A History of Violence: CBC Ideas

I'm Paul Kennedy. This is Ideas.

War and violence have always been with us. The first murder took place between the first humans, Cain and Abel, and that legacy of destroying ourselves and each other has come down to us from the very beginning. The creation story reminds us as much about our tragic weakness as it does about our infinite potential as humans. Chaos is transformed into order by the word, and you are all speakers of the word. If you want chaos to be transformed into hell, then lie. If you want chaos to be transformed into heaven, then tell the truth.

It's easy to look at violence and war as anomalies of human nature, but there's clearly something else going on. What's the meaning of the Columbine and Sandy Hook school massacres, the bus bombings in Jerusalem, the Charlie Hebdo killings? Sometimes we think politics can explain these things or a kind of madness, but what else might be behind such senseless acts—acts that achieve no goal except a universal sadness about the human condition?

You can sweep underneath your bed; you don't have to go out and wave a placard around: "I'm against poverty." It's like, who's for poverty? I think you want to fix the world, but it's a lot harder than you think, right? It says in the New Testament it's harder to rule yourself than to rule the city. But why? Well, it turns out you're more complicated than a city. It also turns out that you're more important, in some sense, than a city.

Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a clinical psychologist at the Stratford Festival. He explored some of these questions, and in today's program, we'll hear the talk he gave and the conversation I had with him afterwards. Here's a history of violence. If you do a genuine psychological analysis of the human thirst for war, you can't entertain a more brutal topic.

Part of the reason that people don't understand it is because you really don't want to understand it. So, despite that, I'm going to use a case history today, fundamentally, to illustrate the state of mind that you have to occupy in order to be willing and ready to commit any atrocity that might be demanded of you under any circumstances whatsoever.

The best way to think about the human thirst for war, at least at the level of analysis that I am capable of, is to think about it as a personality. Lots of the states of mind that possess us can be reasonably thought of as a personality. So if you're angry, for example, you can think of yourself as possessed by Ares or Mars, who's the God of War. Or if you're hopelessly in love and making a fool of yourself, well, then you're possessed by Eros or Cupid or Venus. That really is how archaic people, pre-scientific people viewed the proclivity of people to occupy states of mind that were quite different than those that were characteristic of their normal personality.

Freud really capitalized on that idea and modernized it in some sense because Freud viewed the human being as, in some sense, a loosely united collection of sub-personalities. We don't tend to conceptualize states of mind anymore as personalities—at least not in the scientific literature—but we do all the time in literature, drama, and movies. That sort of representation is extraordinarily compelling. Weirdly enough, you'll pay to watch it, and it is very strange if you think about it because if the specter of pure destructiveness is laid out in front of you on a stage, there's no logical reason to assume that you would voluntarily expose yourself to that and pay for the privilege of doing so.

But you do, and the reason for that, one of the reasons for that is that you need to know what that personality is. Partly so you can recognize elements of it if they manifest themselves in front of you or within you, and partly because you really can't understand good until you understand evil. If you're ever wondering why good itself seems to be such a limited resource, it's worthwhile remembering that you don't get there without going somewhere you don't want to go first.

And so that's where we're going to go today. I'm going to start with a Shakespearean quote—seems appropriate—from "Titus Andronicus," which is a very violent play, a play that's essentially about vengeance. One of Shakespeare's characters says, "Why should wrath be mute and fury dumb? I am no baby; I that with base prayers I should repent the evils I have done. Ten thousand worst that ever yet I did would I perform if I might have my will. If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul."

It's not the sort of thing that you want to hear someone say to you. We look for reasons why people might be motivated to commit atrocious acts, and given our cultural standpoint at present, we're often looking for sociological reasons—poverty, which does not breed violence by the way, relative poverty, lack of education, ignorance. We very seldom consider intent or voluntary intent because the idea that people could voluntarily and consciously intend destructiveness is a very frightening thought, especially when you realize that if people could do that, to the degree that you're a person, you could also do that.

Understanding that people could do that and that you could means that you might be morally obliged to undertake a very thorough examination of the motives for your own behavior. The personality that I want to talk about today is composed of a downward spiral. I think that's why people have always envisioned hell in some sense as a bottomless pit. Hell is the bottomless pit because no matter how bad it is, there's some stupid thing you can do to make it worse.

The spiraling is indicative of a positive feedback loop where A causes B, and B causes C, and then C causes A, and everything moves out of control. The case study that I want to present to you today is one of the more literate of the Columbine killers, whose name was Eric Harris.

People wonder why the mass shooters do what they do, which, in some sense, is quite surprising to me because if you read what they say, they tell you why they do what they do. Now, why people don't believe that is not clear to me except that I think that if you do take them at their word, it raises all sorts of specters that we would rather have hidden. Eric Harris became possessed, I would say of his own free choice, by a personality that was composed of ideological rigidity, pride, resentment, deception, and vengefulness.

I'm going to read you some of his comments about government systems. Here are Harris's comments with regards to ideological rigidity: "Like the early Nazi government, my brain is like a sponge sucking up everything that sounds cool and leaving out all that is worthless. That's how Nazism was formed and that's how I will be - Hitler and his head boys messed up a few times and it cost them the war, but I love their beliefs and who they were, what they did and what they wanted. I love the Nazis too, by the way. I can't get enough of the swastika, the SS, and the iron cross."

It's not that he didn't understand the Nazis; he understood them perfectly well. Whatever else you might say about Eric Harris, he wasn't stupid.

Pride: "People, parents, corpse, God, teachers telling me what to do, think, say, act, and everything else just makes me not want to do it. That's why my nickname is 'Rebel.' Reb, actually. No one is worthy of anything unless I say they are. I feel like God. I wish I was having everyone being officially lower than me. I already know that I'm higher than almost anyone in the world in terms of universal intelligence. I feel ever more confident, stronger, and more godlike, and I have confidence in my ability to deceive people. I have thought too much, realized too much, found out too much, and I'm too self-aware to just stop what I am thinking and go back to society because what I do and think isn't right or morally accepted. No, no, no. I would sooner die than betray my own thoughts. But before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit for anything at all."

This is from "Paradise Lost," the great poem by John Milton. These are the words that he puts into the mouth of Satan after he's flung from heaven for daring to oppose and attempt to transcend the most high. His desire was not only to be like God but to be superior to God. In some sense, he's a symbol—or a representation, you could say, which is more accurate—of the ultimate in intellectual pride, which says everything I know is sufficient and there's nothing transcendent beyond that. Milton has Satan say: “Farewell, happy fields where joy forever dwells. Hail, Horrors! Hail, infernal world! And thou, profoundest Hail, receive thy new possessor, one who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time.”

Resentment: "I've noticed in my clinical practice that there are two or three characterological elements and they really do people in; and weirdly enough, they're not really listed in the psychiatric list of diagnosis and they're often also not discussed as causal elements in the genesis of mental illness and suffering, even though in my experience they're actually the primary causes: arrogance, which is I already know enough; deceit, which is I can twist the fabric of reality in my favor for my individual wants, and I can get away with it—which goes along with pride and arrogance; and then resentment, which is the world is tragic—which is of course true. The world is unjust and tragic, which is more debatable, and the injustice and tragedy of the world is aimed at me specifically and unfairly. Well, that's just not true at all."

Resentment: "I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. And no, don't say well that's your fault because it isn't. You people had my phone number and I asked and all, but no, no, no. Don't let the weird-looking Eric kid come along. Oh no, you people could have shown more respect, treated me better, asked for my knowledge or guidance more, treated me more like a senior, and maybe I wouldn't have been as ready to tear your heads off."

Milton again in "Paradise Lost" has Satan say: “The more I see pleasures about me, so much more I feel torment within me as from the hateful siege of contraries. All good to me becomes bane. And in heaven much worse would be my state, but neither here seek I know nor in heaven to dwell unless by mastering heaven supreme, nor hope to be myself less miserable by what I seek, but others to make such as I, though thereby worse to me redound; for only in destroying do I find ease to my relentless thoughts.”

Eric Harris again: “Then again, I have always hated how I looked. I make fun of people who look like me sometimes without even thinking, sometimes just because I want to rip on myself. That's where a lot of hate grows from.”

This is Richard III from Shakespeare: "I shall despair; there is no creature loves me, and if I die, no soul will pity me. Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?"

Deception: "You know what I feel like telling about lies? I lie a lot, almost constantly to everybody just to keep my own ass out of the water. And, by the way, I don’t think I’m doing this for attention, as some people may think. Let’s see, what are some big lies I’ve told? Yeah, I stopped smoking. Yeah, I’m sorry for doing it—not for getting caught. No, I haven’t been making more bombs; no, I wouldn’t do that. And, of course, countless other ones. Yeah, I know that I hate liars and I am one myself. Oh well, it’s okay if I’m a hypocrite, but no one else because I’m higher than you people. No matter what you say, and if you disagree, I would shoot you."

If you take the personality elements that we've already discussed and you mix them up and you let them run as a process, you get the positive feedback loop that I was describing earlier. It goes something like this:

I learned this in part from the analysis of the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis. The first story about real human beings is the story about Cain and Abel because Adam and Eve were made by God—right? So, you know, you can't really call them normal humans. Cain and Abel are the first humans. Cain is very resentful and deceitful and vengeful. The reason for that, from which it's clearly explained in the story, is that Cain's sacrifices aren't accepted by God.

Now it's hard for modern people to understand what a sacrifice is because—why? Why would you offer up to God some remnant of an animal, for example? But you know, people a long while back acted things out before they could understand them and they had a more concrete view of the world. I mean, they assumed God was in the cosmos because if you look up in the night sky, especially if it's dark, it overwhelms you. You see the transcendent and the infinite, and so it's the sensation and experience of that that allows for the attribution of God and his dwelling place to the heavens.

So that's not so ridiculous because you do see the infinite when you're out under the sky at night in the dark. If God's up there, since smoke rises, if you burn something—well, God can tell if what you're offering is of quality or not. Now we have the psychological equivalent. I asked my students: "What sacrifices did your parents make so that you could go to university?" And of course, they can answer that in no time flat, and whether that sacrifice worked depends on how well the child does at university. But what that essentially means is that the sacrifice of the parents found favor, well, with reality.

But you can substitute God for that with no loss of meaning, and so modern people obviously believe that if you sacrifice properly, then reality will shine its benevolent face on you; otherwise, we wouldn't work. So we're not so different from those archaic people. Now, Cain makes sacrifices, and God doesn't like them. Now, the story’s a bit ambivalent about why—it might just be that God’s arbitrary. I mean, there's no shortage of arbitrariness on the part of God in the Old Testament, which is part of the reason that people have—that modern people have trouble with that book because they say, "Well, I could never believe in a God who's that arbitrary or even cruel."

But the ancient Israelites weren't that foolish—they knew that life could be that arbitrary and cruel, no matter what you believe. So it could be that God just has it in for Cain or it could be that Cain is just not really offering up the best quality sacrifices. He's trying to pull one over on God and everyone else, and in fact, that is what God accuses him of. If you read the story very carefully, Cain is mad because Abel's getting everything, and everyone loves Abel.

Lots of crops, his flocks are flourishing, all the girls love him; plus, he's a really good guy, so you can't even hate him with good conscience, which is extremely annoying, especially to Cain. So Cain goes and has a chat with God. He says, "What kind of stupid place have you made here?" He means reality. "I'm like working myself to the bone, and all I get is the dregs. And then there’s old Abel out there, and everything he touches turns to gold. What's up with you?"

Which is kind of arrogant if you think about it, right? Because he is talking to God, after all. It isn't clear that Cain understands everything about being, and there’s always the possibility that it’s Cain's fault—not God's—but that isn't a hypothesis that Cain is willing to entertain.

So God says to him, basically: "Sin," which means to miss the bullseye, by the way, "crouches at your doorstep like a predatory and sexually aroused hunting cat, and you invited in and let it have its way with you." By which he means not only is Cain attacked by sin, so to speak, but that it’s a creative union sort of attack. Sin comes in, and Cain plays with it and develops it and puts his own twist on it. He produces something new out of it.

It's obvious to Cain that God isn’t willing to take responsibility for the terrible state of being as a consequence of this accusation, and that makes him extremely mad. Extremely mad. And he kills Abel.

If you follow the story closely, you can see that God tells everyone else to leave Cain alone. “Don’t kill him.” The reason for that is that there is a propensity for that kind of vengeful killing to expand exponentially out into the community, which, in fact, is what happens in the story of Cain and Abel. The end of Cain's descendants is actually Tubal-Cain, and he is by tradition the first person who makes weapons of war.

So the idea is that individual resentment manifested as homicidal rage is the precondition for the spread of that mode of being into the broader community, and the danger there is that it will degenerate into everyone against everyone. Harris’ moral is just another word. And that’s it. I think we are all a waste of natural resources and should be killed off. And since humans have the ability to choose, and I'm human, I think I will choose to kill and damage as much as nature allows me.

So take that! Eat napalm and lead! Someone's bound to say, "What were they thinking?" when we go "natural-born killers" or when we're planning it. So this is what I'm thinking: I have a goal to destroy as much as possible, so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that. Keep this in mind: I want to burn the world!

Now part of the reason that Cain kills Abel is because Abel is favored by God. And so Cain is actually not only taking revenge against Abel and against his own insufficiency, and he gets suffering, he's actually taking revenge against God and being itself. And that's actually what he wants to do—hate.

I'm full of hate, and I love it. I want to grab some weak little freshmen and tear them apart like a wolf. Show them who’s God! Strangle them, squash their head, bite their temples into the skull, rip off their jaw, rip off their collarbones, break their arms in half and twist them around—the lovely sounds of bones cracking and flesh ripping! So much to do in so little time!

God! I want a torch and level everything in this whole area, but bones of that size are hard to make. Plus, I would need a fully loaded A-10 to get every store on Wadsworth and all the buildings downtown. Picture half of Denver on fire just for me!

And Vodka, who was his partner; napalm on sides of skyscrapers and car garages blowing up from exploded gas tanks. Oh man, that would be beautiful! Yes, the human race is still indeed doomed; it just needs a few kickstarters like me!

If I can wipe a few cities off the map, then great! If you recall your history, the Nazis came up with a final solution to the Jewish problem: kill them all! Well, in case you haven't figured it out yet, I say kill mankind. No one should survive!

So I'll close this brief case history with a quote from Goethe from "Faust." In "Faust," the figure of Satan is played by Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles has a credo, which is the articulated formulation of the values that he lives by: "The spirit I that endlessly denies, and rightly too, for all that comes to birth is fit for overthrow. Nothing worth, wherefore the world were better sterilized. Thus all that's here is evil, recognized, is gain to me and downfall rude and sinned—the very element I prosper in."

So you can see in that the actuality—the actuality is not only what Harris wrote and meant, but also what he did and what he was planning to do, which was much more destructive than what he actually managed. You see his state of possession by a set of infinitely destructive desires and wishes, and you see the continual representation of that pattern of action and thought in literature—that's evil versus good. Classically, that's what the world is. That's what the cosmos is. It's a place where evil and good continually battle, eternally battle. And although we don't believe in such things anymore—or more accurately, we don't know what we believe—we still are inclined to watch that drama present itself on stage in endless variations.

The reason for that is that it's true. You can't understand the human capacity and desire for atrocity without viewing it through a metaphysical lens. You can't understand someone like Eric Harris or the countless others who are possessed, so to speak, in exactly the manner that he was without using dramatic or religious language because you cannot formulate either the question nor the answer with enough profundity without that kind of representation.

Now, I wouldn't say that the motives that I've discussed constitute the only reasons for the human thirst for war, but I can tell you that you'll never understand the desire for atrocity without coming to grips with the problem of evil.

Thank you. You're listening to Ideas in Canada on CBC Radio 1, on Sirius XM across North America and around the world on cbc.ca.

I'm Paul Kennedy. What is it that drives us to violence, murder, and war? These are some of the most puzzling corners of the human personality, and with the help of William Shakespeare and John Milton, psychologist Jordan Peterson has been exploring the mind of murder, specifically the mind of Columbine killer Eric Harris.

This is a history of violence. And time now for my conversation with Jordan Peterson and for some audience questions.

I want to begin, I guess, sort of where you began, and I've never heard the words of Eric Harris before, and I have to tell you I found them chillingly frightening. It was interesting, though, to then hear you quote, and had the quotation so apposite and so perfect matching. Quoting from Milton and quoting from "Paradise Lost," I believe my undergraduate memory of studying that masterpiece is that—and I think this is a school of critical thought as well—Milton apparently liked Satan more than he liked any of the other characters in that.

And that’s amazingly, in a modern interpretation, why would that be modern? And what do you mean by that?

Well, because Milton was a genius, and the way he represented Satan in "Paradise Lost" was as a rebel. He didn't paint him in black and white, so to speak. He gave him all the attributes that an admirable rebel would have, and people enjoy identifying with the figure of the admirable rebel. But what Satan was rebelling against wasn't what an admirable rebel would rebel against. He wasn't rebelling the way Christ, say, rebelled in his time against the increasing tendency of the religious state to become dogmatic and tyrannical. Satan was rebelling against the idea that there was something that exceeded his power and that was transcendent, while human beings do that all the time—especially modern human beings.

So the idea that Satan's an admirable character, I think, can't be placed at Milton's feet; he opened the door to that interpretation, and that's a good thing because, for example, part of the reason that these modes of thinking were so powerful and compelling to Harris was that they allowed him the possibility of construing himself as an admirable rebel, even though what he was was a momentary embodiment of the eternal desire to obliterate everything.

And those are characters that exist. I mean, Eric Harris is not alone. There, he had partners in Columbine. He has admirers on the web of no small number. And not only does he exist out there, he also exists in here. Like the thing that he represents, the thing that he embodied is not—it's a permanent element of the human psyche. It's radical, it's eternal, it's archetypal, it's structural.

And why it's structural is Harris does a good job of explaining it: everyone knows that life is tragic and everyone knows that to exist is to suffer. One logical and appropriate response to that is to be grateful in spite of your suffering and attempt to make the best of it, and perhaps to alleviate that where you can. And another is to take the perspective of Mephistopheles and to say no, no, the whole thing's flawed right from the beginning. If this much suffering is the price of being, then we should just eradicate the whole mess. And people think like that all the time.

I'm curious, you work not only as an academic, professor of psychology, you also have a practice, you have a clinical practice. Is there any possible use for these great icons of Western or Eastern literature, which all have in them, as you say, the sort of balance or opposition of good and evil? Is there any possible clinical use for that?

Oh, if you see people who are really in trouble—like really in trouble—you can't address their problems without using archetypal language. It's not possible. So, for example, I had a client who lived in a web of lies that was pretty much infinite. I tried for years to get to the bottom of it—familial lies. The lie was, "We love you and we're helping you," when the truth was, "You should have been born a boy, and we've hated you ever since you were born, but we're not going to tell you that and we're not going to let anyone else know that because we need a facade of benevolence."

Now, for her, this person to even begin to understand what was going on in her family, there was no escaping archetypal language. I mean, it was hellish. People died in that house and I made very little headway. Every time I got to the bottom of some absolutely horrendous betrayal—which betrayers were in Dante's Inferno, they were right in the center of hell, right? They were the worst of the criminals, so to speak.

I get to the bottom of some God-awful, decades-long, brilliantly played betrayal, and there'd be another one at the bottom of that. I was wondering specifically, though, whether you’d actually used texts in conversation or patients.

Yeah, so you have talked about Faust? Or, you know, lots of my patients have come from religious backgrounds. I mean, one of them was a relatively unsuccessful chaplain who was suddenly fired from her job and then was hit by a car, so that wasn't a good day.

Um, all in one day?

Yes, yes. And there was just—there was no escaping the religious dimension. I mean, the thing about the religious dimension sits at the bottom of life. I mean, people don't understand that. They think it’s a set of superstitions. It's like it’s not a set of superstitions. Or if it is, then you might ask yourself: why do you continue to go see it played out time and time again on stage? Is it, what are you just entertaining yourself? It's like you're not.

Whether you know it or not, you're educating yourself. You're seeing near archetypal representations of the structural elements of human behavior laid out for you by geniuses dramatically. And part of the reason that you get the information that way is that, no, you’re not smart enough to understand it abstractly, and neither is anyone else. It’s so complicated that even now, all we can really do is see it played out.

It's very difficult for us to transform that into fully articulated philosophy. It took me 15 years of work, three hours a day, to develop the ideas that—and really, like that was every day. I was thinking about this obsessively for four decades, and it took me that long to reach the level of articulation where I could tell the sort of story I told today.

It's like it’s complicated material. And so it’s also predicated on the idea, which I believe to be true, is that reality itself is a forum for action. It’s not a place of objective things, and I believe that. I also believe that if you're a true Darwinian, you have to believe that because Darwin believed that we are selected for survival as a consequence of our actions.

And so our actions are what actually constitute the fundamental truth. You live or die by your actions. Well, actions have patterns, we have character, we have a nature. That’s why you can—that’s why dramatic representations can be distributed worldwide and everyone understands them. And they understand them, in some sense, innately and are drawn to them.

I remember I showed Pinocchio to my son when he was about four. Pinocchio is a story about confronting chaos and rescuing history in order to become a genuine human being. That’s—that’s Pinocchio goes to the bottom of the ocean to confront chaos in the form of a whale, and he rescues his father, and that makes him a fully developed human being.

That's a story that the Egyptians told 4000 years ago. It's a very old story. My son must've watched that three times! You know, he was really in some sense obsessed with it. Well, not really! Pinocchio has so much information and you can barely begin to calculate it. And you know you could tell that by watching its effect on someone whose mind was just starting to develop. He was terrified of that whale, but he wouldn't stop watching it!

You know, we used to tell him, "Keep your eye on the hero," right? Because, you know, what should you show your children? Frightening things? Well, the world is frightening. You're going to shelter them from that? Then all you do is launch them out into the world like edible prey. It’s a bad idea.

So, you know, you have to tell the children what to do. And that's to keep your eye on the hero because despite the fact that it’s dangerous, he prevails. That’s the story of humanity. It’s not, well, the hero is quivering at the back of the cave, you know, waiting for someone else to do the dirty work.

I guess I'm wondering how we might take the archetypes you're talking about in literature and theater, in art and the creative world, and somehow connect them with the other kind of world we're watching all the time on television. And then, as you say, we are in a world where many of these things are being acted out right before our eyes, and it’s horrifying to watch.

This is horrifying to watch television for me these days anyway, as it would be to read Eric Harris’ eternal um, and how could I connect what I might learn if you—if you—I mean, I tried to take apart the reasons for atrocity and warfare particularly. I was trying to understand how the world could have come to the point in about 1984 where we were locked in mad, right? Mutual assured destruction mode—thought how in the world is it that the world—that we could have constituted the world so that we're aiming at each other's mutual destruction with a weapon capacity that was exponentially beyond?

It seemed like a mystery. And I tried different levels of analysis, you know, because my first degree was political science. So I tried political and economic and sociological until I got to the psychological, and then to the psychodynamic, I didn't really have much luck because, you see what I was trying to understand, for example, wasn't so much territorial war.

I can kind of understand you have something I want, so, you know, I'll push you out of the way. Animals do that. I mean, it's not—it’s by no means right, but it’s understandable. But there are endless stories, say, about occurrences in the 20th century—some of them that you can't even read without developing post-traumatic stress disorder—of gratuitous violence.

So one example that's always haunted me, it's an example from Auschwitz, was the game that the guards used to play there. They’d have the people that were being incarcerated carry wet sacks of salt on their backs from one side of the compound to the other and back. It’s like, okay, just exactly why do you want to do that? Well, that's a messy question, you know, and I don't think you can understand it until you understand the part of you that could do that.

And one of the horrifying things about this line of investigation is that that part exists, and you could understand it, but you probably won't. And it's no bloody wonder!

So when I started the psychological investigation, I read a lot of mythology, a lot of work on comparative religion. The religious stories are the fundamental narratives, you know? They sort of—if you think of behavior or drama as having a grammar, the grammar of behavior and drama is religious.

And the reason it’s related is religious because it’s the grammar. You can’t go any deeper than that. That’s how things are. Like the human being, the archetypal human being is a hero voluntarily confronting the unknown. That’s what we are. And if we’re not that, we’re something else.

And that is not a good thing. It’s also something that—and I think this is what’s really interesting about what you’re saying—I would say, and I may be mischaracterizing civilization or 20th-century political reality, but many people—I think, given the fact you say it’s a fact, and I think it is—grounded in something really archetypal and perhaps really just really basic DNA—there’s evil and there’s good.

Most people would want to say, “Okay, let's work on getting rid of evil.” And I think you—good luck! I think you’re saying, “No, that's not what you have to do.”

Oh no, I think that is what you have to do! But you don’t do it by getting rid of other people's evil. You do it by getting rid of your own!

Like I can tell you an experiment you can try. This is a great experiment: try not to say anything that isn't true for a month. You know, and you say, "Well, what about white lies?" It's like, well, you know, that’s your problem. You see if you can figure out how to tell—so, you know, you might say your wife says, “How do I look in this dress?” and you know, you don’t think she looks very good. And so you say, “You look great, honey,” and that’s real good, but that isn’t the right answer.

The right answer is something like, “Don’t ask me manipulative questions.” Yeah, I know that’s a little—look, it’s a little harsh, and I wouldn’t actually formulate it that way. I would say, “Well, you know, I don’t answer questions like that,” or something like that.

So the truth wouldn't be that, “You know, you look hideous in that dress, and only a [expletive] would wear it.” That’s not the truth, you know. The truth is more sophisticated than that.

And, you know, people are telling lies all the time to spare other people's feelings, and they have all sorts of good reasons for it. It's like there are no good reasons for lying. You pollute your speech by lying.

And one of the most fundamental presuppositions of Western culture, and this is I think perhaps the most brilliant disguise humankind has ever made, is that chaos is transformed into order by the word. And you are all speakers of the word, and if you want chaos to be transformed into hell, then lie. If you want chaos to be transformed into heaven, then tell the truth.

Fighting evil does matter, but it’s not corporations. You know, some of them are evil, obviously; some of them aren't, you know. It's not corporations, it's not socio-political structures. None of those things—it’s like fix up your speech, fix up your family, and then if you can manage that, which is very difficult, then maybe you could dare to start thinking about something more complex than the family level of organization.

You know, I see students all the time whose lives are—they're a god-awful mess, you know, and they're out protesting about something that’s destroying the world. It’s like, “Well, if we put you in charge?” Well, you have to decide what you’re up to, and you're either trying to make things better or worse. That’s it. Those are the options.

And if you're trying to make them worse, there’s a reason. And if you’re trying to make them better, there’s a reason. And so in some sense you decide which side you're on, and then you decide how much you're on that side, and a huge part of being on that side is truth.

It’s the fundamental virtue. Without truth, you don’t know where you are. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know who you are. And the only reason you think you can get away with anything is pride. It’s like, you know, I’m smart enough to twist the fabric of reality in my favor. It’s like, clear, okay, go ahead and see what happens. It’s like, the outcome will not be pretty. Even if you get what you want doing that, you'll find out that it doesn’t do for you what you thought it would.

So you know it’s a fool’s victory.

First question from the audience: Do people tend to take from plays views that reinforce their own position even when the play expresses contrary?

Oh, that’s a good—that’s a really good question! Art and literature are truly subversive. And in the—in, you know, because first of all, if it’s art, it’s not propaganda because if it’s propaganda, then that’s a conscious attempt to change the way you think or look.

But if it’s art, then what’s happening is the artist is trying to figure something out. Well, he or she is engaged in the act of artistic production, and then the art object is the result of that exploratory attempt.

And the thing about exploring with art is you’re always exploring things that you don’t know because otherwise, why would you be exploring? And so part of the reason that art is subversive is because it exists on the border between articulated knowledge and the unknown itself—like it’s the place where articulated knowledge is born.

And it’s very difficult to criticize art, right? I mean, you could say, well, one painting is better than another, but like—what I mean by that is even nihilistic punk rockers like music, right? Music seeps in—it’s like music helps them celebrate life to the degree that nihilistic punk rockers are capable of doing that, and they won’t criticize the music.

Like maybe they don’t like the lyrics or whatever, but you're just an idiot if you criticize music as a phenomenological entity. Like dance is the same way. These things are, in some sense, they’re beyond criticism because you actually don’t know what they’re about.

So yeah, art is really subversive or transformative, you know, but that's the same thing.

This is a question that brings us right up to the present day, I suppose. What should be done in Gaza? How do we look at that conflict properly?

I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about Gaza, or alternatively, I'm doing everything I can about Gaza by talking to you here today. And my conclusion was, as I mentioned before when I was trying to figure out what level of analysis was appropriate to conceptualize the greatest of moral problems—

So Gaza’s situation is a good example of that. I always ended up at the individual level. So I would say, if you want to help the situation in Gaza, be more truthful with your spouse. And you’d think, well, how can that be connected? But I can tell you how it’s connected. You know, you’re more connected to other people than you think.

So, you know, we don’t live in linear relationships with one another; we live in networked relationships. So each of you is connected, for example, pretty directly to about a thousand people over the course of your life, a thousand people. It’s more than that, probably. But then you think, well, you are connected to a thousand, so that’s a million.

So you’re one person away from a million people, and then those thousand thousand—no, a thousand—and so you’re two people away from a billion people. And you know, the thing that’s interesting about a network is that it has as many centers as there are nodes.

And one of the—this is something Solzhenitsyn made explicit, but one of the implicit presuppositions of the Judeo-Christian tradition is that each soul is a center of the cosmos. You think, "What can that be true?" It's like God only knows what's true. What we know about consciousness, you could put in a thimble. We know nothing about consciousness.

We haven't advanced in our understanding. In fact, we may have gone backwards over the last 400 years. Like, I mean, we know nothing about the relationship of the brain to conscious awareness or virtually nothing—bits and pieces here and there. Consciousness is an absolute mystery.

And God only knows where it came from or what it’s up to. I mean, we know some things about being: we are fundamentally explorers of the unknown; that’s how we’re built. We take things apart and put them together, and you know, when we communicate the results of that and we find pleasure in that, but don't underestimate the utility of getting your life together.

I mean, besides, you can do that. Besides, you’re not going to hurt anyone if you do that—you’ll just make things better. Plus, it’s kind of humble! It’s like you can sweep underneath your bed. You know, you don’t have to go out and wave a placard around: "I’m against poverty." It’s like, "Who’s for poverty?"

You know, so I think you want to fix the world—fix your life. It’s a lot harder than you think, right? It says in the New Testament it’s harder to rule yourself than to rule the city, but why? Well, it turns out you’re more complicated than a city.

It also turns out that you’re more important in some sense than a city. And it also turns out it matters what you do with your life. Not just that it matters for you, it matters for everyone else, and it probably matters for the destiny of being. I mean, that’s what it means in some sense to be made in God’s image.

And you know, you think, "Well I don’t take that stuff very seriously." It’s like, your whole legal system is predicated on that idea, so don’t you say, and you don’t take it seriously. You presume that you have intrinsic value. It’s a presupposition, right?

Well, what does intrinsic value mean? It’s grounded in something. It’s transcendent value. And even if you don’t believe in it, you act it out, and you'll be very annoyed if anybody interferes with your transcendent value.

So who cares what you say you believe? What do you know about yourself? You know, we wouldn’t have psychology if we were transparent to ourselves. We wouldn’t have drama. You know, just because you believe something about who you are doesn’t make it true.

So take this back to Michael, to Eric Harris: What parenting or educational practices help to develop such extreme arrogance as displayed by somebody like Eric Harris? It's not self-evident that it was parenting per se that produced Harris.

You know, and I would hesitate to lay responsibility at his parents' feet. People make choices. And this is a rough one to navigate because we don’t have the science for that, because the science says, "Well, it’s got to be causal in some factor." So you look at sociological or economic causes, and you know, there are all these deterministic events on the social side and on the natural side—nature and nurture.

That’s all you are is nature and nurture. It’s like, well, maybe not! You’re actually nature, nurture, and consciousness. And consciousness seems to be able to make choices, and the choices seem to matter.

So you can come from a pretty wretched family and a pretty wretched social circumstance where absolutely everything is stacked against you and come out pretty damn good. Most people who abuse their children were abused as children—causal, right?

Well, no! Most people who were abused as children don’t abuse their children. The causality only works when you go from the abuse back, okay? So that the pool of abuse people is high—most of them don’t abuse their children.

But if you look at child abusers—a small pool, most of them were abused—but you’re not talking about the whole continuum. Most people who were abused don't abuse their children—and you know that, because if they did, think about it, if they did, it would spread exponentially, and then everyone would be being raised by seriously violent, abusive parents.

And it would take no time at all—it could take a few generations and poof! Everyone would be a violent abuser. It’s like that doesn't happen! So weirdly enough, the horrors of history don’t necessarily accumulate and become transferred.

And I’ve seen this in my own practice. Like I have one client who she had a pretty nasty upbringing. Her mother pretty much did everything she possibly could to make sure that she had no real self-confidence. And what she learned from that was not to do that to her son.

And she raised an excellent son. It’s like she had every reason to, you know, perpetuate her misery as a consequence of resentment, and she has some resentment, and it’s not surprising, but she swore, "Man, I'm not going to do this to my son." And she did a great job!

Like I know her kid quite well, and he’s—she didn’t overprotect him, that’s pretty good. He tells the truth; he’s on a career—you know, he’s got his career going, he’s a straightforward young guy, and he likes his mom.

You know, so good deal! But account for that causally—the problem is—and this is something Nietzsche observed a long time ago—any event can produce multiple causal pathways. Well, not any event, but you know, any complex event.

So determinism—I think the world is too complicated to be deterministic. So on Ideas, you’ve been listening to a history of violence: an exploration by psychologist Jordan Peterson into the human lust for violence and killing.

On YouTube, you can find many of his talks at Jordan Peterson videos. This program was recorded at the Studio Theatre of the Stratford Festival. Thanks to Michael Hart, Robin Cheeseman, Melissa Renault, Peter Holland, and David Campbell. Special thanks to Ants Word Feiger, Anthony Tulino, and Keira Loughran.

If you want to find out more about the show and what’s coming up, or to comment on anything you heard in the show, check us out at our website cbc.ca/ideas. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. A history of violence was produced by Philip Coulter. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly.

I'm Paul Kennedy. The hourly news is next.