Values and Responsibility | Mark Manson, Mikhaila, and Jordan Peterson

What are you supposed to give a [ __ ] about? According to you, is it different for each person, or are there rules people can kind of follow to figure it out?

Uh, I intentionally don't answer that question because I don't feel it's right for me to impose my values on any of my readers. Um, I do simply, at times in the book, I offer kind of what I've discovered is better or worse to give a [ __ ] about for myself. Um, and I do provide... I'm going to harass you about that in a minute or two, so I thought I'd warn you about that so you can prepare for the war.

No problem. I do lay out, I think, some principles that I generally find to be useful. You know, so generally, it's more useful to focus on, um, kind of what I... for... it's not the most sophisticated, uh, terms, but internal values versus external. About, you know, so focus on things that occur inside of you; focus on your own integrity; focus on your own honesty. These are things that you experience internally versus, say, um, you know, things that you experience externally—external markers of validation.

Um, what would that be like? Fame? Is that an example? Money? Yeah, so money, social media followers, things like that, having a nice car. Um, you know, there's nothing wrong with those, but it's kind of... it's similar to the discussion we were having earlier. Like, we all like money; we all like having nice things. But there needs to be... you can't only value those things. Like, you have to have a balance of kind of more internally driven, uh, things that you care about.

So, I do think that you impose your values on your readers, and but I actually think... Well, okay, I'm going to make two observations. The first is that I think that apologizing for that is the most predictable thing that a millennial could possibly do because I think your generation and perhaps even more the generation younger than you, what they've been taught above all else is that the cardinal moral sin is to judge—to be judgmental, right? To be discriminating. But that's absolutely foolish, and you actually make a case for that because you say that one of the most important things that you can do—and by you, you mean you, but you also mean other people—is to say no.

And that, as soon as you value one thing, which you need to do—and hopefully the proper thing—you're saying no to a very large number of other things. And so this is why the stance of the idea that you can raise being non-judgmental to the level of a higher moral virtue is definitely wrong. If your claim is correct, that your emotional state depends on your value structure, and it's more important than anything else to get your value structure straight, and if you have a value structure, you have to say yes to some things and no to others, then you immediately admit that there's a value hierarchy, and there's some things at the top and some things at the bottom.

And I think one of the real strengths of your book is that you at least begin to do that, and I think you do it explicitly. So you say quite straightforwardly that there are five things that you've discovered that are of general utility, that you've found of general utility, and you don't say that you're certain that you're 100% right about those five things, but you certainly make the claim that the reader should take them seriously and that they've been useful to you.

And that was taking responsibility, and you do a very careful job of distinguishing that from accepting universal fault, which is a good piece of intellectual exercise because it's necessary to take responsibility and to discriminate that from assuming universal fault. You can get cancer, and it's not necessarily your fault—in fact, it probably isn't—but you still have to take responsibility for it or you will suffer the consequences.

You talk about the necessity to accept and cultivate the ability to tolerate, to accept uncertainty and to cultivate the ability to tolerate it. You talk about, um, learning to appreciate failure. You talk about rejection—we already mentioned that—and the ability to say no, and the necessity of saying no, and perhaps the unapologetic necessity of saying no. And you also, uh, you make that concrete in some sense because you talk about, for example, that you learned as you transitioned from your 20s to your 30s that saying no to an entire smorgasbord, let's say, of sexual possibilities was worthwhile because you found something deeper in the commitment to a single person.

And that's a form of sacrifice. You talk about sacrifice in your second book, and, um, you know, you made a sacrifice, and sacrifices are actually worthwhile. And then you talk about contemplation of your own mortality as a way of discriminating between what's important and what isn't. And so, and then in your second book, you talk about both Nietzsche and Kant in some detail, and both of them were striving for the apprehension of something approximating a universal morality.

And so I can see that, and you also mentioned Ernest Becker, you know, and, and um, you know, Becker believed that…

Alright, you got me. What do you say?

You got me! Well, what... yeah... you totally... no, you are right. It's funny because now I'm kind of doing like a check of, of, of my... because you are right; you are correct. Um, I think, and it's… and I gave you, I'm going to admit here, I gave you guys the stock answer there. You know, when—so that's a dangerous thing to do, I know, especially with you guys. But you know, I've been asked a million times people are like, "Oh, so what should we give a [ __ ] about?"

And my de facto answer has always been like, "Well, it's not my place to tell people exactly what their values..." That's definitely not true; that's exactly what you're trying to do. Now when 13 million people are listening, I think the reason you get away with it is because you're trying to do it for yourself too. You're not preaching. You're kind of inferring, right? You say, "This is what worked for me, but it could work for you," right?

Yeah, and let me—well, let me present some context to this, which I think can be helpful. Um, you know, my background is straight up just the self-help world, and generally in the self-help world, values are just shoved down your throat. You know, you're supposed to want then the fancy car; you're supposed to want the perfect marriage; you're supposed to want to be happy and live happily ever after. You know, it's like these are the things that are taken for granted at page one.

And so, you know, when I wrote "Subtle Art," I went through pains to kind of be contrarian in a lot of ways to what a typical self-help book is. And so one of those ways was I don't want to explicitly ram values down people's throats, but I agree with you that the overarching project of the book is yes, I am imposing—um, even if I don't come out and say it—like, this is what you should give a [ __ ] about. It's the way I've constructed the book, and particularly the second book. The second book is much more striving for… um, striving for some sort of solid structure, by the way.

Yeah, just so everybody knows, well, you hooked yourself into this project as soon as you made that initial discovery. Like, you made a quite profound discovery, in my estimation, which was that values regulate emotion. So then, as soon as you make that discovery, you're stuck with a question, which is okay, then what are the appropriate values that make me happy?

Well, or even... well, if it's not happy, it's some other metric, you know, because you can also question whether or not happy is the right ultimate development. I like happiness; I know you're like, it's not about being happy, but well, it beats the hell out of being miserable. If happiness comes along, you should be bloody happy that it's like lit on you on your stem for a while.

Yeah, yeah, but it's... yeah. And then as soon as you get into that question, it's turtles all the way down, right? Like, it's—that takes you into, um, you know, kind of staring into the void, so to speak, which you talk about in your work quite a bit, of, of—you know, how there's… you have to... you have to take on the responsibility to create something that's meaningful in your life.

Yes, or to discover it. That's one of the weaknesses of Nietzsche, I think. I mean, I'm a great admirer of Nietzsche, and he... I've never read anyone who could think with his much glittering brilliance as Nietzsche, and he's very dangerous to read because he's so unbelievably intelligent. He'll take everything you know apart sometimes with a sentence. He said once, he was bragging in a sort of self-deprecatory manner in some sense—I mean, he never sold any books—and so he was sort of bragging to himself, I suppose.

He said, "I can say in a sentence what it takes other people an entire book to say." What they can't say in an entire book—that actually happens to be true. Nietzsche could, in fact, do that. And he believed that we could create our own values, but that's wrong. We can't create our own values; we can discover them, and we can co-create them. But, you know, and you know this in your book as well; it comes out again implicitly.

Um, you wouldn't be able to violate your conscience if you could create your own values, right?

Violate your conscience?

Yeah, because your conscience—you'll lower this for me a little bit—you'll do something that your conscience objects to. Okay, okay. If you were fully capable of creating your own values, your conscience would never object. You would just go along with what you'd proposed, like if we were the sorts of creatures that could do that.

But what we find very rapidly is we try very hard to impose our own values, and then it fails. We're not satisfied by what we're pursuing, or we become extremely guilty, or we become ashamed, or we're hurt, or we hurt other people. And sometimes that doesn't mean we're wrong, but most often it does. And so, yeah, this—and your search for bedrock, I think, is— and perhaps the fact that you never do come to any final conclusion is definitely, at least in my opinion—so maybe not definitely, but in my opinion—a large part of the reason why your books are attractive.

You know, the millennials—you talk about the consumer literature that shows that people who have an infinite variety of choices are less happy than people who only have one or two. And you mentioned at the beginning of this discussion that the millennial generation that you're a part of suffered in some sense because they weren't deprived enough and had too many choices.

The advantage to being deprived is that it's obvious what to do. Like, if you're starving, then you eat. There's no question. But if you have enough to eat, and you have enough shelter, and you have enough information—maybe not as much as you could have, but enough—it starts to become difficult to decide what to do. And then you have another problem, which is that you can't decide what to do.

Yeah, and then you have to start to investigate value, and that, that seems to me, even from your autobiographical comments, seems to be what happened with you and obviously so many other people. Absolutely.