Discussion: Sam Harris, the IDW and the left

[Music] Jordan, it's great to interview you again. I interviewed you back in October last year and then made, I've now made two documentaries about you. A big focus for Rebel Wisdom is kind of making sense of the cultural moment and making sense of your success and what it represents. I don't know if you remember, but the very first question I asked you back in October in the interview was, firstly, what do you make of your success so far and are you ready for it to continue? Because I had a sense back then that what your message represented was something the culture desperately needed. The sort of, and what that signifies to me is a kind of reintegration of the sacred. Did you have any sense back then, the exponential success that you were going to have between then and now?

Well, I mean, the most likely outcome at each of the, what would you say, at each point where I might notice what's going on around me has been that this was stopped, but it isn't stopping. So I've been thinking about that pretty much non-stop, I would say. And I have some solutions, let's say, or some ideas that I didn't present in October.

So one of the things I've realized is that part of what's pushing, part of what's accounting for this, the popularity of my ideas is actually a secondary consequence of a technological revolution. And I've seen that more clearly since October, partly because I can see the mainstream media dying at a faster and faster rate and the alternative media expanding faster and faster. So television, radio, and the classic print media had shared one thing in common, which was an extreme restriction in bandwidth. This was especially true of television because each minute of television, given the necessity to broadcast in, that was unbelievably expensive, and so there just wasn't time to do anything on television.

There's no time. And so if you had something important to say, or even something unimportant for that matter, most of the time it had to be compressed into something approximating 30 seconds, which wouldn't even be your words; it would be a journalist commenting on what you said. And if you were really pushing the envelope, maybe you'd have 25 minutes on a talk show that was devoted to your ideas. But then even that would be highly scripted. And so television made people look stupider than they were, even to the producers of television because of this narrow bandwidth.

The rise of video online and audio as well has blown the bandwidth limitation out of our mass communication, and it turns out that people are smarter with longer attention spans than we thought. What happened with me was that for one reason or another, I was an early adopter of that technology. There’s this massive technological transformation, which is a Gutenberg revolution in the provision of video and audio. No barrier to production because it doesn't cost anything; anyone can do it. People can communicate with it. You can cut up YouTube videos; you can make your documentaries. The entry point is easy.

Audio podcasts and that sort of thing, which can be of indefinite length, allow people to use found time to listen. More people can listen than can read. Like all of these things add up to a massive technological revolution, and it's that upswell in technology that in part has propelled what I've been doing to this mass audience. And so that's been a relief to figure that out because it depersonalizes it to some degree, right? And so I used the metaphor when I've been asked about this before of being on a wave. I'm surfing on a giant wave, but the wave isn't something that I've done; it's part of this technological revolution.

So that's a relief to know that, and I'm quite convinced that that's the case because there are other people who are occupying the same space. Essentially, Joe Rogan is a very good example of that, and the various commentators on YouTube who've become increasingly influential and powerful—same thing, driven by the technology. They happen to be early adopters.

And then there's a secondary question, which is, well, is there anything specific in relationship to my content, let's say, and I would say also that is it the case? And I think what I've been able to do with reasonable effectiveness is to draw a conceptual equation, equivalence, between the meaning that's necessary to sustain you in life, given its suffering and malevolence, and the necessity to adopt responsibility. And I think there's something new about that.

I mean, I don't know how new; I'm sure I am not the first person who's discovered that, but I think I've done a reasonable job of pointing out to people that that the suffering that's intrinsic to life in the absence of meaning is not tolerable. It destroys and corrupts, and that the proper pathway out of that isn't rights or happiness or entitlement, or anything that's associated with individual ease, let's say, but with the adoption of something approximating maximum responsibility.

And people get that. Like, it's not that hard to understand when it's laid out like that, and lots of people, especially young people, especially people who are young and also somewhat nihilistic in their orientation, perhaps because of an excess of intellectual criticism, they grab that immediately. Think, "Oh, there's the missing piece! I see it's that the antidote to this meaninglessness, this void that I'm for, isn't hedonism, it's not rights; it's not impulsive pleasure, it's none of that, it's responsibility." It's like, "Oh yes, okay, that everything snaps into place."

And so that's been, I think, that's the most essential part of the message to the degree that what I'm doing has an essential message that would be it. And I do think that's what accounts for a large part of its impact.

You mentioned Joe Rogan before you and here grouped together in this sort of new constellation of the intellectual dark web. What do you see as the—I mean, what do you make of your kind of inclusion in this and what do you see as its role going forward in the culture?

Well, it's like a herd of cats, right? Because I've thought about, well, what unites us to the degree that there's an "us"? Because that's not so self-evident. There's enough of an "us" so that the name emerged and it's stuck. So there's something in common because otherwise the name wouldn't have stuck, right? You can't name nothing; it doesn't work.

And I've talked a fair bit about this with Dave Rubin because Dave Rubin and I have been touring together, right? He opens my discussions and adds a nice comedic touch to them. And so what do we have in common? Everybody in the group is an independent practitioner, so an entrepreneur essentially with their own media enterprise that's autonomous. None of us are serving any master except the audience.

And we're all somewhat independent financially as a consequence of that, and so that makes us beholden to no master. All of us are engaged in these long-form discussions, right? And one of the consequences of being engaged in a long-form discussion is that you can assume that your audience is intelligent. And so that's another thing that unites everybody in the group is we all assume that our audience is intelligent.

But I think that that's not so much a consequence of any particular moral virtue on our parts, but an observation that the technology has made possible. It's like, oh, when you can see this, I would say particularly with Rogan, because in some sense, he's a trailblazer in this domain. It's like, oh, turns out my audience will listen to the three-hour discussion. But he wouldn't have been able to discover that without the technology, right?

So now, to his credit, he was smart enough to discover it and smart enough to notice it when he discovered it. And I think that also characterizes the rest of the people in this group. It's like, oh, look at that. The audience actually wants our listeners, let's say, and viewers want detailed, in-depth, unscripted, spontaneous, meaningful conversation and then really are willing to go in that direction. That's the risk-taking element.

Like I can give an example of that. So I just did four talks with Sam Harris, who's often grouped into this group as well, on the relationship between science and religion, say, or facts and values. That's another way of thinking about it with a bit of politics thrown in, discussion of left/right differences and so on. What's the willingness to take the risk? Well, I had no idea when I met Sam in Vancouver, which was where the first two of the four talks were held.

I'd never met him before we did two podcasts together, one of which was very we got locked in, the other one which was more productive, I would say. But I had no idea of he had, I could talk. But we were willing to, I guess that's right, agree to take the risk to see if we could talk in a public forum. And I think that's another thing that characterizes the people in that group is that they will take those sorts of risks.

If you go into a television studio, a classic television studio, all the conversation is scripted, and it's actually quite frustrating because you can't have a conversation with the journalist because the journalist isn't there. Who's there is a frontispiece for the organization and the organization has scripted all there. And so it's not actually like talking to a person; it's really like talking to a puppet, for better or for worse.

But in these long unscripted long-form conversations, then you can take the risk of having a conversation, and that can go spectacularly well but it can also fail dismally. So I would say those are the things that unite us to the degree that the group exists. I mean, I admit I was in LA a week ago and about seven of us got together for dinner, and that was the first time we met as anything approximating a group.

And you know, it was interesting to watch everybody interact because, as I said, it really is a herd of cats. There's tremendous diversity of political opinion and a tremendous diversity of personality. Like Eric Weinstein and Joe Rogan, like they're not even members of the same species in some ways, you know? So it's a very fractious group, but I think those things that I outlined are the elements that basically unite it.

There's also something that I sense watching some of the discussions; there's a kind of intellectual curiosity and a sense of people thinking in public. And there's also a sense of maybe the potential for people to change their minds or to discover things during the conversation.

Well, that's partly the appreciation of the intelligence of the audience. It's like, and I would say it is actually the manifestation of the process of thinking that's more important than the conclusions that are generated. Even in these discussions that I've been having with Harris, like we are trying to argue out to different viewpoints because Harris believes that values can be derived with unerring precision in some sense using the proper methodology from facts.

And I believe that it's more complicated than that, that there has to be intermediating structures, and those are really narrative in their nature. So there's a technical argument as well as a variety of sub-arguments of the relative role of traditional religion and so forth. But the outcome of the debate about those issues is partly what people are coming to the talks to see, to determine what should the conclusions be.

But a much larger part, perhaps, is to observe and engage, at least by proxy, in the process of dialogue. And that's more important because dialogue is the process by which complex problems are solved, which is what makes me a free speech advocate fundamentally. Well, it's not an advocate; it's like I realized that that the protection for free speech is protection of the mechanism whereby complex social problems are solved.

And we're the people in this group and many other people as well are acting out that dialogical process, and people are happy about that, as they should be. And I read The Spectator review of your recent conversation. I think you've now come to the end of your debates for Sam Harris, and they said that you expressed a little bit of irritation at some of the points that you were making or that you didn't fully appreciate that he'd understood them.

I also think that Sam Harris, in particular, like he's built a whole kind of personality career, several books on this atheism position. Do you think that he can argue in good faith from that perspective? Could he turn around and say, "Well actually, no, you're right, Jordan, this atheism thing is..."?

No, I think he was. I think he was conducting the discussion in good faith. I actually think that what Sam is doing is a good faith project. You know, I think there's conceptual muddiness about it. But you know, his basic premise is that we could come to an agreement that working to reduce unnecessary misery and suffering is a universal good. Okay, fair enough, that seems like a reasonable proposition.

I don't think it's a proposition of fact and he claims that it is, but that doesn't matter, still it's fair enough. Then, you know, that’s another proposition is it would be really good if our systems of value weren't founded on error. And what do we have that's not error? Well, we have facts, we have objective facts. I mean, look at the technology, look at what we've done with our science.

It's like you don't want to underestimate the utility of objective fact. So maybe we can ground the value structure in the facts? It's like, well, that would be good if we could do it. And so his ethic, let's say, is an amalgam of those two propositions. I think that his project is honorable and I think he's committed to it.

He also rightly is concerned with the dangers of the fundamentalist dangers of revealed truth, and so is very skeptical about the axiomatic claims of dogmatic religion. Yeah, fair enough. But his—the mechanisms that he outlines to derive values from facts are insufficient in my estimation. I don't think that his argument is sufficiently sophisticated, even though I don't doubt it.

I don't think that Sam is any less committed to an ethical good. It's not obvious to me that he is than I am, you know? And he's argued and discussed fully in good faith, as far as I'm concerned, you know, with the odd error because no one is negotiating 100% all the time in good faith. I mean, that's a standard that no one can achieve.

But I think the discussions have been unbelievably productive, and we'll see that certainly the crowds are responding. I don't think the crowds would have been engaged if Sam wouldn't have been discussing in good faith. You know, because the engagement is actually an indication that a good faith discussion is occurring; otherwise, it gets dull very, very rapidly.

We'll see what happens when the videos are released, and that will be in August once there the sound is edited and all of that. And people will have a public debate about how the discussion proceeded. I also think that each discussion built on the previous one and that we both ended up—I think we both ended that more informed and more articulate than we started out. So that's a good, that's a really good thing.

I certainly understand his arguments much better than I did, well, a year ago, let's say. And I've heard Eric Weinstein describe the cultural moment as a kind of civil war within the left, sort of extreme left, and then the sort of moderate soft left, which are probably sort of the at least the dominating kind of paradigm in the media.

I've got a lot of progressive friends, and what I see happening recently, maybe in the last couple of weeks, is a lot of them starting to grapple with your ideas and looking at lasting this question: what can the left learn from Jordan Peterson? Which is a pretty new development because I saw a lot of kind of reactivity to it before.

How can you personally contribute to that debate?

Well, debate? You're interesting. Oh yeah, absolutely. No, no doubt about it, no doubt about it. One thing that I've been doing in my tour repeatedly when I talk about the first chapter of my book, which is stand up straight with your shoulders back, it's a discussion of hierarchies and their eternal nature.

Right? Because my claim is, it is not my claim; I think it's mere fact that organisms that have to cooperate and compete with other organisms of their type inevitably arrange themselves into hierarchies. And that's been going on for so long, which is at least 300 million years, that our nervous systems have adapted to hierarchies as if they're a permanent element of being, right? More permanent than trees, like seriously permanent.

At the most fundamental neurochemical, the one that regulates the entire brain, serotonin is acutely sensitive to hierarchical distinctions. And so that's part of the prop—is it? So the reason I laid that proposition forward was to say, whatever pitfalls hierarchies might produce, you cannot lay them at the feet of the West, patriarchy, or capitalism—it's like that's a non-starter. You're wrong, and not just a little bit wrong.

You're so seriously wrong that if you insist upon doing that, you won't even achieve your own aims because you're actually not grappling with the problem. The problem is, if hierarchies are a problem, which they are, the problem is way more serious than mere capitalism; it's way deeper. And if you're actually interested in rectifying the constantly—the negative consequences of hierarchies, then you're going to have to get a lot more sophisticated than their idiot Marxism.

So, part of the elaboration of that argument, as well, hierarchies are inevitable because we have to solve complex problems, and we have to solve them socially. When you implement a solution to a complex problem socially, you produce a hierarchy because some people are better at the implementation than others.

So there's a hierarchy of competence, and then there's a hierarchy of distribution of the spoils. And so in both of those hierarchies, you get a disproportionate clumping of resources at the top and dispossession at the bottom—in the nature of hierarchies. So what's the left? For the left is to remind those who are benefiting from the hierarchies that the hierarchy comes at a cost, and the cost is the clumping of people at the bottom. And that that's an eternal cost and it's not trivial.

And so that's what the left should be properly focused on. The left should be providing the voice of those who are dispossessed by hierarchies, and the right should be saying, "Yeah, but the damn hierarchies are necessary." And they're not only necessary but they're also productive. And the left says, "Yes, but they tilt towards tyranny and they can be occupied inappropriately by people who are playing games of power." Fair enough; the right has to take that into account.

The hierarchy can rigidify and is likely to do that, and it can be taken over by people who are corrupt, and that's likely to happen. But it's okay because the dialogue could work out; the right can say, "Well, yeah, we need the damn hierarchies," and they need to be buttressed, and the left can say, "Yes, but they have to be maintained properly so they don't deteriorate and degenerate."

And I think that's ancient wisdom. I think the ancient Egyptians had figured that out in their symbolic representations. So now when the left goes too far, it does something like say, "Well, how about no hierarchies?" It's like, "No, how about not wrong?" Because all that happens—if you flatten—one of the things that happens if you flatten out the hierarchy is that you can't even organize your perceptions.

You can't perceive the world without looking at the world through a hierarchy of value. And because you can't perceive the world unless you make one thing more important than all the other things, because you don't even know what to look at. And if one thing isn't more important than all the other things, then you have nothing to aim at.

If you have nothing to aim at, then you have no meaning in your life. So the left can't just demolish the hierarchies in the name of some equality of outcome, let's say, because you blow out the future; you leave people aimless and you destroy the very institutions that allow people to make competent progress in the world. That's not an acceptable outcome.

So we have to agree to live with the tension: necessity for hierarchies, the proclivity for them to pathologize, and the necessary voice of the left in speaking for the dispossessed. So, and I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I've said something approximating that through my entire career.

And so the fact that the left-wingers have been irritated at me is, well, in some sense that's an inevitable consequence of me taking on the radical left-wingers, but it's also the refusal by the moderate left to deal with their internal problems.

And the sticking point that I hear a lot from my sort of more progressive friends is you're sort of primary focus is on the individual.

Yeah, well, that's too bad for them because it should be. You know, I can agree with that. But the paradox that they would say is like, okay, focus on the individual, but you have to accept that there are some situations that are much more conducive to an individual thriving than other situations.

So their focus is on structural inequality; you're focusing on the individual. Is there not some interplay between?

Most definitely. Well, obviously, because people do have group identities. The question is whether the group or the individual identity should be paramount. And the leftist stance, the radical leftist answer is, well, there is—look, it's not me that's failing to take into account those two levels of analysis. It's the bloody radical leftist because for them it's the collective, and that's that.

And so it's obvious, as far as I'm concerned, that people have their individuality, and then behind that they have their group, like multiple group identities, which is also a big problem.

But also, over today or any of these situations that make it much more difficult for people to self-actualize—well, what I think they'd argue is they don't hear you talk about that very much.

Well, it isn't, first of all, it's not self-evident. Like, I'm not— I don't accept Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I don't think it's necessarily more difficult for people who are poor to self-actualize. Sorry, I don't buy that.

Is because what that would mean—think about what that would mean; that would mean that the rich are morally superior. That's what that means because they have all the opportunities to self-actualize. So obviously, if the material conditions are the prerequisite for self-actualization, then the rich are morally superior to the poor; is that really an argument we want to make?

And then in fact, I don't think that that's even vaguely reasonable because one of the things that does help build character is privation. Now, obviously starving to death is an excess of privation, so there are limit conditions. But it's a leftist trope that the provision of additional material resources will produce ethically superior human beings. Sorry, not true, and in fact, sometimes quite contrary.

So, I don't buy that argument in the least. I also think that under most circumstances, in accepting those of exceptional privation, and even perhaps under those conditions in most cases, your best bet to move people forward is to concentrate on the development of their individual character.

And their individual, their individual moral character, because moral character is actually—their moral character is actually the set of tools that you have to operate effectively in the world, because otherwise morality would be of no utility, and morality is in some sense precisely that which is of maximal utility.

And so the other objection that I would throw at the radical left is how do you know that your emphasis on collective existence isn't just an abdication of your personal responsibility?

Well, of course, it's not; it's like, no, no, no, seriously, here. It's not that easy to add—personal responsibility, maximal personal responsibility. What makes you think you're not running away from it? You have every reason to; you really have that stellar moral character, really? That's your self-analysis?

Sorry, I don't buy it. And I especially don't buy it when I look at the consequences of leftist revolutions because all these people of stellar moral character, when they undertake their collectivist revolution, nothing comes out of that but absolute bloody catastrophe.

So, all the well-meaning aims aside, my sense of a lot of the progressive people that I know is that they're not—they're sort of from a new generation. They're not generally materialist; they're sort of very spiritually aware. And I sense a kind of implicit message in what you're saying that I'd never heard made explicitly, that in some sense materialism is a deadening doctrine.

I mean, you look at the opioid crisis in America; you look at a lot of these—if poverty is seen as a more sort of—also as a sort of spiritual crisis or a crisis of the soul as much as anything else—is it mostly that?

Like if I hear lovely—I mean, if poverty was caused by lack of money, we could fix it really easily. But my point, I think, is to say that if you were framing your message in that way, I think there would be a lot of people on the left who'd be receptive to that message, sort of that actually there is a crisis of—that the crisis of worldview has real consequences, and a lot of poverty we're seeing in the world is to do with this kind of materialist worldview that has become corrupt or at least kind of stripped all of the meaning and purpose.

Oh yeah, well, that's a good point. Well, right. Well, I mean, I don't believe that materialism, materialist hedonism is a sufficient solution. Now it's a bit more complicated than that because I do think that functional democratic systems are actually pretty good at reasonable hedonism. Like I'm pretty happy that our system produces a variety of toothpastes and a variety of toilet papers and a variety of sanitary napkins—all of these things that are basically oriented towards, what would you call them, individual creature comforts.

There's something about that that's really merciful and properly egalitarian. And so a certain degree of material hedonism is a good thing, right? Because it's nice that people can have their basic needs taken care of in a dignified manner. But as a ultimate solution to the problems of life, it's insufficient, which is again why I don't really like Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

No, it isn't a progression up the moral chain because of the provision of additional material resources; it doesn't work that way. That doesn't mean that you don't want to set up a situation where as many people as possible are absent the terrible strictures of privation. But we are doing that quite rapidly, thank God.

So I think where the leftists are less happy with what I'm doing is the case that I'm making that the meaning that transcends mere materialism is to be found in the adoption of individual responsibilities because I wouldn't say that that's a core message, certainly not of the radical left; it's not that at all.

Because generally they construe the individual as either the oppressor or the suffering oppressed but not as the active agent, as either of those active agents. The problem with the oppressor/oppressed narrative is, even though there's an element of truth to it, each of us can be subdivided into so many group identities that there's at least one dimension along which we're all oppressors.

And that's actually when I'd be looking at what happened in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution—that was the bloody error, so to speak. Because you could take virtually any individual, and you could find out it's like if there's one dimension of your identity that makes you an oppressor, that trumps all the elements of your identity where you're a victim.

And the problem with that is there is one element of your identity where you're an oppressor, and so that's sufficient justification to throw you in with the predators and do whatever is necessary to dispense with you, and that is exactly what happened in the aftermath, not only of the Russian Revolution, but all of these radical leftist revolutions.

It's like, well if you're a socialist, well, you're not sufficiently pure from a doctrinaire perspective, and if you're a student, then you're part of the emerging bourgeois class, and if your parents were reasonably, what would you say, efficient farmers, then you're part of the kulaks.

And like it just went on and on and on and on; there wasn't anybody who escaped from being tarred with the brush of oppressor. And that's because— that is because each of us are in fact oppressors and oppressed. Every single person shares both of those things in common.

So, I've got a couple of minutes left, so this might be quite a big question, but just come back from the US, where we interviewed Paul Vander Klay—an imposter who's been doing quite a lot of videos about your thought. One of his questions was, he says he sees a real sort of stoicism in your thought, so pick up your cross and drag it up the hill. His question is, what's at the top of the hill?

He said, "Well, that's because he hasn't listened to the times when I've been talking about it, I guess, because I've said it repeatedly: you stumble uphill with your burden towards the city of God."

Does that mean the city of God to you?

I would say that's a place where everyone bears maximum responsibility and speaks the truth. That's what it is.

And what's the responsibility? You're responsible for the suffering in the world, you're responsible for the malevolence in the world, and you're responsible for the veracity of your utter insanity of God. You're maximally responsible for the suffering; you're maximally responsible for the malevolence, and you speak the truth. That's what it is.

Very concise. So you can tell Paul Vander Clay that.

That's great. Jordan, thank you very much.

My pleasure, nice to see you again.

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