest, but it also might highlight for you what it is that you're nostalgic for, and then that can help you figure out what to aim for in the future.

You know, it sounds like you're rather hopeless about the present and by implication the future, and maybe that's because you don't have a richly enough developed conception of what it could be. So you could go back to your past and find out what it is that you wanted and had, and then you need to make a plan for how you might obtain that in the future.

Now, it's a bit more complicated than that because you talked about death. You know, and so you may be longing in some sense for a return to a state of blissful ignorance where you weren't concerned about mortality. And you know, the only real medication for that, I think that's real, is to live as worthwhile a life as you can, as full of life, so you don't have regrets.

I'm not sure that so much that people are afraid of death; they're maybe afraid of not living enough. And maybe if you lived enough, you could let it go when it was time. I think there's some truth in that. And so if you're overly afraid of death, it may be because you have a lot of unlived life in you.

And you could go back to the past and you can find out what you needed and perhaps had then, and then you can strive to attain that in the present and the future, and those exercises could at least in principle help you with that.

So what are you missing? Right? What are you missing that the past had for you? And maybe you write that down. Like, well, I had this; it was really important to me. And I, you know, I had a loving relationship with someone, and I don't have that now. I had the security of a comfortable home life, and I don't have that now.

It's well, those are things that now become ambitions, right? Because a lack is an ambition and a lack and a mirror image of one another. So if you can identify what you lack, you can derive an ambition from that, and you might say, well, that's impossible. It's like, well, you decompose it into small steps, and that's complicated—but so life is complicated, so there's no way around that.

What's your advice to someone who took your Understand Myself test and scored zero on agreeableness but still recognizes the need to collaborate with many people?

Well, that's an interesting question. Zero is pretty low. The best personality predictor of imprisonment, conduct behavior, antisocial personality, criminality is low agreeableness. Now, it's not a very powerful predictor, at least as it's measured with self-report questionnaires, but it's the most powerful predictor. And so if you're low in agreeableness, you will have the proclivity to be less empathetic and sensitive to other people than they might like, and you might also be harsh and stubborn.

I mean, there's advantages, right? You'll tell the truth more likely because you're not so concerned about upsetting people. You're likely more difficult to stop, um, and there's some utility in that once you're set on your pathway. But it's reasonable for you to take a good look at that because it could easily cause you and other people a fair bit of trouble.

Now, I don't know the rest of your personality configuration, so you know, if you're conscientious but low in agreeableness, well then you'll be able to keep and maintain contractual obligations—the sense of duty—which isn't the same as the empathic sense indicated by agreeableness. The sense of duty will keep you to your word, so if you're high in conscientiousness, well then you can rely more on contractual obligation—like what's the deal here, what's my end of the deal, what do I have to do to uphold that?

It has to be more explicit rather than implicit because you're not going to be a good gauge of other people's emotional state. And you said yourself personally, “I feel almost zero regard for the emotions of those around me, yet I can't avoid them and complete what I need to do at the same time.”

Okay, so you have a strategic problem as well. So, you also might practice—consciously practice doing things for other people, and you'd have to do that strategically. There is some evidence—I don't remember where I ran across this—that doing so is a facilitator of mental health, and so you might have to learn to be act agreeable more explicitly when you're undertaking something with someone.

You may have to learn to ask yourself explicitly what's in it for them, right? Why is this an equitable arrangement? If you're conscientious, that's going to be an easier thing to understand.

So, well, what can you do about being so low in agreeableness? Well, you can capitalize on your other personality traits. You know, maybe you're high in openness, and so what you can offer to other people is the opportunity to collaborate with you in a creative endeavor, and they might leap at that opportunity.

Maybe you're extroverted. Now, extroverted disagreeable people tend to be narcissistic, so that's a rough one because if you're extroverted and disagreeable, well then your narcissism is gonna be problematic, and that's especially true if you're low in conscientiousness because then you won't be able to keep verbal contracts either.

But if you're extroverted, let's say, well, you do have the option of being entertaining and enthusiastic, and that's something you have to offer other people. So you have to look at your entire personality constellation and figure out what you need to rely on to rectify those areas where you're, you know, where you deviate substantially from the norm.

You may also need to find someone in your life who is agreeable—assuming they can stand you. They might be attracted to you just out of perverseness, but, and ask for their opinion because their superior empathic sense, let's say, might lay them open to exploitation—that's the downside of high agreeableness, by the way.

But they're going to be much more attuned to the social niceties of a given situation. You might need to ally yourself with someone who's clearly more empathic, and you know control your tendency to take advantage of them if you can.

So, and then the last thing I said, well, practice, you know, doing things for other people. You might have to do it coldly and calculatingly, at least to begin with because you don't have that easy empathic sense. But that doesn't mean it has to be false, you know? It depends on what it's in service of, and if it's in service of rectifying and maintaining your relationships with other people, then that's an admirable goal, even if it's a cold cognitive goal rather than a warm and heartfelt goal.

And so it's certainly better than the alternative, which is to not do it at all.

I'm 25. I had a drug problem when I was younger in my late teens and early 20s. I stole money on multiple occasions. I don't even know who some of those people I stole from are and can't repay them. However, even in the instances where I could apologize or repay, I feel completely unable to. I'm too ashamed. This bothers me all the time. I can't sleep or do anything. I really hate myself. I think that I'm a rotten person and don't know how to handle it. Do you have any advice for this?

Well, if I was your therapist, I would say, tell me about every single occasion that you remember where this happened. Now, you can't tell me because I'm not there, but you could write it down and that would help it. And maybe you could write down why you did it. And maybe you could do that with a bit of compassion, you know?

I mean, obviously your behavior was sufficiently reprehensible to be plaguing your conscience, but at least you have a conscience—that's something. And so, and people make mistakes, especially when they're young, especially when they're added by drug use, let's say. That's there's plenty of occasion there for misbehavior—that's for sure. And it's pretty common.

In any case, you're plagued by this, so there is the past has still got its tentacles around you. Well, write it down. Write down every episode—every time you worry about something like that, write it down and get a list. That's your symptoms.

Then you know, the idea of approaching one of these people and apologizing and offering to repay them—that's a pretty good idea. Maybe you could list all the people that you stole from who you could do that with, and then rank order them in order of difficulty and then think about how you would approach the least difficult of all those people and what you'd say. And maybe you have to write that out.

Now, I'm not saying you have to do it, but you could do that to begin with and then you could decide whether or not you could do it with the easiest person, and then you could see how that goes. Maybe that actually helps. And then if you can't do that, maybe there are some other means of clearing your conscience.

So when you write all this down, write down how much you took and then maybe your goal could be you donate twice that amount to a charity—so you have to research charity and find one that you think is really valuable, you know, where it would do some good.

And so, you know, you don't have to pay it all back at once, but maybe you could pay once a month or whatever you could afford. And then you've atoned for your sin, let's say. And you've transformed something bad that the people who experienced have probably already forgotten about.

I mean, unless you were stealing huge amounts of money and destroyed their lives, they've probably moved on, and so you could transform your nefarious actions into something that was good.

Now maybe a donation to charity, you know, wouldn't do it for you. You could try it once and see if that helps, you know, pay off one of your existential debts and see if that helps. It's a negotiation with yourself.

And so then I guess I would also ask, are you more broadly depressed and anxious? You know what I mean? So are you fixating on this in a manner that's truly counterproductive? That's reflective of a deeper issue with depression or anxiety?

And you'd know that, for example, if you said, well, you know, you said you can't sleep or do anything, you really hate yourself—that's signs of generalization beyond the confines of these misdeeds. And so if that's the case, then perhaps even if you did atone for what you had done, other preoccupations with previous instances of unacceptable behavior would start to plague you to the same degree.

That's a more complex problem, and if that's the case, then, well, your best bet then is to find a competent mental health professional and have your circumstance evaluated. And you know, if you're really torturing yourself to death about this despite the fact that you've apparently ceased your drug abuse, well maybe there's something else fueling it, and you may need to investigate that.

So that's about all I can think of along those lines.

Why do we need to contemplate our own malevolence? What if you get stuck in it? How do you move forward after becoming aware of it, especially if you've actually done something bad? I'm not speaking of criminal behavior.

Well, I think the reason that we need to contemplate our own malevolence is so that we don't—I think it's a human propensity, a profoundly deep human propensity, to see the world in terms of good and evil, shades of good and evil, but even absolutes of good and evil. And we understand that malevolence exists, that now and then people act to hurt others.

Although apologists exclaimed that that's generally motivated by the desire for some good, I'm not convinced. There's a certain pleasure in vengeful harm, and we all feel the desire to be vengeful merely as a consequence of the, in some sense, the perceived central unfairness of existence itself and the undeserved suffering that seems to accompany it.

It's easy to become frustrated by that and embittered by that and to lash out and to hurt, and so that's malevolence. Well, and it's a very destructive force. Now we don't think well of it. So if you identify malevolence somewhere else than within, you can become powerfully motivated to take corrective action against the perceived source of malevolence.

I see that, for example, when critics of our social structures insist that the fundamental motivating factor that organizes those structures is the arbitrary expression of undeserved power or invalid power—privileged power, let's say. Well, yes, to some degree because every structure has its element of corruption. None of us are perfect and neither are institutions.

But the danger of that view is that once you've identified the locale of malevolence and it's not you, well then you're a moral actor and can do no wrong in your pursuit of the wrongdoer, and that's very, very dangerous.

It's not that easy to identify the wrongdoer, especially when you're talking about social institutions, and some appreciation of your own malevolence might stop you from being so vicious in your pursuit of the perceived wrongdoers who aren't you. And you know that one of the terrible attributes of utopian totalitarian societies is their proclivity to localize malevolence in some group and then their unbridled pursuit of destruction in relationship to that group and all the atrocities that go along with that as a consequence of that attribution of malevolence.

And so it's a tenet of the Judeo-Christian ethic that the adversary is best confronted within. And now, you know, you object to that for good reasons. Like, do you really want to do that? Do you really want to see yourself as a perpetrator rather than a victim or a hero? The answer to that is well no, it's devastating. It can be devastating.

But you know it says—it's been said that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and I think that that fear of God, so to speak, is allied with this apprehension of internal malevolence. I don't think that you can be motivated to be good. I don't think you can be serious about your attempts to be good unless you have some real sense of just how far off track you can get or have got and how malevolent you have been or could be in your actions.

You just don't take yourself seriously enough until you see the devil within. And when you see that, well, it can be traumatizing, and you're objecting to that. What if you get stuck in that?

And it's no wonder people don't want to contemplate it, but it's not easy for me to see how you can go through all the difficult gyrations necessary to put your moral house in order if you don't view yourself as akin to the perpetrator in very many important senses.

So, you take that on to yourself and try to rectify that within yourself. And so I guess you contemplate your own malevolence so that you don't unconsciously project malevolence onto others and assume your own, you know, assume your own moral rectitude.

Now, you know, this might contradict what I said about innocent before proven guilty, and those are difficult things to reconcile, you know, but I guess that's why the idea of original sin emerged at least in part. You know, it's not necessarily that any of us are specifically guilty of something, and that's the legal issue.

And maybe that's the issue with regards to your treatment of others when you're formally accused of a crime. The proper presumption is innocence. That doesn't mean the proclivity isn't there. So I know those things are hard to sort out, and maybe my explanation doesn't differentiate them, you know, as wisely as they might be differentiated.

But you can be sorely tempted towards something as an indicator of your malevolence without being guilty of acting that out, and you have to deal with the fact of sore temptation as well as the fact that you're innocent in that you didn't act it out.

So it's something like that. You have to localize malevolence somewhere because you tend to see it as an existential constant, right? It's something that exists in the world that needs a locale, and the safest locale and the most salutary locale I believe is the identification of malevolence within.

It isn't obvious to me that that's more traumatizing than localizing it in the social structures, for example, but it might be.

You spoke once about going into the deep to save your father, but I never knew my father at all, so who is it that I'm saving?

Well, I would say that you're saving your relationship with the paternal spirit. So the Egyptians had a god of the state that was Osiris. Osiris, he was the old king, and he was archaic and willfully blind especially to the machinations of his evil brother, Seth.

And so the Egyptians represented their knowledge of social structures in a narrative. And well, the social structure, you know, the culture is like an old king whose best days are behind him and who is always in danger of being overthrown by his evil brother. It's like a very astute representation of the state.

Well, Horus is the god of attention. He has—he's the eye, the famous Egyptian eye of Horus, and he's the falcon who can see. And so he pays attention, and that capacity to pay attention, as for the Egyptians, was what rescued Osiris from the depths of the underworld when he was overthrown by his malevolent brother.

So who are you saving? While you're saving Osiris, and that could be your father, insofar as the spirit of Osiris characterizes your father. But if you don't have a father, that doesn't mean that spirit isn't there.

So maybe what you're doing is rescuing your relationship with the central animating tendency of human civilization, insofar as that's paternal, or maybe you're rescuing your relationship with God—the father—that being an expression of that animating principle.

It's complicated, but that's the gist of it. So you repair your relationship with the culture that gave birth to you, and that's the father in the broadest sense. Well, not the broadest sense, because that would be God, but in a broader sense.

So you repair your relationship with what's common across all men—that might be another way of thinking about it.

Does life have meaning without God? Can life be meaningful without God and without eternity?

Well, at the highest and most abstract levels, perhaps not. So, I mean, life has proximal meanings, right? There's the meaning that you experience when you're engaged in a piece of art or when you're reading or when you're engrossed in a movie or in a conversation.

There's the meaning that emerges within your relationships with people that you cherish or are enthusiastic with. There's meanings of security and predictability. There's meanings of duty and responsibility and active engagement with your job and your career. There's meanings of aesthetic pleasure.

Now, all of those have their value, and each of them has their place. And you know, maybe there's a hierarchy of value there as well so that some of those meanings are deeper than others. And then you might say, well, what characterized the deepest of all meanings? And it would be something like a relationship with the transcendent that would establish a relationship between you and what's always been conceptualized as God.

Which is generally supposed to be something ineffable, right? It's not definable. But you might think about it as the central animating spirit of the age or the value around which all other values are organized or the wisdom of the ages or the creative spirit that possesses you when you're inspired or what grips you with enthusiasm at a sports event or at a musical event—all of those things.

And we need a relationship with that, and we find our deepest meaning in that relationship. And if we don't find it, I think if we don't find it in something that's explicitly religious, then we tend to magnify something of lesser value—say something political—into that to fill the void.

So yes, life has proximal meanings without God, without eternity. But at the ultimate level, something's lacking, and it's the desire to fulfill that lack that—and maybe the lack itself that's part and parcel of the religious instinct.

So you can kill God, but you can't—that doesn't rectify the hunger for God. And then that hunger seeks out replacements. That's how it looks to me. And then, you know, you might also say, well, does that mean you have to believe in God?

I don't think of the proper answer to that is that you need to agree with a propositional statement. Does God exist? Yes. Like, does this— is this table there? Yes. It's not that kind of relationship. It's characterized in the Old Testament as a struggle, so Israel means “those who struggle with God,” and you have to participate in that struggle.

You can do that, weirdly enough, as a believer, as a non-believer, maybe sometimes more intensely as a non-believer. The issue might be more paramount than the issue of virtue and the issue of the ultimate orientation.

Dr. Peterson, as an art student, I wonder how to create a poetic piece deeply storied and metaphoric without becoming a piece of propaganda. I feel like trying too hard to create a meaningful and poetic piece often results in the creation of something rife with bias and ideology. However, letting my unconscious take full control creates what seems like an empty and uninteresting piece. Is there a method to control that chaos without corrupting its meaning while still expressing it poetically?

For the time being, I decided to concentrate on learning good technique.

Well, the first thing I would say is that is what you should be doing as a student. You should be concentrating on learning good technique because those are the tools that you're going to have to express your creative intuition. So that's a great place to start.

You said you're a student, so well, you're not a master. You're a student. So of course, you're going to wonder how to create a poetic piece without becoming a piece of propaganda. You're going to be struggling with that your entire artistic career. You know, and you might say, well, the more tools you have at your disposal, the more opportunity you have to produce something of value and so great that it's the right answer to the problem.

Well, then trying too hard, I think a lot of what artists do is play. And so I remember watching this video of Pablo Picasso creating a painting on a piece of glass so you could see exactly what he was doing, and he'd paint and erase and paint and erase and paint and erase, and he was just playing and watching what was happening constantly. And he was sort of seeing what would happen, but he was very disciplined.

I mean, he had all the tools that is at hand, right? I mean, he'd gone through his apprenticeship. And so master your craft and play with what you're mastering, and those two will come together across time.

Now and then you'll produce a poetic piece deeply storied and metaphoric that isn't a piece of propaganda, and then you'll have succeeded as an artist, at least in that instance, and then maybe you'll be able to do that over and over.

So don’t try so hard—that's part of it, perhaps. That doesn't mean don't discipline yourself with regard to broadening your skill set; that's really a good idea. But then you have to bring the spirit of play into that and the spirit of discovery. Trying too hard—and then when you say you're trying too hard, what are you trying too hard to do?

You know, that might be worth thinking about too. Are you trying too hard to produce a high-quality piece of art? Well, maybe that's not the right goal. Maybe the right goal is something like I'm going to play with these new skills that I've developed and see what happens.

I mean, Picasso, for example, there's an online archive of Picasso's work, and you know, when he was painting roosters, he painted hundreds of them. I think Picasso produced 60,000 paintings—some outrageous number of paintings, and they were by no means all masterpieces. Although perhaps that's cynical—there were plenty of masterpieces, that's for sure, and so I'm not saying this in a denigrating fashion.

You could see Picasso approaching a masterpiece in his repeated attempts to represent, say, something like a rooster and represent it this way, represent it this way—I represent it this way—producing multitudes of variants and then, you know, honing in on the ultimate goal or being able to select from all those variants the optimal representation, playing—playing hard, playing in a disciplined fashion, playing with the tools that he had.

And so, and that's part of letting the unconscious in, right? Is to let the process of play take you where it's going to go. Maybe you have to abandon the idea of producing the finished piece of art, or at least you have to abandon the idea of producing it on that occasion because art is a process of exploration right as well.

So confining that to the production of a given entity too brutally is going to impede the manifestation of that spirit.

Is there a way we can reach people who are controlled by ideology? If schools are bent on teaching CRT and other Marxist-inspired doctrine, how can we turn the tide?

Is there a way we can reach people who are controlled by ideology? Yes—by acting honorably and by telling a better story. So that's the goal, right? You have to tell a better story, or you have to act out a better story. And telling it would also be helpful.

You have to offer something more attractive fundamentally, and that doesn't mean that there's no room for criticism. But I think telling a better story is the fundamental issue. If schools are bent on teaching critical race, they're in other Marxist-inspired doctrine; how could we turn the tide?

Well, I offered some ideas about that. Tell a better story. It's not self-evident that indoctrinating students at school is going to work that well. I mean, I remember myself as a junior high school student, and my friends, we were pretty cynical about what we were being taught, especially if it was contaminated by something that it shouldn't have been contaminated by.

And so it might be that pushing all this has exactly the opposite consequence, at least over the long run. We'll see, but basically, you have to tell a better story, and you have to get your arguments in order.

And so if you have kids, well, that's a tough one. You can discuss what they learned at home. You can encourage them to use their judgment. I told my kids, you don’t have to follow stupid rules, but if you break them and you get caught, well, you have to deal with that.

But as far as I'm concerned, you know, if you've thought it through and the rule is stupid, then, well, you're free to oppose it as long as you're willing to take the consequences. So, you can have intelligent discussions with your kids, especially if you're interested and they're willing to bring things up.

You can keep an eye on what they're being taught, and then maybe you can object to the teacher and you can object to the school board—best to do it in writing.

And I would also recommend and encourage that.

I've cleaned my room and feel called to serve the greater community. What are some signs that you're ready to go into the world and serve people?

Offer you opportunities, or you see opportunities, and maybe those are the same thing. If you're ready, your readiness primes you to be cognizant of the next steps forward. If you put yourself together, other people are going to recognize that, and they're going to put opportunities in front of you, and then you can say yes, and away you go.

That's how that works out. So another sign—well, you said you feel called to serve the greater community. Okay, so that's a sign as well. I mean, assuming that it's not mere expression of narcissism on your part, you're ready for it.

So watch and look and see if you see an opportunity that inspires you or that someone offers to you, even if it's lowly in that direction, right? Even if it's starting at the bottom—starting at the bottom is fine. You learn that way. You learn everything about what you're doing by starting at the bottom, and there's something to be said for that.

So, last question: in your last Q and A, you said you decided to take the vaccine. My friends and I were surprised by this. Is it safer than I think?

I don't know. You know why did I get the vaccine? Well, balance of risk, I suppose. I don't need COVID. I've had enough health trouble, and I had COVID, so I had COVID, and I got the vaccine because some blood markers indicated that my immunity might not be what it should be.

Was it the right thing to do? How the hell do I know? I don't bloody well know. I don't think the vaccine makers are conspiratorial fundamentally or any more than any other organization. My wife was very ill in recent years and is somewhat immunocompromised, so that entered into it.

I wanted to stop worrying about COVID. It seemed to me that the evidence that case rates plummeted after the vaccine was strong. I've had vaccines before, and they don't seem to have hurt me. I felt some obligation not to be a carrier, although I would say that wasn't the prime issue. I'm sick and tired of the lockdown and assume that if in Canada we reach a certain threshold of vaccinated people that it'll be done with, and I'm ready for that and willing to take some risk for it.

But, you know, I have family members who don't want to take the vaccine, and I can certainly understand why, and I'm not beating my chest at them. So, balance of risk. I was more concerned about not getting it than I was about getting it, so I got it.

And I'm not saying that's any moral accomplishment on my part, it just seemed like I was tired of the lockdown and so tired of worrying about it—not that I was worrying about getting COVID that much. But, you know, it gives me some moral authority when I say enough of this as well, you know, with these rules that have been applied to us, curtailing our civil liberties like I had the goddamn vaccine, so get out of my face.

And maybe that's the fundamental profession.

Alright, thank you for listening, assuming you're still listening. See you at the next Q and A!