Q & A 2018 03 March

Hello everyone. Apologies for the delay. I hope this is all working. I'm taking questions from Patreon people today, so there's 841 questions ready to go. So hopefully, I'm up to this.

What should teaching and research in the humanities look like? I'm going to grad school for literature, and I don't want my work to serve ideological possession. Well, the thing is, first of all, is that you kind of have to educate yourself when you go to graduate school. You know, you have your courses, but I don't think that you learn more than about 10% of what graduate school can teach you by taking the courses. You have to read, and the mistake that most people read is make is that they only read what's being published in the last five or six years in their own narrow field, and that's increasingly a bad idea.

The libraries are full of classic books, and I would say take your field, go back to the beginning of the field, at least read the people who wrote the classic works, bring yourself up to date, and then familiarize yourself with as much history, as much history of art, as much history of literature, and literature as you can possibly manage. You want to learn as much as you can about everything. I would also say you have to do that with a certain degree of specialization; you have to pick one topic and really become expert at it. But it'll serve as a doorway too because everything's connected. It'll serve as a doorway to what's behind it. So, you focus on one thing and read as much as you can on that; that's your specific discipline. Then outside of that, read as widely as you possibly can manage.

The other thing I would really recommend, and this is also true if you're going to university, is it isn't enough to read; you also have to write. And if you're gonna go to graduate school, you should write every day. It's a good idea for anyone who wants to develop themselves intellectually. But even half an hour a day, you know, that's a hundred and eighty hours a year; that's a lot of thinking because writing is thinking. You should be writing out your understanding of what you wrote or what you read, and the questions you have about it, and trying to formulate what you regard as clear questions and problems and also clear answers for both of those. And that's how I would say you should approach graduate school.

Have you thought about slowing down? There are people worried about how hard you're pushing yourself with the countless commitments. Yes, well, I would say that those people worried about that include, I don't know if it's me, but certainly my family, they're worried about it. But I'm putting competent people around me increasingly to handle the scheduling of the public events, for example, and I have good agents and a good publisher, and I'm learning how to manage this.

I think I'm not really interested, I suppose, in slowing down, although it has been a bit much in the last year and a half. I do better in some ways when I'm working flat out. If my health was good, it's better than it was by a large margin, and maybe it's still getting better. If my health was good, none of this would be an overwhelming challenge. But I'm trying to do everything I can to put my health in order, and many, many things have been fixed. So, yeah, I thought about slowing down, but I've decided against it, I guess is really the final answer to that.

That's the other thing, you know, there are times in your life where it's not time to slow down; it's time to become more efficient. That's the thing; you can become so efficient. You know, you end up doing things in five minutes that would otherwise take you a week. That might seem like an exaggeration, but, and I suppose it is to some degree, but it's not that much of an exaggeration.

So as you take on more responsibilities and you determine that you're going to become more efficient, the responsibility pushes the efficiency. So what do they say? There's time enough to sleep when you're in the grave. Many who respect your work feel your tweets are often impulsive or even expedient, very funny in certain interactions. Would you consider a change in the way you tweet?

Well, I've been considering that for a very long time. One of the things I did in the last month, which I think was productive, Twitter's a hard dishearten to manage because it rewards impulsivity, and I have somewhat of a temper, and I suspect that it's maybe I'm more susceptible to being tempted to respond in a too forceful manner. Maybe I'm more tempted by that than I should be, but Twitter is really useful. I mean, it does keep me updated with regard to the ongoing, let's say, war that's raging at the bottom of our culture, and it does enable me to stay in contact with people at least to some degree.

It's a great way of communicating small but at least in principle important ideas and also to let people know about what I'm doing on YouTube and with the tours and all of that. People seem to respond positively to those sorts of notifications. So what I did do in the last month was to find people—I tweeted out one day; I asked people to send me the Twitter handles of organizations or individuals who were reporting on positive developments in a credible and realistic way.

Human progress org seems to be doing that really well. I thought it would be good to tilt my Twitter feed toward, or to my Twitter actions toward things that are positive and also true as much as possible. So I've started doing that in the last month. I feel somewhat of an obligation—if I'm being discussed publicly by journalists or other professors and they misrepresent me or misrepresent the ideas that they're purporting to discuss, then I feel like I have a moral obligation—I suppose one is to defend myself, I suppose, and certainly to object to the misutilization of ideas by my fellow academics.

I don't know if that's reasonable or not; it's not easy to figure out in a situation like this how much you shut up, how much you stay patient, how much you push back, how much you fight, how firmly you respond, whether or not to use wit. I mean, the rule I tried to outline in my book, "Twelve Rules for Life," there's a chapter called "Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them," and there's a philosophy of discipline in there, and it really has two dimensions, let's say, or two—it's at the juncture of two ideas.

One idea is that you don't want to make any more rules than necessary because you get tangled up in them, so minimum necessary rules—that's a good guideline for setting up any structure even in dealing with yourself. And then if you're going to have rules, you have to enforce them because otherwise they're not rules. And so how do you enforce them? With minimal necessary force? Some of that has to be played with, you know, and experimented with. So minimum force—that's a really good principle, and I try to govern myself by them in my Twitter behavior.

But, and I hope that that's successful. You know, sometimes when I've gone after people, I went after a couple of journalists in Canada last year who wrote what I would regard as scurrilous and incompetent articles. That's a bad combination, and you know, it was kind of a harsh exchange, I would say, but it isn't clear that it was the wrong thing to do. So it's hard to know how much you have to skirt the ragged edge of disaster if you want to do things right.

So anyways, I am changing the way I tweet because I'm trying to make it the bulk of it informative and positive. I guess I should say something about that too; you know, there's a lot of really good things going on in the world. So we have poverty—absolute poverty—between the year 2000 and 2012, which was three years ahead of what the UN had hoped would happen. You know, cynics say, "Well, you have absolute poverty," and, but the cutoff was kind of arbitrary; it was a dollar ninety a day if I remember correctly, which obviously is quite low, so it's not a real transformation—it's like it's a real transformation.

Some number had to be picked to represent absolute poverty, and I don't suspect the UN erred on the side of capitalist over-optimism; perhaps they did, but hundreds of thousands of people are being connected to the power grid every day. Fresh water is available not to fewer and fewer people, but to more and more people, and that's happening extremely rapidly. No starvation in India and China is a thing completely of the past; you never hear about that. And that's pretty much the case for the rest of the world except now and then for political reasons.

So, you know, everybody's got a cell phone, or anybody who doesn't is gonna have one in the next 10 years, and that puts in people's hands a degree of communication and access that would have been absolutely incomprehensible even 15 years ago. So it seems to me that the reason that I changed—it seemed to me that it was worthwhile to change the way that I was using Twitter because all these good things are happening.

And just concentrating on this polarization process that seems to have gripped us in the West seems counterproductive given all those good things that are going on in the background. Now, that doesn't make what's going on in the West with regards to political polarization trivial, but it does set it inside a much more positive context. So that's something to keep in mind.

Whatever clients need for autonomy/identity in therapy, they would prefer that which is meaningful and therefore under their control. Is this not unhealthy? Hmm. I'm not exactly sure how to meet what to make of that question. Well, first of all, let's try. Whatever clients need for autonomy, identity in therapy—that's paramount. I mean, again, in my book, and in Chapter nine, assume the person that you're listening to knows something you don't, so that you can learn something, maybe because you need to learn something.

Because, like, what do you know in therapy? I don't think that if you're a good therapist, you try to take responsibility for the decisions that your clients make. You don't take that decision-making onto yourself because you have to adopt a position of radical ignorance. No, a person is sitting across from you, and this is true of every person; you know, a person is sitting across from you, and they don't understand themselves, but you really don't understand them.

And if you're a therapist, or maybe even if you're a friend or a partner for that matter, the person wants help, and so something's wrong as far as they are concerned, and there might be some way to fix it. That's your initial starting place, I would say, and both you have to kind of agree on that in a psychotherapeutic situation. Well, but you don't know what's wrong. You know something's wrong because the person is upset enough to come and seek counseling, so they want to set their life right, but you have no idea what's wrong.

You don't know anything about the way they think or what they value or what their past is or how, or what they're like physiologically or what their temperament is like or how things are going in their relationships or what their career is like. You just—the things you don't know about that person, man, it's intersectionality gone mad, I can tell you that. And so you've got to listen and let the persons tell you what it is that's wrong as if you don't know because you don't know.

And you have to ask questions of clarification. But you always have to remember not only do you not know what's wrong, maybe the person doesn't know what's wrong. It's highly probable they know that something's wrong, but they don't know exactly what, and they certainly don't know what caused it. And so you've got to listen radically and clarify and ask questions and make sure you're not confused so that you do understand, and maybe you can help the person start to understand what they're talking about or thinking about.

Just talking and thinking are very much the same thing. And then, well, maybe you get some sense of what's wrong, and maybe some sense of how it came about. God only knows how long that'll take, and then the next thing you have to figure out is, well, what would a solution look like? Like, even hypothetically, what does the person want? And do they know what they want? And if they don't know what they want, then how can you help them figure out what they want?

And how do you help them figure out what they need, and how do you help them admit to that? All of that, and so that's a boatload of listening there again, you know, and it's the same in every relationship that you have. If you try to foster that person's development, you want to find out, well, what's wrong in their lives? And you know, but they have to figure that out because they're the ones that will have to bear the responsibility for the decisions.

So you don't want to take that onto yourself. It's like, well, I don't want to tell you what to do because I don't know what you should do. Like, we can both agree that you should move toward what's better for you and hopefully for the people around you because we would include that in the definition of better, right? Because otherwise, it's not sustainable. But we have to talk forever to find out what that is.

And you have to be very incautious to think that you can make decisions for someone. It's an arrogant move, and it's an ill-advised move, and you shouldn't do it if you're properly terrified of your errors because, well, again, I'll repeat, you're not the one that's going to have to take responsibility for the decisions—they are. So it has to be left in their hands.

And so autonomy—it's everything in a clinical practice. No, that doesn't mean that you can't help a person strategize. You know, you might say, well, as you're moving towards some formulation of the problem, you might say, well, here's five things that it might be, or here's a list of things that might be bothering you, or you can make suggestions. But they can't be baited suggestions either; you can't overweight the one you hope they'll choose. You know, again, it's incautious.

A lot of this, I would say I learned well from thinking about it, but also from reading Carl Rogers. I'd really recommend Carl Rogers; you know, he was a smart guy when it came to listening. You can really learn a lot from him, and he was also smart in how he outlined the client's need for autonomous development, and that's the development of the individual.

So, any update on your plans to start providing independent classes or an online university? Well, I'm working with some young people right now who are very, very smart. The first thing we're going to build modules by the looks of things. Each module hopefully will stand alone because then we can test them instead of launching a whole university, which seems to be a crazy thing to do.

We're going to make independent modules for different purposes and then launch them, probably as quasi-independent products, let's say, to see if there's a demand for them. So the one we're working on right now—and I'm not gonna say too much about it—is a competitive writing module where you'll be able to look at paragraphs and paragraphs that other people have written of a variety of sorts.

I don't think I'll tell you about that; I better wait. So, anyways, we're going to write a competitive writing module, and because one of the big problems, the biggest problems that has to be solved for any online university is how do you teach people to write? Because you don't want the university just to be lectures and multiple-choice tests, even though that could be done with some degree of reasonable competence.

Mostly, what you want when you educate people is to educate them not so much into factual knowledge but intellectual skill—they have to be able to speak, so we'll need a speaking module, and they have to be able to think, and we'll have to develop exercises that are relevant to critical thinking. Writing is a big part of that, so they have to be able to read, and so those are the big problems to solve.

And then the other problem for an online university is accreditation, obviously. We've got some ideas about that. And also, what do you do with regards to the social element? Because that's a huge part of university—to develop an intellectual peer group, right? That's really an important part. You know, it's not going to be easy to replace that online because, you know, the relationships that people make in college often last—well, they can last for decades, or maybe they can last a lifetime for that matter.

But it's a place where you can elicit adult identity, and the peers that you pick are a big part of that. Of course, some of the peers that you pick when you go to university should be the great people of the past. That's really what university is for, is to make them in some sense your peers. Now, that, you know, that's pushing it because you have to do a lot of work before they become peers.

Anyways, we're definitely working on this. Part of the problem is that I'm—it's hard. It's—what's the problem? I'm doing enough other things at the moment so that finding the time to do this credibly in addition is one of the major challenges.

So I married young and have had only one sexual partner. Now, I desire variety but value my marriage and will not cheat. Any insight in overcoming this conflict? As a matter of fact, yes, I would say get the variety with your partner. You know, there's lots of games you can play to spice up your sexual life. You know, buy some lingerie; like buy a hundred pieces. You know, buy something sexy for your partner to wear, maybe multiple things; buy whatever you need that you might want to experiment with.

You know, I mean, you have to introduce that spirit of pretend, play that you had when you were a little kid into your sexual life, and then you have many partners in the same person, and you put some thought into it. You know, I mean, sex is something that—that sex is a domain in which expertise can be developed, just like any other domain. And some of that's play and fantasy play and all of that, and some of its sexual technique.

And I guess then the other thing I would say is take stock of each other and see if there are things that you could do in your life that would make you more attractive to one another. You know, those are hard questions because no one wants to say, well, you know, I'd be more attracted to my wife sexually if she just acted X, Y, and Z, and the same with regards to how a wife's contemplation of her husband.

But those are the real questions, man. It's like if your partner isn't acting in a manner that is sexually attractive, then either there's something wrong with you or there's something wrong with them. And of course, I know people have ill health and all of that; I'm not talking about that. But those harsh judgments that your sexual attraction makes are also very useful ways of orienting yourself toward proper behavior in the world.

So I would say any insight in overcoming this conflict: now I desire a variety but I value my marriage and will not cheat—well, admit to the variety that you want and see to what degree you can fulfill that within the confines of the marriage. It's also part of coming into contact with the shadow, I would say. If you want to look at it in a Jungian perspective, you might have all sorts of sexual desires that part of you feels should remain taboo, and maybe they should.

I'm not suggesting absolute sexually libertine behavior; old sexuality has to be regulated very carefully. But you might be able to push yourself with some time and effort and contemplation, some admission of fantasy, and all of that, into domains of sexual satisfaction that you haven't achieved before.

Why do I not discuss religious fundamentalism more often and more in depth? Many people consider you a religious apologist as a consequence. Well, it's okay if people consider me a religious apologist; I am a religious apologist. So an apologist is someone who makes an argument for something, and I'm constantly making arguments for a religious perspective on life—a religious orientation toward life—an orientation that's centered in meaning, an orientation that's centered in the desire for all things to thrive, insofar as that's possible— a desire for people to speak the truth and act out the truth and act responsibly and all of that.

And I think that there's something transcendently necessary about all of that, and I think it is the antidote to hell, so that makes me a religious apologist. The fundamentalists—I don't know which fundamentalists you mean. If you mean the Christian fundamentalist, well, I understand where they're coming from. You know, Christianity is an ethical framework above all else, and it's predicated in a story about the way the world is constituted, and the story provides the foundation for that ethic, and the ethic unites the community and gives people direction.

This is a big deal. Now, if the story is challenged, if the foundational story is challenged, which is certainly what happened as a consequence of the rise of empirical science, then the foundation for the ethic starts to shake and tremble, and that threatens the ethic. But the ethic is what holds people together and gives them direction, so you can't just lose the ethic.

So the fundamentalist Christians are all short-circuited because they know that there's something to the ethic, and they understand that the foundation has been shaken, but they don't know what to do about it. So they insist that the foundation has not been shaken, and I understand that. So I think the way out of that is to understand that the truths that govern ethics and the truths that govern the description of the world as a material place are not the same. They're not of the same kind.

How they're related, I'm not exactly sure, but there's no simple one-to-one relationship. You can't describe the world and then immediately extract out an ethic. It's partly because there are just too many ways of describing the world and this is the fundamental point of difference, as far as I can tell, between Sam Harris and I. Hopefully, we'll discuss it in the summer.

So that's the Christian fundamentalists, and I don't really see that they're a particularly threatening group, as far as I can tell. I mean they're certainly not in the ascendance by any stretch of the imagination. They're not involved in any particularly reprehensible political behavior unless you count conservatism, and it is by no means obvious that they're even holding their ground in the culture war, so I'm not very worried about them.

Islamic fundamentalism, that's a whole different story, but I don't know enough about it to discuss it intelligently. I don't understand Islam; I'm concerned about its, what would you call, compatibility with the Democratic West. It isn't obvious to me that there are medium to high functioning Muslim democracies. I suppose Turkey's the closest one, but Turkey's pretty shaky at the moment. I think that the failure to separate church and state, or even if we don't call it a failure, the fact that church and state hasn't been technically separated in Islam makes it difficult to understand how it's possible for Islam and modern Western Democratic traditions to coexist.

I don't know how that gap can be bridged. You could say, well, with goodwill, and let's hope that's the case. That doesn't mean I don't think that Muslims can live in a modern Western democracy. I mean there are many, many kinds of Muslims just like there are many kinds of Jews and Christians. And then there's the problem of the current proclivity of the extreme end of the Muslim fundamentalist world to be very violent in very many ways.

And so you know, I'm not a great admirer of the Saudis, to say the least. I don't appreciate their brand of Wahhabi Islam, and I don't appreciate their exporting of that view with their petrol dollars to the rest of the world. So I guess that's what I have to say about fundamentalists.

Hello, Dr. Peterson. I've been trying to listen to my conscience, but I can't tell the difference between fear, willful blindness, or genuine conscience. Well, the first thing I would say about that is it is quite clear that you are in fact trying to listen to your conscience because that's probably the first thing that you discover, so that's a really good question.

Okay, fear. Well, here's a test, and you don't want to do this stupidly. If you think that you should do something, and you think that the reason you might not be doing it is because you're afraid, then you should do it. So that way, you can find out if it's fear. You know, I think your question is, well, how do I know my conscience isn't just masquerading as fear, saying, well, you shouldn't do that, but it's rationalizing the real issue, which is you're afraid of doing that.

Yeah, see, here's a reason that you want to tell the truth, and I part—I kind of figured this out when I looked deeply into the Pinocchio story. You know, in Pinocchio, as Pinocchio strives to become real, he has a conscience to guide him, but it's Jiminy Cricket—this insect. But Jiminy isn't really a very good conscience. He's a bit dogmatic, to begin with—dogmatic and inexperienced.

And so it's not like the conscience is an unerring guide; it's like a partner in discovery. As you move forward in your life and you consult your conscience and you listen to it, then it gets smarter, and so do you. But there's a coda there, and this is why I've suggested so frequently in my lectures and in my book that people try not to lie.

You see, there are many systems—you have many systems, let's say—that guide you. And one of those is your capacity for rational thought, and then you have a variety of emotional systems and motivational systems and internal dramas and intuitions and bodily sensations—like lots and lots of senses. Lots of systems that are guiding you, and many of them operate, you might say, unconsciously, autonomously, instinctively, implicitly—all of that.

Now you, nonetheless, you program them—like you feed them content, let's say—just like you feed your body nourishment; you feed them content. And a lot of the content that you feed them pertains directly to your voluntary thoughts and speech and your actions. And then if you pathologize those by lying, so if you say things that you know not to be true, or you don't say things that you know to be true when you need to, which is more common.

And if you act in ways that you consider reprehensible, then you pathologize all of those autonomous systems that guide you. It's like you're programming them badly. You're building an AI system inside yourself, really. And in some sense, that is what you're doing. That has very bad—it's very bad training data.

And so the output it produces won't do properly. And so you don't want to pathologize your guidance systems; it's a really bad idea. So that's why you have to not lie. And maybe that's also why you have to say what you have to say, and you have to say it clearly as well, and you have to learn how to do that.

So that's one of the ways of getting your conscience straightened out. And then you have to have a dialogue with your conscience, and you might ask, it's like, okay, well what should I do, or what should—I should I do this, or should I not do this? So let’s say you're thinking, should I not do this in the case of a temptation, maybe you have a chance to develop a new relationship, you know, and you're excited about it and apprehensive about it and afraid of it, and you don't know how to sort out all those feelings.

And the first thing is you really have to want to sort them out. That's why you have to orient yourself to something that's a genuine up. You know, the star above the horizon—you have to really want things to be straight, and you have to have thought that through. You have to know what it means for things not to be straight, and really what it means is that you're headed for hell in one way or another.

And if you understand that, it's enough, maybe it's enough to scare you straight. You really got to think that through. Then you've got to think about how much better it would be if you aimed up, and that really has to kind of permeate your whole being. And so then you're oriented that way; you're oriented up, and you're deciding that it's okay to try to tell the truth, and then you can start to rely on this dialogue with your conscience.

But both of you have to learn, and you're going to make mistakes along the way, you know, that's okay. You can say, well, I'm gonna try this without being certain that it's right. You can even say, I'm going to say this without being certain that it's correct. Like if you're arguing with your wife or your husband or your sister or your father and you have an idea about what might be going on, you can say, look, here's my idea about what's going on.

Who knows what that idea might be contaminated with? Like maybe I'm putting it forward just because I'm too proud or arrogant or angry or fearful or whatever. That's possible. Let's see if we can figure that out. But you can offer tentatively and have at it—that's what you do if it's a hypothesis, right? You both have at it and see if it's an idea that's worthy of keeping. You do that with your conscience, and then you work move forward.

There's a technique in behavioral psychology called psychotherapy called collaborative empiricism. So let's say that you and I have been sitting down, and we decide that you're gonna try something new this week, like maybe you're agoraphobic and you're having a hard time in a parking lot and so getting out of the car and going to the grocery store. So maybe we say, well, you know, drive to the grocery store, and you're just gonna walk halfway to the door, and that's good enough for like—do that every second day for a week, and then come back and let's talk about it.

So that's collaborative empiricism. You're running a little experiment. You think when your conscience is guiding you towards something you take a tentative step in that direction, and then you check and see, well, you know, did what I wanted to have happen occur as an outcome? That's the crucial question. That's the crucial question for behavioral truth, right—that's the pragmatic perspective. Did what I want to have happen happen as a consequence of my framework of interpretation and my action?

If the answer is yes, then I have not invalidated it. Right? That's pragmatic philosophy in a nutshell, and it's very, very smart. So you have a dialogue with your conscience that never ends, and hopefully, it gets wiser and you get wiser, and that's the dialogue that Jung talked about between the conscious and the unconscious, between your fantasy life, say—the life that's sort of underneath you, is a conscious being like you—the life that's part of your biological platform, the biological platform that somehow miraculously gives rise to your consciousness.

You have a dialogue with that; we're always in dialogue; we're always in dialogue, right? With everything. So pursue that. I've watched many hours of your videos, but I don't think I've ever heard you describe yourself on the Big 5 model. Care to tell us how you rank on each trait?

Yeah, okay, well there's a problem because I know the tests, and so it's hard for me to take them without being—well, because I know the tests, right? So it's hard for me to take them without the ever-present threat of conscious manipulation. I've gone through them with my family, you know, to see if we get a more accurate judgement. So I can tell you on the Big 10 scale, which is the Understand Myself personality scale, I'm pretty enthusiastic. I think it's the 75th, 80th percentile, something like that.

Ninety-ninth percentile for assertiveness, so I'm pretty extroverted, because those two together make extraversion. And then, with neuroticism, that's a hard one because I've had this problem with chronic depression that looks like it's autoimmune related. And so I felt a lot more negative emotion than the typical person does, I would say, by a substantial margin. Withdrawal—well, I don't seem to shy away from things, so you know, apart from the fact that I do feel anticipatory anxiety, which I think is secondary to this depression, let's say, I don't seem to shy away from things, so I don't think that temperamentally I'm particularly high in withdrawal.

I am more—it's not irritable—what's the next one, volatile? I'm higher in volatility than withdrawal by a substantial margin. I can be quite irritable, but again, it's hard to dissociate that from the depression. So anyways, my levels of negative emotion are higher than I would prefer. Agreeableness—I'm pretty compassionate, pretty high in compassion—like 75, 80th percentile. So, you know, and I'm relatively low in politeness, so I think—but not, you know, not fifth percentile; something like 30th percentile, forty percent—if I remember correctly.

So that means that, huh, it means that I'm blunt enough to hurt people's feelings now and then, and that I really don't like that because the compassion thing gets me. So conscientiousness—I'm moderately orderly, 70, 75th percentile, and like 99th percentile for industriousness. And then openness—both of them, intellect—in 99th percentile for intellect, and then it's like 95th, something like that for openness, or higher. So that's where I rank.

So my wife and I found out earlier in the year, and we may not be able to have children. Then last month, I was diagnosed with cancer. Man, how do I combat depression? Well, the first thing that we should point out here, I'm very sorry to hear about all that; that's a lot of tragedy in a very short period of time, man.

And I'm not gonna give you any casual advice because, but I maybe I can make some things clearer. The first is you're not depressed; you've had terrible things happen to you. That's not the same thing, right? I distinguish between them. If a client comes to me and they say they're feeling very sad and down and anxious and worried about everything, and so forth, then I kind of walk through their life.

Do they have friends? Do they have a family? Do they have a meaningful job? Is their educational background appropriate for their level of intelligence and ability? Are they taking care of themselves? Do they have something to look forward to? Do they use their time outside of work productively and wisely, etc.? So you think about those as the dimensions of a good life. There's more, or maybe there's fewer, but that's not too bad for a quick and dirty first pass through.

Let's say those are the dimensions. By the way, that you work on—if you do the future authoring program in the self-authoring suite, you're asked to think about all those dimensions and consider what your life might be like if you optimized along all of them. And so if you—if all of those things are going well for you, and you feel terrible all the time, then you're depressed because there's something wrong with your emotional regulation.

You know, I mean, maybe you're having an existential crisis; that's a possibility. But I mean, let's assume we can't see anything structurally wrong with your life, but you're feeling terrible. Then I would say, well, you have depression; there's something wrong. Maybe it's physiological, and people like that, in my experience, those are the people who often really benefit from antidepressants.

But then there's other sort of person who is in trouble. You know, they—their educational attainment is not what it should be. They don't have a job. They have an alcohol or drug problem. They have a family that's really not functioning well, or they don't have a family. Their immediate relationship, intimate relationship is non-existent or terrible. Their friends are non-existent or worthless and destructive. They don't get along with their relatives. They're in poor mental and physical health—get the picture?

That's—and they're not feeling good; their mood's low and they're anxious. That's not depression; like it might be, you know, but it's a terror. But what that is, is a terrible life, and those are different things. They need to be conceptualized differently. Now, even if you have a terrible life, an antidepressant might be able to lift you up enough so that you can keep fighting, let's say, assuming that that's what you're doing.

But an antidepressant obviously isn't going to help, isn't going to remove the facts of your terrible life. Now, you've got terrible things happening to you at the moment, and there's no simple answer to that. I would say you could take a look at Chapter 12 in my book, "Twelve Rules for Life." It's called "Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street."

And in part, it's an order by autobiographical chapter about how my wife and I and my family, my son and daughter and my extended family as well dealt with my daughter's extremely serious illness while she—it still plagues her to some degree, although not nearly as much as it did. She was very seriously ill when she was a teenager, and it was an ongoing crisis, continual four years of crisis.

And so the question is, how do you cope with that? And the answer is, the first answer is you shrink your timeframe. You know, you've had these—especially with regards to your diagnosis, it's like all of a sudden your future is being thrown completely into chaos, and you don't know how to deal with that. And who would? You do what you can to stabilize your medical treatment and to optimize your quality of life while that's happening—a very complicated thing to do.

And then I would say you live for the day, you know, for the week. Maybe weeks too much even, but for the day. Just like you get up in the morning and think, I need to do everything I can to make this day as meaningful and rich as I possibly can. And hopefully, I will have had a full day by this evening and then I'll be able to sleep, and then I'll be able to get up in the morning and say I'm going to try to make this day as useful and meaningful and engaging as it can be.

And then maybe when you're really sick, you don't have a day; you have hours, and then you do the same thing for the hours, and then maybe you do the same thing with the minutes. I would also say, you know, you've been through a lot of shock, and it's conceivable that you might need to talk to someone. It's also conceivable that an antidepressant could help you.

You know, you've got a lot to deal with, and you might need—your nervous system might need some stabilization with all that stress, and so that's something to consider. Antidepressants are also quite effective as pain medications, especially a drug called Cymbalta. So that's also worth knowing because you need to know about this—pain medication. It's very important in extreme situations of pain. Opiates, of course, are the drug of choice, but you can use drugs like methylphenidate, that Ritalin—the ADHD drug.

You can use them as adjuncts to pain medication, and people need to know that because they're basically amphetamines. Amphetamines have analgesic properties, but they also keep—they also maintain alertness. And so the problem with opiates is they can be sedating, but an opiate and amphetamine combination—and this is for people who are in absolutely intractable pain, by the way—that can increase alertness and help cope with pain, and it’s really useful to know what you might need to cope with pain.

So I would say shrink your time horizon and then—oh, thank you—okay, thanks, Tim—shrink your time horizon and then concentrate on the moment, whatever that moment happens to be. It might be the next minute, you know; I don't know what else to do when you're in an extreme situation. The other thing I guess the final thing I would say with regards to the—we may not have to be able to have children.

Well, you need a plan to address that to the best that you can, to the best way that you can. And then you have to give yourself some time to reconsider. We may not be able to have children; that probably takes about a year or a year and a half to digest. So don't be too hard on yourself if you haven't figured it out yet. Any major life transformation, like a really major life transformation, I would say takes a minimum of a year to really adapt.

Please give your perspective on why polyamory is bad for the individual in society. Well, I think the fundamental reason, there's a bunch of reasons. I mean, the first is societies seem to function better—that is, less violently, let's say—when there's one woman per man. If there's many women per man, there aren't many women for every man. There are a handful of men, let's say—a minority of men—a Pareto distribution of men who have a disproportionate number of women and a lot of men who have none.

And those aren't happy men; let's put it that way. They're men who are very likely to get up to no good very rapidly. So there's that. Then I would say the women who—let's say a man has many women, and let's say he's a desirable man for that matter, just for the sake of argument—if he has a variety of women, then those women don't have much of him, so they don't get to establish real individual relationships with him because it's going to be fragmentary.

And I don't believe that that's satisfying for people. I think that what you want, as much as you possibly can, is to have people around you with whom you can weave your life together over the short term, medium term, and long term. It adds depth to your life in a way that almost nothing else can.

And so what you do—and so I've been speaking more about permanent polyamorous relationships—you might ask, but what about sequential ones, where, in some ways, indiscriminate—indiscriminate—um, well, from just casual sleeping around? I think the problem with that is that to sleep around casually is to imply that—sex is casual. To imply that sex is casual is to assume implicitly that it can be divorced from the rest of life—emotional life, motivational life, values—all of that.

And you can divorce it, but you pay a big price for that. I think the price you pay is like the virtual—it well—the word psychopathic keeps leaking to mind, leaking to mind. Yeah, good old Freud—you have to reduce a person to the casual pleasure of a transient sexual interaction in order to sleep around casually. And I think that once you establish that as a habit with sex, which is a deep experience—if you if you'll do that with sex, which is a deep experience, then—and you learn how, then what makes you think that won't transfer to everything else that you do?

I don't see how it can fail to. So, you know, you could say, well, monogamy isn't a very good solution. It's like, well, life is a fatal—medical—what is it? A sexually transmitted disease with a hundred percent fatality rate, too, you know. There's lots of really complex problems for which we only have the best answer we can come up with, which is not a utopian answer. But I would say, and I think the evidence supports this as well, that stable monogamy is the best solution that we know of, and it's also the minimum necessary requirement for the stability of children.

So polyamory—it's wrong; it's wrong. It makes men violent; it increases inequality in the matter that makes things dangerous; it makes it impossible for women to have a deep relationship with men; it facilitates the, what would you call it, the transformation of sex into something casual. And then that spills out into the rest of the world; it deprives the people who engage in it of the opportunity of establishing a stable, long-term, mutually satisfying—it's more than that—mutually beneficial relationship.

You know, because a good marriage—the people in it gain more than—they're more than twice as good, right? The benefits aren't precisely linear, so you lose that, destabilizes the situation for children. There you go, man; that's a lot of things that aren't good—that's for sure.

How do you think altered state of consciousness or shamanic experiences can or should be integrated into modern life and scientific thought? Man, you guys, you're really asking some tough questions today. Well, the first thing that we should realize is that states of altered consciousness are people have been experimenting with them forever, and God only knows what the consequence of this.

I certainly believe that the old Greek mysteries were institution-induced hallucinogenic experiences. I think that most of the religious stories that we have are a consequence of psychedelic experience—most—a substantial number of them. It certainly seems to be the case with soma, for example, which looks like it was the fly agaric mushroom, the Amanita. People have been using hallucinogenic substances for a very long time, and they produce very incomprehensible sets of experiences, most recently documented by the research teams at Johns Hopkins, where they've shown that if you give people enough magic mushrooms, psilocybin, to induce a mystical experience, that you decrease their death anxiety and fear when they have cancer diagnosis, which is really something.

And that a single dose of mushrooms that produces a mystical experience has about an 85 percent cure rate for smoking, which is absolutely beyond comprehension. So the psychedelic substances seem to open up another plane of existence, so to speak, you know. And it’s that part of experience that has an infinite scope. Why they do that, how they do that, what that means? God only knows, God only knows. I don't think we understand psychedelics even a bit.

I don't think that they—what—I don't think they fit into our current worldview. So how should they be integrated? Well, you're a fool if you play with psychedelics. No, what did Carl Jung say? Beware of unearned wisdom. That's pretty damn smart. So you don't play with them. If you're inclined to experiment, then you should treat them with respect.

You should go into the experience with the expectation and the desire that you will learn something painful—if that's going to be—and that your life will be transformed in a positive direction. And you should pray to whatever Gods you worship that they don't rip you apart, you know? And then maybe you'll be sensible enough to learn something, and you'll be able to bring it back from the underworld and you'll build integrate it into your life carefully, and you'll be a better person as a consequence.

But be careful what you hope for. I don't even have the conscientiousness to sit down and do self-authoring. I bought it over a year ago and haven't opened it. What the hell is wrong with me? Well, lots of things, probably, because there's lots of things wrong with everybody. But let's not go right for the jugular, you know? Let's assume—let's assume that the problem is relatively simple before we assume that your character is beyond salvage—which is also something I would recommend if you're arguing with your wife or your husband or your partner. You know, assume that their character can be salvaged; it's a good way to start the argument.

So I would say, why don't you have a smaller goal? You know, so if you notice that you're not doing something—I'm not doing the self-authoring program—well maybe it's daunting to you, you know? Or maybe you're not very disciplined, or maybe both, or maybe six other things, who knows right? Maybe you're angry that you spent money on it.

It could be any number of reasons. Maybe you don't want a better life. Maybe there are things in your past you don't want to look into. Maybe you're afraid of your personality. Maybe you're terrified of the future and you don't want to think about it. God, any of those things can be true. But what you want to do is first notice that you're not doing it. It's like, oh, I'm not doing this. Well, I must be going about it wrong. Well, that's sort of the definition of wrong, right?

If you're trying to do something and you're not doing it, then you're doing it wrong, that's for sure, by your own definition. So let's say, well, if you're trying to do something difficult and you're not doing it, well, you could beat yourself with a stick until you do it, or you could hire someone else to do it, you know, metaphorically speaking, or even maybe really if you want to do it. But the best, barring that, the next best thing is to aim at something lower, obviously.

You're too useless to do the self-authoring program, okay? Ask yourself—sit on the edge of your bed and say, okay, I think I'd like to try this self-authoring program. Is there some step I could take toward that, that I would do? I would say, well, maybe you think what I have to do to do it well, I have to find my username and password; then I have to open the web—I have to turn on my computer; I have to look in my email; I have to find my username and password; then I have to find the site; I have to open the site; then I have to enter the username and password here, and then I have to start reading it.

Okay, so then you think—you've got to walk through it like it's a simulation. Which of those things are you unwilling to do? You can ask yourself, am I willing to go turn my computer on? Yes. Am I willing to open my email? Yes. Am I willing to search through my email for the username and password? Well, I'm a bit worried about that because I bought it a year ago; I'm not sure I'm going to be able to find the username and password.

Okay, do you think you can handle that potential disappointment and frustration? Yes, I could do that for 10 minutes. Okay, you can always buy it again if you look lost, right? If you really want to do it, it's not that big a deal. Okay, so it looks like I'll turn on the computer, I'll sit down, I'll turn on the computer; I'll open my email; I'll look for the username and password, and I'll buy it if I can't find it—that's a possibility. Will you actually do those things? Like would you do them right now?

Yeah, I think I'd do that. Would you also put the username and password into the program itself? Well, then you feel a little resistance—you think, well, maybe. Maybe I do that; maybe I wouldn't. Okay, would you put the username and password into the program and start reading? It's like—nope, that's too much. It's like, okay, then you might think, well, if I wasn't such a useless son of a—I'd just sit down and do the whole thing. It's like, yeah, maybe, but you are exactly that useless kind of son of a, and so you can ask yourself politely what you're willing to do.

You might find that you're willing to open the damn program and put the username and password in and like look at the first sentence, and that's a big accomplishment. It's like you could take yourself out for dinner for managing that, and I'm not being cynical. It's like, way to go! You opened it. That means you have to get over your anticipatory anxiety; like, that's a big deal. Maybe that's enough for the day. If you're fine that you're not doing something that you know you should be doing, ask yourself like seriously—like you would ask someone else, like you'd ask someone you care about: I'd like you to ask someone you'd listen to what it is that you're willing to do.

You won't clean up your room? Okay, will you clean up your closet? No. Will you look in your closet and like think about some things that you might clean up if you did it the next day? It's like yes. Well, there you go—successful negotiation. You know, you got it. You're not your own slave, and you're not your own tyrant. You have to deal with yourself; you have to negotiate with yourself just like you'd negotiate with another person.

So that means you got to take your—you see the way you find it? You want to accept it, and then you have to ask yourself like you'd ask a really bratty nine-year-old kid what you might be willing to do to put another foot forward, and then you have to do it—small as it is—in humility because you're so damn useless that was the best you could manage. It's like, well, it's better than nothing, so it's good enough. And if you do that every day, if you try that every day or every second day or once a week for that matter, you know, if you allow yourself to genuinely step forward on a reasonably regular basis, you'll actually move forward.

You know, even that will do the trick because the benefits will start to compound. So if you're not hitting what you're aiming at, aim lower—move closer to the target until you can hit it—until you can hit it with a little bit of effort. And accept that as your starting point. At least that's good; you found your starting point. Hooray! Hooray! You're on the path. Good for you. You know, it really—I'm serious about that.

My wife says I am like you, i.e., obsessed by ideas and seldom want to talk about much else. She wants me to ask if your wife is ever annoyed by it. Ha ha! No, I don't know if she's annoyed by that. I think she's worn out by it, you know? I mean, I'm amazed that she can—she seems to be able to live with me, which is asking quite a lot of someone because there's always a lot going on. You know? I mean, so I don't think she's annoyed by it. I think she's overwhelmed by it, and fair enough.

And maybe sometimes she's annoyed by it too. To be obsessed by ideas like that—well, that's part of being high in trait openness, especially if you're also extroverted—that's what you like. You know you're high in openness; you should have your wife take the Understand Myself test, and you too, and then you can look— we're gonna build this couples report pretty soon that will—I'm working on the paragraphs now—the infrastructure is already in place that will enable people to compare one another, but you know, it sounds like you're extremely high in trait openness, especially on the intellect dimension.

And perhaps your wife is lower on that dimension, and so take the test and find out, and then you'll both understand that it's characterological. So you might need to find people that share your intellectual predilection if your interests are more than your wife can easily and happily, let's say, tolerate.

Well, hi Dr. Peterson. I'm a member of the translators who translate your video into Chinese. How can I speak the truth and survive in China and protect my family? Oh man, well, the first thing I would say is, God, that's a hard question—carefully and carefully and attentively. How can I speak the truth and survive? Carefully and attentively.

I mean, I would say rule number one—rule number one—don't sully your soul. That's like rule number one in life, you know? You got to decide what's horrible. Obviously, being persecuted for your opinion is horrible; there's no doubt about that. But being unable to—being forced to live in a web of silence and deception is also horrible. I'm not going to say worse; I'm going to say also horrible.

So you've got Hobson's choice there. If you're going to do what you can to tell the truth, then do it with humility and care. Start within the confines of your own immediate circle, and don't get arrogant; don't get arrogant. Don't think you'll get away with it. You have to be doing it humbly and carefully. Push on what you can push on that you think might change, and don't be contemptuous of small victories.

And take care of yourself; be careful. You want to maintain yourself while you're making your attempts so that you can be around to do it for a long time. So, see, and I guess we could rephrase the last part of your question because we could also say, how can I speak anything but the truth and survive in China and protect my family?

I do believe that in the medium to long term, and all things considered, you never have a better bet than telling the truth. But I do say that realizing that there are places and times where it's relatively safe to do so and places and times where it's relatively unsafe to do so. And if you're in China now and for a very long time, you're in a place where it's relatively unsafe to do so, don't take unnecessary risks. But don't—but you have every reason to try to keep your soul and your word intact.

My brother committed suicide, and I'm taking care of my sister's kids aged seven and three until she stabilizes. How can I help them cope with the loss of their uncle? Well how do you help kids cope? You put a stable routine together around them so that they don't have any additional uncertainty in their life. You decide that you're oriented towards their future good. You know, you're gonna decide that as deeply as you can—are you resentful about having to take care of them, because you might be, and maybe you have your reasons too?

But I would scour your soul for that possibility and see if you can rectify it by whatever means necessary. Act responsibly and reliably, and that will give them faith in adults, which is good because they need some faith, and they're going to be adults so they need to have some faith in adults. Play with them; pay attention to them; play with them.

It's not a bad idea to teach kids how to come and get a hug. You can do that in a pretend play mode. You know, you say, look, let's practice something. Why don't you practice, pretend that you need some practice in figuring out how to ask for what? Because everybody needs a hug. You sometimes, even the three and the seven-year-old, both should be able to play that game.

And then have them practice until they get good at it so that when they're feeling lonesome, they can— and then you tell them, look, pretend you're feeling lonesome; how do you come and get a hug? And you've got to figure that out. You know, maybe they just come on it, and they look at your feet, and they say, "I'm feeling lonesome; I really need a hug."

And then you know—you can teach them to come and get attention from you when they need it. And that's really what a kid needs is to have someone there to pay attention when the kid needs it. That's really— that's really a good thing. The seven-year-old in particular is probably gonna wonder if he or she was the cause of the suicide. That conversation might come up, you want to watch the kid to see if there's any evidence that he or she believes that.

It's an easy thing for kids to believe because it actually helps them make a little bit of sense out of what happens. You know something terrible happened. I lost my dad; he went away; I wasn't good enough for him. You know, that's really easy—easy thing to think. So you might want to keep your eyes open for the necessity of that conversation.

I'm a minority; my kids are mixed. I resent the disempowering narrative of victimhood being handed to them. It's lazy and offensive. How to arm them against it? That's a good one. Well, the first question is you didn't tell me how old they were, so that complicates things. But I would say you better pay attention to what they're being taught in school.

My suggestion to parents is that if your kids are in a class where they talk about diversity, equity, inclusivity, gender, white privilege—that's not a bad—there's other words too, but we'll stick with those—that your kids should be encouraged to leave the class because they're not being educated; they're being indoctrinated.

Now that doesn't mean that there can't be an intelligent discussion about any one of those topics, but when they come together in a group, then that's a pretty good marker that you're in the vicinity of a radical leftist neo-Marxist ideology, and there's no excuse for that being foisted on your children. You may have to have a serious chat with your school, with your kids' teachers, with the principal.

You may have to learn how to formulate your arguments against the practice. Like if you resent it, what are you gonna do? You're gonna put up with it; you're gonna get angry and take it out on someone else; you're gonna do something stupid because you're resentful? It's like those are—that's likely, right? Are you gonna swallow it and get weak? I mean, Jesus, those are dismal options.

I mean first of all, you might want to find out if all your resentment is justified. You can talk to someone that you admire and see if you're just flying off the handle because maybe you are. But if you're not—well, if something is happening that you really don't like, that's a sign that you have to do something about it because your being is rebelling against that constraint.

So you have to get more educated; you have to get more articulate; you have to get more politically oriented, politically savvy, politically involved. You have to talk to people and make a coalition. You have to face down your children’s teacher. You have to come up with a plan for what happens if when you face them down nothing changes. You have to lay out a strategy of Indian war, or you have to live with your resentment and risk having your children disempowered by the narrative of victimhood.

That seems like a really bad outcome. You know, if they see you resisting it actively, then you are right then and there acting out then the contrary narrative. So if you don't believe that they should be described as disempowered, then you should act in a manner that indicates that your convictions have far more potency than you might believe.

Sam Harris has accused me of sophistry in my Bible lectures. How do you draw the line between sophistry and a valid reading? Well, welcome to the universe of literary criticism! Seriously, right? Because that's the real question. I look for patterns, you know, when I wrote "Maps of Meaning," which is my first book, I laid out a description of the way that we perceive the world, and I wanted to know if it was an accurate perception.

And so I tested it against multiple levels of analysis, and so I wanted to see—well, did it stand up? Did this story stand up logically? Was it in keeping with what was known at that point in terms of functional neural psychology? Was it in keeping with the literary tradition? Did it make sense from the perspective of mythology? All of these things.

And my supposition was that if the interpretation remained coherent across all those levels of analysis, the probability that that was spurious was very low. Just like you can think about it akin to the way that you detect whether or not something's real using your senses. You have five qualitatively different senses, and if one of them reports the existence of something, that might be faulty.

And if two report the existence of something, maybe even that would be faulty. But if five of them reported, then the probability that there's something there is starting to become high enough so that you don't die by relying on it, which is really the fundamental manifestation—indication of sufficiency.

You know, Sam's— I don't think Sam really accused me of sophistry precisely what he did was say, like the post-modernists say, "Any text is susceptible to a very large number of interpretations. How do you know yours is?" Well, you could say, true. This is where things get complicated because it depends on what you mean by true, which is another thing that Sam and I had a debate about.

You know, I act out my interpretations of the stories that I read and I detect their—the consequence of that action in the world and use that as another means of determining their validity. So acting in this manner—the manner that I believe is appropriate as a consequence of the way that I've interpreted, come to interpret these great mythological stories—has been of inestimable and estimable benefit in my life, and I think it's helped my family a lot—my immediate family and my broader family.

It's helped my friends; it's helped my students; it seems to be helping the broader community, and it's commensurate with what I know scientifically. And so if that's sophistry, that isn't sophistry because it’s just too many points of contact.

So, besides, you know, there's other ways of—there's other ways of protecting yourself against sophistry, too. One of the ways you can tell if you're a social scientist, and you've actually found something, is that you're not happy about it. So if you do a data analysis and you get a result and you think, oh God, that's the last thing I hoped for, then that's pretty good evidence—not conclusive, obviously—that's pretty good evidence that you've actually found something real—not sort of like the data for the data that's been generated by the personality theorist lately showing that as societies become more egalitarian, the proclivity of men and women to choose different occupational routes increases rather than decreases.

You can be sure that whoever made that finding—that isn't what they were hoping for because that's—well, first of all, who would hope for that? You know, there's not an ideology supporting that as a desirable outcome. I mean, it might be a great outcome because it means that as you make societies more sociologically e-flat, say, in terms of opportunity, men and women get to choose what they want, and they actually choose different things, and that's okay.

You could say that, but hardly anyone is. So there's almost no one who's happy when they find that. So often when you interpret a story, let's say, you come up with a self-serving interpretation, then you might think, well, I know I'm gonna trust that because it's self-serving. But often, if you— I believe is if you take the Jungian tack, for example, through the mythological material, you don't find what you want; you find the opposite of that. You said what's his prime dictum derived from alchemy? In Sterk, Williness, Invented Tor, which I'm probably butchering in terms of pronunciation, of course—no one knows because it's Latin—what you most want will be found where you least want to look.

Well, that's hardly a self-serving interpretation. Who's gonna generate that, man? But that's the dragon and the gold right there. So, you know, if your interpretation makes things more difficult for you, makes things more challenging, requires you to be more mature, requires you to be more responsible—all of those things—then I would also say that that's a testament to its validity because it's not self-evidently contaminated by impulsive self-interest.

So how is it that society has not learned from history about the dangers of socialism, Marxism, ideology, etc., after years? How do Marxists get away with it? Well, let's not go with the dangers of ideology; let's go with the dangers of, like, to call it radical left-wing ideology. Well, I think the reason for this—and this also might be the reason—be the reason that there's a strange thing: the iconography of communism is still acceptable socially, whereas the iconography of Nazism isn't.

Now I'm not saying that we should make the icons of Nazism socially acceptable either. I think that the communist icons shouldn't be socially acceptable, but they are. And there's probably a reason for that, you know? Now, part of it is that the left has never taken on—the radical left has never taken responsibility for being on the same side as the Stalinists and the Maoists and the Cambodian murderers and all of that, so that's part of it.

But then the next part is, I think there's something deeper. I think that, you know, inequality is a reality, and it's a reality that cannot be put at the feet of capitalism or at the feet of human political structure. There's a good book you guys might want to read—it’s called "The Great Leveler" by Walter Scheidel—and it's a new book, and it's a study of inequality.

And one of the things he does is do an empirical analysis of the relationship between inequality—the Gini coefficient, which is a measure of inequality—and the ideological position of governments. So here's the theory—the hypothesis would be, well, because the left wingers are concerned with inequality, if you measured inequality under left-wing governments and you measured inequality under right-wing governments, you'd expect the reduction in inequality under left-wing governments.

And the results are: no difference. And so what does that mean? It doesn't mean that left wingers are hypocrites, although it might mean that because people can be hypocrites; but what it means is the problem of inequality is so intractable that we don't know of any appropriate political, sociological, or economic solutions that actually work. It's a real catastrophe.

Now, inequality in itself might not be a bad thing unless it's too extreme. It's extreme when people start to starve, and then clearly something's—you know, it's very difficult to—I think everyone would agree that that's a suboptimal outcome. You know, we don't need to get all ideological about that, but some degree of inequality is useful because, well, it gives people something to strive for; it gives them an up, right?

It means— I was thinking about this, and sometimes you actually want people to be rich because if a new product is introduced into the market, the people there have to be people around who have substantial tools of capital to be able to afford it when it's still novel, and then that market brings the price down for everyone else.

And so if everyone had exactly the same income, it would be very difficult to introduce expensive products into the market with the hope that their price would plummet. That actually is a big deal; you want large pools of capital sitting around so that people can invest in very, very complex things, and you also want large pools of capital to be the hands of—to be in the hands of private individuals so that there are competitive forces that are powerful, that are competitive with the government and with other large organizations.

So anyways though, back to the Marxists—despite the fact that there are reasons for inequality, and despite the fact that you can't lay the fact of inequality at the feet of capitalism, and despite the fact that capitalism also appears to be making everyone not absolutely poor at the same time as it makes some people very rich, they're still inequality is still a painful reality, and no one really likes it.

You know, I mean, you can lord it over someone, I suppose, and extract out some sense of your moral superiority because you happen to occupy a hierarchical position. That's higher—and sometimes there's some validity in that, especially if you've earned it—although I would say, like glorying in it is probably a suboptimal outcome. It's still the case that that inequality violates a moral intuition that everyone has, I think, and that's probably the moral intuitions that lie along the agreeable axis.

It's like, what wouldn't it be better if everyone had enough? It's like, well, who argues with that? You know, I mean, everyone feels that way. And so I think a thoughtless compassion makes Marxism naively attractive, and I'm not being cynical about that because there is some utility in naive agreeableness. But unfortunately, the world is a very complicated place, and merely wanting to be nice about things and wishing that everything was fair doesn't justify imposing an equity outcome and gerrymandering complex economic systems that will bite you if you mess with them because you're ideologically possessed.

I am 46, retired executive, wealthy, competent, and full of juice. Who can I talk to if I want to invest time, money, energy in your university? People—lots of people are asking me such things, and it's very much appreciated. It's a weird—you know, because you'd think that if people are offering you time and money that it would be a straightforward thing to say, yes, please, climb aboard and help. But it's not that simple because, first of all, I don't want to involve people in something that I can't be sufficiently committed to. It's not fair to them, and it isn't obvious to me how I can be committed to this yet fully committed to it.

And so I'm sort of playing with it at the level that I can manage it—it's not like it's a game; we have a good product involved or a good product in motion at the moment. But I'm not—I don't have the wherewithal to scale at the moment. And you know, you can say—and people who are developing new businesses like to do this—like, let's say I could come up with a draft business plan for an online university, and then I can contact people like you, Paul, and say, look, I'm ready to gather investments.

And let's say I could raise twenty million dollars, or let's say I could raise two hundred million dollars. Then I have a new problem. The problem is, well, oh my god, I've got all this money now; I have to figure out something to do with it, and that's actually a really big responsibility. Not—it's not like, you know, it's a success catastrophe, let's say, it's a first-world problem; I get all that. But that doesn't mean that it isn't real, so I have to do a lot more thinking and planning and figuring out how to disperse my time most effectively before I dare to take on any additional people who would like to help.

Now, once my organization is in a place where that sort of help would be useful, then I'll make a public announcement, and I would be more than happy for people to jump on board, let's say. Climb on board—pushing, devote resources, all of those things. I'd be happy for that to happen then, but I don't want to do it prematurely because I don't want people to risk their valuable resources in an endeavor that isn't yet solid.

So, alright, so I'm only going to do I think one more question. I am a sober alcoholic/drug addict. How can I find my way back to belief in a higher power after 10 years in the empty void of atheism? I'm falling apart. Well, I would say your best bet is to actually start devoting some time to it. You know, for me, I became convinced of the validity of a religious viewpoint, I think, as a consequence of study. Read Joseph Campbell; read Carl Jung. Jung's hard; Campbell's a good introduction though; Richard O’Leary, too, as well.

I don't know if you can find your way back to belief, but you might be able to find your way back to meaningful engagement, and that's a better way of thinking about it. You know, the belief thing is a really tricky one. People ask me, do you believe in God? And I think I really think how dare you ask that question, I think that's really what I think. But on a more prosaic level, I usually think, well, I don't know what you mean by belief; I don't know what you mean by God.

These are very—these are very difficult questions, and none of that's self-evident. Now, I would say, do I believe in the crucifixion? Well, certainly! I mean, people—the crucifixion—how can you not believe in it? If you think symbolically, it's like human beings, we're eternally crucified, right? Our lives are tragic, and they end in death, and we're all betrayed, and we all experience betrayal.

So, okay, you can't not believe in the crucifixion. Do you believe in the resurrection? Well, people die and are reborn all the time. No, they go through—this is what you're after here, I'm a sober drug and alcohol addict. Well, you know, you had to let—you die when you stop being an addict, and something new be reborn. It's like, what's the ultimate significance of that? And how is it tied to the notion of bodily resurrection? Well, I don't know what the ultimate significance is, but it does seem to be the pathway through life.

To believe—I would say you start believing not by attempting to convince yourself that the statement "there is a God" is true, like a fact is true, but to act out the proposition that you should shoulder your cross and stumble uphill toward the City of God. That's belief, man. And you can do that right away. Now you might ask, well, do I have any guarantee that that has transcendent and universal significance?

It's like, well, it's not a bad model for emulation, so it has universal significance in that regard. We each have to shoulder the tragedy of our existence and stumble upwards despite that; that has universal significance. Does it have significance outside of life and like in the internal eternal realm?

I wouldn't surprise me if it did. I suppose it depends on what you mean by the eternal realm. They seem to have significance