In Conversation with our Dreamers, Renegades, Visionaries: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson [Extended]

Bock is hard to listen to; you have to listen to his pieces over and over. At least I do. I don't suppose you have to if you're a musical genius. But because the goal interpreted them personally, it was easier to take the music apart and understand in an auditory way what Bach was trying to do.

Music helps demonstrate the reality of meaning, and it does that for everyone. It does that for people who are deeply atheistic or even nihilistic, and that's interesting too. Because you can take bitterly dissing, they listen to music and they're overwhelmed by a sense of… it's really a sense of religious meaning. They don't even notice it, except that without it, they'd be in trouble.

Some people, who they're low in openness—which is a psychological trait—are pretty opaque to what art represents. They have a hard time with it or maybe they need more less sophisticated art. It's too shocking to them if it's sophisticated and profound; they can't handle it. Lots of people are terrified by art.

If they like things, they like music; they like kitsch. Because if it's real, it's too much for them. They're terrified of it. They'll say, "I don't like that." It's like there isn't that they don't like it; it's that they can't handle it. They're afraid of it. People are even afraid of color. You know that's why everybody uses beige in their decorating and creams.

You know, they're terrified of color. So people are terrified of deep truths. And no wonder. They wouldn't be deep if they weren't terrifying. When we look at the world, we see objects—handleable and usable objects—in motion. But that isn't really what the world is like.

What the world is like is a set of interlocking and interconnected patterns at multiple levels of resolution, from the tiniest to the largest, all playing together in a patterned and somewhat predictable manner. Not completely predictable—like music isn't completely predictable.

And so the reason that music is meaningful when you listen to it is because music demonstrates to you what the structure of the universe is actually like. Your senses, your visual sense, blinds you to that because it's more practical in a way. It shows you what you need to right now, whereas music gives you this sculptural picture of quantized patterns interacting at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously.

And that enthuses people with a sense of meaning. Our truly artistic production is full of inarticulate meaning. It's inarticulate because it's still in the developmental stage before articulate knowledge. And so it grips people with a sense of significance, but they can't necessarily say why.

The reason they can't say why is because the why for that kind of meaning hasn't been explicated. The reason that art is meaningful to people is because art is meaningful. It's full of the next set of ideas—this is one way of looking about it—or it's full of eternal ideas that people still haven't fully comprehended.

And so you can't help but be gripped by it.