Why Is the Feminine Represented as Chaos? | Q&A 06-02-2021 | Jordan B. Peterson

Hi everyone, and welcome to the third Q&A since I've been back. In 2020 and 2021, the questions for this were submitted on Thinkspot one week in advance of its recording. The video will also be published one week in advance, or a few days in advance on Thinkspot. So, if you'd like to be in on it first, you can try it out there.

All right, so away we go with the questions.

First, why is the feminine represented as chaos? My feminist friends often question that part of your teaching. What is the archetypal role of women who do not feel inclined toward traditional modes of being?

Well, we could answer the first question first. There is no archetypal role of women, or not a simple archetypal role of women who do not feel inclined toward traditional modes of being, because the archetype is the tradition. So, that's a contradiction in terms essentially.

Why is the feminine represented as chaos? Well, let's throw something back at your feminist friends: why is the masculine represented as order, by feminists? I mean, let's address that question initially. So, it seems to be a foregone conclusion that the patriarchy is represented with masculine symbols, and it seems equally a foregone conclusion that the patriarchy is order. So, if the masculine symbolism is used by feminists themselves to represent order, what is left for the feminine to be represented by? Order? Well, that's already taken.

And the reason your feminist friends object to it is, well, I would say fundamentally there's two reasons: they object to everything, and they don't understand it, and they don't notice their own behavior. So why don't you ask them, well why is the masculine represented as order?

And then there's a deeper answer too, which is, well in some sense, I don't know, it's not me that's doing the representing. I mean, let's look at Taoist symbolism. The Taoists, whose ideas I am definitely not responsible for, who represent an age-old tradition, represent yin and yang as the two fundamental modes of being in the famous paisley dual paisley symbol. It's actually dual serpents, head to head. Yin is feminine, and yang is masculine. Well, why don't you get your feminists to ask the Taoists why yin is feminine?

Now, the reason is, as far as I can tell, is that the feminine challenges the masculine. And it challenges the masculine by throwing the masculine into disorder, and it does that primarily through rejection. And so if you're a man, and you're trying to embody productive order, let's say, and you make an advance on a woman—the feminine—you make an advance on the feminine, then we'll say archetypally, and you're rejected. Then that interjects a tremendous amount of chaos into your existence—the chaos that's attended on such a fundamental rejection. And that rejection may require a total rethinking of the order, because the fundamental purpose of the order, at least as it's manifested by men—the masculine—is to be attractive to the feminine.

And so if that's not working, then the order needs to be restructured. And then we might say, well, ask your feminists this: are they calling constantly for the masculine to be reordered? And obviously, the answer to that is yes, except insofar as they also wish to participate in it, which is something perhaps we'll get to later. They're always calling for the masculine to be reordered.

And so how would you symbolize what it is that calls for order to be reordered, if you wouldn't symbolize it as chaos? So, you know, I guess I'm somewhat annoyed by this, by all appearances, I guess it's because it isn't me doing this symbolic labeling, which is another thing that my critics don't seem to understand. I didn't invent these symbolic domains, far from it; I'm merely drawing people's attention to them.

You know, and you might say, well, what's the evidence that the feminine is represented by chaos? Well, I outlined all sorts of evidence in my three books, and Carl Jung has outlined all sorts of evidence in his, you know, fifty books, and Joseph Campbell has outlined all sorts of evidence, and Eric Neumann in "The Great Mother," which is an absolutely superb book, which you could recommend to your feminist friends. Certainly, Camille Paglia would recommend Eric Neumann's work, because she's a great fan of his.

So, he wrote a great book called "The Origins and History of Consciousness," which is one of the greatest books in the Jungian pantheon, but one that stands on its own. And also, one that Jung said he wished he would have written in the foreword to it, so that's really saying something. And then "The Great Mother," which is also by Eric Neumann, is a catalog of the symbolism of the feminine, which you could encourage your feminist friends to read if they would actually like to read something that isn't within their pantheon, let's say, but would add something incredibly extraordinary and credible to it.

I mean, Paglia believed that Neumann's viewpoint was the proper path that literary criticism and, by implication, cultural criticism should have taken in the late 20th and early 21st century. That's the path I took; that's the path she took, at least in part. It's certainly not the path that the universities took because they took the path that is predicated on the proposition that our culture—the Western culture, let's say—is predicated on the arbitrary expression of power as the fundamental human motivation, which is an unbelievably shallow and erroneous conclusion.

If the masculine is represented as order, even by feminists themselves, and if feminists are calling for a complete revamping of the patriarchal structure, then how in the world can those same feminists complain, let's say, when I point out that the feminine is symbolized by chaos? Well, in their case, it's certainly acting as chaos.

And the other thing I should also insist upon is that I don't draw a moral distinction with regards to the utility of order versus chaos. Order is the domain of what we have comprehended and control, and we certainly want to comprehend things and control them because we want things to turn out the way we want them to turn out, and that's the definition of control. But chaos is the domain that surrounds that, from which all new things flow, which is also part of the reason that it's feminine, because the feminine is that from which all new things flow, as well as that which rejects the order and selects.

These are very deep issues; they're very fundamental issues. I mean, do your feminist friends also doubt the reality of hypergamy? Because that's the proclivity of women to mate at or up or across, or up hierarchies of socioeconomic status. It's been well documented across many, many cultures, although it is ameliorated to some degree in the most egalitarian cultures, as opposed to being exaggerated. As personality traits are—and the difference between men and women personality is exaggerated in those cultures—hypergamy is also an indication of the feminine's tendency to reject the current embodiment of order in the form of the masculine entities that present themselves to her, let's say.

So I don't think your feminist friends have a leg to stand on with regards to the criticism. I just think they want to have their cake and eat it too, and they haven't read the relevant books, and they like to say things they haven't thought through. And they want—and it's an easy way of dismissing my ideas, and they don't know what they're throwing away when they throw away the feminine identification with chaos and plenitude and generation and creativity and all of that because somehow they think it's an insult because they don't understand anything about what I'm saying, and don't want to.

And so that's the answer to your feminist friends.

Do you think the underlying reason for cancel culture is that we are so connected through technology but so isolated, just wanting to be heard? What do you think is the deepest reason?

Well, I don't think that the underlying reason for cancel culture is that we are so connected through technology. I think it would be happening anyways. I think it's possible that technology facilitates the kind of bullying that cancel culture essentially represents by making it somewhat easier, and also making it less likely that the people who are doing it are going to be held responsible for their actions. But I don't think it's the fact that we're connected through technology, and I'm presuming the questioner means modern technologies such as those that underlie the use of social media rather than, you know, books and print and TV—all those technologies that we've had for at least some time.

The deepest reason for cancel culture? Well, I would say there's two deep reasons. One is it's a form of bullying, and it might even be a female-specific form of bullying, or female—not specific— that's wrong. It's the form of bullying that goes after reputations, essentially, and that's a feminine form of bullying because the feminine use of aggression tends to be reputation destruction, and cancel culture is a manifestation of that.

And I don't know to what degree cancel culture and its assorted manifestations are a manifestation of the feminine tendency to destroy reputations, but it looks like, to me, like there's something to that. So we don't know, right? We don't know how female anti-social behavior proclivities are going to manifest themselves in the political realm, but it would be foolish to think that they won't because they certainly manifested themselves in, you know, male antisocial tendencies that certainly manifested themselves in the male political realm. So why would we expect anything different on the female side?

In any case, no, I think the reason that cancel culture exists is, well, there's this bullying issue, but there's another deep reason, which is that the philosophy upon which cancel culture rests is the philosophy that states that the fundamental motivating drive and the organizing principle of Western culture is power.

And power is something like the ability to use force to compel others to act against their own best interests or to act against what they would freely choose. So it's the antithesis of informed negotiation, right? If I have power over you, that means I can force you to do my will rather than negotiate with you to do our will or to allow you or to facilitate you using your will.

So that's how I'm going to use power in this discussion. And this culture war we're in is fought against the philosophy that presumes that it's power of that sort that structures our social relations. Now if you believe that—and you shouldn't, because it's nonsense—it's the anti-truth because that isn't what structures our social relations. It's an aberration upon what structures our social relations.

Well then you believe that people—individuals are nothing but the mouthpiece of their group and their group identity is beneficial to them, because it allows for their expression, the expression of their power, and for the maintenance of their status and all of that. If you believe that, then there's no dialogue between people; there's only power struggle between groups.

And so you don't give someone who isn't in your group the opportunity to speak, or to exist for that matter. Why would you? Because they're just doing their power thing, and you're doing your power thing, and it's a battle of all against all, and you want your power identity to win. So cancel culture is the logical outcome of that reasoning.

Why would you—you don't engage with your opponents because there's no you to engage; there's no individual; there's just the group identity expressed in power. So you can't have a rational discussion, modify your axioms, and come to a negotiated settlement. That's all part of the enlightenment hypocrisy, or even deeper than that, the Judeo-Christian hypocrisy. Now, I take umbrage to that, let's say, because I don't believe that these principles are even Western in their derivation. I believe they're human universal in their derivation.

And so unless the people who are criticizing Western culture want to attribute to Western culture only the best of human culture, because that's what this is—which I think is something they would have a hard time swallowing—I don't believe the best in human culture has manifested itself as the drive to power. I think that's an appalling philosophy. I think the only people who believe that are those who use power to negotiate their own social relations and who wish they had the power to negotiate the broader social contract.

So I think the hypothesis that power is the fundamental motivation is an unconscious confession on the part of its professors, and I think all of their actions indicate precisely that. So you know who you're dealing with when you hear someone who makes that claim. They're either deeply cynical or they're narcissistic or they're Machiavellian—and they believe that's how everyone else is.

I think that comes—I think that's absolutely clear, for example, in the writings of Durkheim, who is personally appalling as a human being in every possible way. And I mean, I think it is reasonable under most conditions to separate the thinker from his thoughts, or her thoughts, but I'd be willing to make an exception in the case of Durkheim. But he believed that power structures human relations. That's where he got his sexual gratification was through the expression of power, and I believe he did think that that's what structured human social relations, and that's how he acted, and that's how he thought.

And so his effect as the most cited social scientist ever is so pernicious that it's absolutely beyond comprehension. So those are the reasons for cancel culture. It gives malevolent Machiavellians the opportunity to bully in a manner that destroys reputations without repercussion, and so there's no shortage of fun in that.

And it gives those—and it's required ideologically for the sake of consistency by those who claim that power is the fundamental structuring motivation of Western culture or perhaps culture at large, insofar as it isn't possible to distinguish between culture and Western culture. Unless, as I said, you're willing to attribute all the positive aspects of human universal culture to the West.

So the critique is broader than a critique of Western culture; that's the point that I'm making. It's a critique of the fundamental human endeavor—the golden thread that stretches back centuries. And when they—when the cultural critics say that this is a war of fundamentals, they mean that this is a war that goes all the way to the bottom. It's a war about whether or not it's the logos that's the center of motivation for human social structures, and their answer would be no; it's the power-mad adversary.

So, it often seems like intelligent people lack social skills, where socially highly competent persons are usually not all that smart.

No, that isn't how it is. There are exceptions, and much is made of them, I suppose. The popularity of the show "The Big Bang Theory" is an indication of that. So intelligence gets caricatured as, um, the systematizing tendency versus the empathizing tendency. You can look that up if you want—it’s the systematic—the systemizing tendency, which is seen in its extreme in the case of autism, is a part of the tendency to think systematically and to prefer things to people.

And there are intelligent people who are systematizers. They're usually characterized as nerds, just—and the most accurate caricaturization—the most accurate caricature is perhaps "The Big Bang," or the most, what would you say, the most amusing caricature, the most, uh, thoughtful caricature. But its popularity indicates that, you know, the trope has some merit, some identifiable merit.

There are a subset of highly intelligent people who are systematizers, and they tend to lack social skills. But even systematizers who aren't intelligent lack social skills, and you can be virtually certain that the more intelligent systematizers have more social skills than the less intelligent systematizers.

So overall, there's a positive relationship between intelligence and social skill, make no mistake about it because intelligence— that's general cognitive ability—is such a pervasive phenomenon that virtually everything that has a cognitive element, well, I would say everything that has a cognitive element is positively correlated with IQ or with general cognitive ability.

General IQ is general cognitive ability standardized and corrected for age, by the way, and general cognitive ability is the proclivity for people who do well on solving one set of abstract problems to solve all sets of abstract problems. It's a unitary phenomenon— a very powerful unitary phenomenon.

So, it's just not the case, and it's certainly not the case that emotional intelligence—which doesn't exist, by the way—it's a manifestation of agreeableness on the big five scale because the big five does exist. Even though its constituent elements don't have the same predictive power as general cognitive ability, they're reliably measurable and valid predictors of many, uh, non-obvious phenomena, let's say.

So the big five—extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness—were derived through statistical techniques that are very similar to those that were used to derive the single factor of general cognitive ability, sometimes parsed into verbal and non-verbal intelligence.

And there’s some utility in that, even though those two are very highly correlated, especially across time. Factor analysis, which is the statistical technique applied to personality adjectives, reliably reveals that there are five factors. And if you're talking about personality, you're talking about one or more of those five factors, whether you know it or not, and whether you want to or not.

And that's that. Now, you could argue that there are six factors—the people who push the HEXACO model do argue that—and more power to them. They seem to have identified something useful in honesty-humility, perhaps. Maybe that's the inverse of what the investigators into the dark triad, which includes Machiavellianism, have also identified. There does seem to be a paucity of words representing malevolence in the big five, and that's because those judgmental words were parsed out of many of the adjective lists that were used to derive the big five to begin with.

There was an attempt to include non-judgmental adjectives in the initial derivation. So maybe there are six factors, but there's certainly five, and perhaps those can be broken down into ten. We broke them down into ten—my colleagues and I and some other compatriots, colleagues, and students of mine broke the big five down into ten aspects.

If you're interested in that, you can use my personality test at understandmyself.com, which also, by the way, enables you to generate a couple's report. So if you and your partner both do the personality test, you can get a couple's report that will identify where you are simpatico, let's say, and where you're likely to have trouble and why.

So, you know, hypothetically, that's going to be useful. And it's, you know, it is really useful to know that some of the conflicts that you're going to have with your partner are a consequence of the differences between your innate temperaments and to know that those temperamental differences exist and to be able to take them into account.

So, anyways, it isn't the case that highly intelligent people lack social skills. It is the case that we're very motivated to look at the deficits of highly intelligent people because it's so annoying that they exist. You know, look, when I taught at Harvard, I used to have some of the undergraduates over for lunch or dinner—not nearly as often as I would have liked to or should have. My experience with the Harvard undergraduates was that—they're very highly selected on the basis of general cognitive ability, by the way—although that's not the only means of selection, even though it perhaps should be, because that would be more fair than what's being done currently.

That doesn't say that—that isn't to say that that would be optimal, because conscientiousness might be taken into account validly, and so might openness, which is the creativity dimension. If you're going to consider personality, conscientiousness would be at the top of the list.

Anyhow, my observation with the Harvard undergraduates was one third of them were as smart as anybody ever going to meet. And those were people—kids who you could teach something to, and they would immediately grip it, and then they would immediately generalize it to areas that perhaps you hadn't even considered, which is a hallmark of extreme intelligence and also to some degree of creativity.

So that was always very interesting. A third of them would catch on faster than virtually everybody who ever met but didn't have that generalization capacity. And then a third would get it if they worked. And so that was the Harvard undergraduate population. And so I would invite students, particularly from that upper third, let's say, to have lunch, because they were very interesting to me, those kids.

And get to know them. And like they were almost without exception—perhaps without exception—they were great people. You know, they were generally attractive; they were socially skilled; they were humble. You know, and going to an Ivy League school like Harvard, at least at that time, was a humbling experience because no matter how smart you were, where you came from—and you were very likely to be a valedictorian, for example, if you were admitted to Harvard—you were not as smart as the—as some of the people around you, and you were way not as smart as some of them.

And so it was a humbling experience for everyone. Now, they might have been puffed up because they were at Harvard to some degree, but within Harvard, that was a whole different story. That's not a place that's all that easy on your ego as a first year.

So, you know, and that's something to think about if you barely got in. I would recommend if you barely got in that you attend somewhere where you're a bigger fish in a smaller pond. It'd be a lot easier on you psychologically. You know, maybe the connection network wouldn't be as good, but I would generally recommend that. You know, you don't go somewhere where you barely made it. I don't think that's the best possible route.

Anyways, these kids in the upper third of the upper, you know, one tenth of one percentile by no means lacked social skills. You know, most of them were good athletes because that was also a criteria for admission or they had performed some other quite remarkable feat of accomplishment—at least one—by the time they were applying, because to get into Harvard, you needed to have extremely high general cognitive ability, let's say.

You probably also needed to be conscientious, at least implicitly. But you definitely needed to have accomplished one or two remarkable things in your life before you got selected, because general cognitive ability wasn't enough, because Harvard had a plethora of candidates in the stratospheric echelons of general cognitive ability.

And so, you know, I used to joke with my wife after we had a dinner like this that, you know, we’re both primed to want to hate this highly accomplished person who had done so much by the time they were 18. But you know, on meeting them, you could see exactly why they got to where they were. And that was merit, insofar as that was properly selected for by the selection committee, which at that time was less corrupt than it is now, although not without its corruptions.

So, no, wrong. Intelligent people don't lack social skills. A subset of highly intelligent people who are systematizers in their thinking lack social skills. And it's convenient for all the rest of us, insofar as we aren't in those upper echelons of general cognitive ability, to look for the weaknesses of those who are. But I'm afraid the story isn't that comforting.

So, EQ is not inversely proportional to IQ; quite the contrary. So, you know, look, think about it. The more complicated the cognitive activity, the better at it people who have high general cognitive ability are. Now, there isn't anything more complicated than reading other people. So why would IQ falter in its prediction of that capability?

And then let's think about this a little bit further with regards to convenience. So let's say you're a lawyer, or a clinical psychologist, or a doctor for that matter, and let's say that you've been selected for that occupation. Well, what's been used to select you? Well, in the case of clinical psychologists, which is probably the most relevant case—although lawyers and doctors also deal with people all the time and need to have a certain degree of emotional intelligence—which, by the way, doesn't exist; it's agreeableness fundamentally in the big five pantheon.

I think I forgot to finish that thought earlier. In any case, clinical psychologists are selected in large part, although not entirely, on the basis of their GRE scores—that's the test used to screen applicants across universities when they apply to postgraduate clinical psychology programs, which are very, very hard to get into.

Which means that the applicant-to-admission ratio is extremely high. It's at least as hard to get into as medical school and I would argue probably harder, but I might be wrong because they're both very hard to get into.

You're basically selected on the basis of your GRE scores—about a third of your application would be a consequence of your GRE scores and your grades, and both of those are central markers for general cognitive ability. And so all the people who practice clinical psychology have been selected on the basis of general cognitive ability.

And maybe that's not the only criteria that should have been used, and it isn't, because, you know, evaluation committees look at things like letters of recommendation, which are not particularly valid predictors of competence, by the way, but maybe can be used to screen out, you know, by reading between the lines generally, the letters of recommendation for anybody applying to programs that are highly selective are glowing, and so it's very difficult to differentiate between them, and a predictor with no differentiation has no utility.

And increasingly, people are loath to provide accurate letters of recommendation because they're afraid that, well, they'll be caught up in some scandal if they let their opinion be known, so they're in all likelihood becoming less valid predictors. But in any case, I'm hammering this point home because it needs to be hammered home. Intelligent people are better at everything that's complicated.

It's the nature of intelligence. It's the central nature of intelligence. And, you know, there are vast differences in intelligence between people, and those have massive real-world consequences. And doesn’t that just suck? Well, it certainly does.

It's perhaps the most inedible object that psychological research has, you know, generated for your delectation, and it isn't even clear that our culture can absorb the knowledge without crumbling. So, but there it is, and we're forced to deal with it.

Now, the upside is because we can measure general cognitive ability—and this you've got to think this through, people—everyone, we can sort people on general cognitive ability. And so that's a bloody catastrophe for those who don't make the sorting, isn't it? And something has to be done about that, and some thought put into it, some real thought put into it—not hand-waving that says everyone can be trained to do anything, which is liberal.

It's a lie; it's not true. It's an anti-truth, unfortunately, because wouldn't it be lovely if that was the case? You know, and hard work, which is expressed in trait conscientiousness, can compensate to some degree. But no matter how hard I work, for example, I'm never going to be the kind of mathematician that can do cosmological-level or particle-level physics.

I've seen mathematical geniuses; I’ve had some of them as students. They could learn in a month what took me five years not to learn very well. I had a student who was a systematizer on the autistic spectrum and although also highly verbally proficient in her systematic way, god, she learned more about statistics in two months being my graduate student than I did in 12 years of being a PhD candidate and then a researcher, and, you know, she won awards for teaching statistics in her first semester, and those concepts to her were like reading an ABC book for me, and I'm not like that, you know?

I have some sense of my own intellectual limitations; I certainly see them in the mathematical realm. My verbal intelligence is very high, but my non-verbal intelligence is high, but it's not very high, and I've met people who have very high non-verbal intelligence and had the privilege to work with them. But, you know, the thing about the sorting is that it's, well, obviously, it's extremely hard on people who don't make the cut in whatever direction the cut is being made, but it allows the rest of us morons to be in a position to take preferential advantage of the talent that we've winnowed and that is now being presented to us.

And so we have to ask ourselves, what's in our best interest, people? Are we going to swallow the bitter pill of differences in general cognitive ability so that we can exploit for our own utility the massive advantage that those who have high general cognitive ability are able to present to us? And are we going to play the game straight so that we do open the door to those who have proficiency in that regard so they can maximize their talent and therefore benefit the rest of us? Because that's what we do when we use objective merit-based screening for application to places like Harvard.

And if we did that well, we'd stop screening out the Asians, for example, which is an unbelievably perverse thing to do, given that they have an edge in conscientiousness, probably for cultural reasons. But it's certainly the case that at Ivy League institutes, very, very many Asians in particular who have exceptional general cognitive ability are being screened out of the competition for personality defects, and it's appalling.

And, you know, if the liberals who are listening to this—and there's probably not that many of them— but for the liberals who are listening to this, is that really the kind of diversity that you're promoting? Is that what you want? You're going to hobble the ability of the entire culture to take advantage of the pool of human intelligence that our testing technology allows us to identify?

Now, you know, those people who are screened out and go to lesser, less prestigious institutions than Harvard are likely to do pretty damn well there as well. So, you know, there are people who are going to land on their feet, but that's not the point.

The point is our most prestigious institutes should be most open to those who are most capable of most benefiting, and though it's clearly those who would be selected with objective analysis. And for those of you who object to the idea of objective analysis, you just try and replace it with something better. Something better. You know, extremely highly trained and extraordinarily intelligent psychometric experts have been trying to do that for a hundred years, supported by the best research institutions in the world, and they have come up with general cognitive ability and conscientiousness. And that's a really hard game to beat.

I tried developing a neuropsychological battery as an adjunct to general cognitive ability, for example, and did actually manage to differentiate the personality screeners in some useful manner by breaking them into the ten aspects that are tested again in the myo in understandmyself.com. And we found some incremental predictive utility in that differentiation. That took 15 years of research effort, which involved, by the way, some of those people who were selected for extraordinarily high general cognitive ability.

On the basis of the test that I was trying to compete with, my competition wasn't successful except insofar as I was able to differentiate—with my colleagues, able to differentiate personality, you know, into ten aspects. So that meant we broke conscientiousness down into industriousness and orderliness, and industriousness seems to be a better predictor of performance in social institutions than does orderliness.

There's some domain-specific prediction that still remains for orderliness, but you know, that was a small incremental utility improvement. You're not going to replace general cognitive ability with anything that's better, and hey man, knock yourself out trying. I did for 15 years. I built a commercially applicable product as well, which I couldn't sell because it was too accurate and therefore too threatening.

And that brings us to the next question. What are your thoughts on the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator as opposed to the big five?

Well, Myers-Briggs was not generated with modern statistical technology and has all the lacks you'd expect. So, it was generated as a consequence of its purported affinity for or identity with Jung's theories—although it's not a product that Carl Jung either used or produced or, as far as I know, approved of—not to say that he outright disapproved of it, but it's not a direct consequence of his work in his domain.

It's a consequence of inferences about his work from other people who studied his content, and generally that doesn't go that well with the possible exception of Eric Neumann, for example, and a few others who I've put on my reading list, which are recommended books, which you can access at jordanbpeterson.com under books under recommended books.

Now, the Myers-Briggs is widely used as a personality test. Why? Well, there's something to be said in its favor. It does provide a relatively accurate index of extroversion, for example. It lacks neuroticism entirely, which is a big problem.

And the terminology it uses is best replaced—and I'm saying this, you know, despite my admiration for Jung's thought—it's best replaced with the factor analytically derived terms that are used in the big five and in the big ten aspect scale. So it should be supplanted by those tests validly to serve the purposes of valid prediction and reliable testing.

Now, why is the Myers-Briggs so popular? Well, I think the reason it's so—there's two reasons, and they're valid reasons. The first is that it is important for people to understand that people differ on the basis of their temperament—that a systematizer, for example, who would be low in agreeableness, um, and generally low in neuroticism, but low in agreeableness, certainly a systematizer does differ from an empathizer who would be high in agreeableness.

Um, that there are—is diversity in the way that people process the world, and that considering that diversity is actually useful if you actually consider the diversity, which is to be found far more in the realm of personality than it is in the realm of inalienable attributes. There's no reliable data, as far as I know, on racial differences in personality.

So the diff—the diversity that the diversity, inclusivity, and equity people are striving to include is actually to be found in the domain of personality and not where they're looking, um, and the evidence for that is crystal clear.

So, and is it useful to have a diverse range of personalities in your, um, organization? Well, that's a complicated question because it's preferentially useful to have a very large number of conscientious people in your workforce because they get the job done.

Now, you know, conscientious people do tend to be a bit more conservative because they also tend to be orderly, and so they might not be as open to new ideas as those who are not inhibited to such a degree by orderliness. So it's the absence of an impediment rather than the presence of a feature, but we don't understand the relationship between openness—which is the creativity dimension—and conscientiousness well enough to make more differentiated predictions.

So anyways, is it useful to have a diversity of personalities in your workforce? Well, in so far as having a diversity of personalities in your workforce enables you to understand the target market, which includes a diverse range of personalities. And in so far as having a diverse range of personalities has been useful for the general human enterprise, which is why it's been selected for, it's possible that it's useful for your organization.

But, but you know, that's still somewhat problematic claim, given that the evidence suggests that a preponderance of conscientious people is very helpful if you want to undertake what it is that you plan to undertake.

And then the open people might be necessary for vision and more emotionally stable people for resilience, and more agreeable people to understand and empathize with everyone within the organization, but also with the general community, and disagreeable people because they'll tell you what they think and work as, you know, whistleblowers by bringing things that will produce conflict to your attention because they're not conflict diverse.

These are very complicated matters. Now what the Myers-Briggs personality—Myers-Briggs temperamental inventory does or personality type indicator does to the dialogue is bring it up fundamentally in a non-threatening way, so you can administer the Myers-Briggs, and while you're doing that, you can inform everyone that temperamental differences exist and that they matter and that they're real, and you can get the dialogue going, and no one gets offended by their Myers-Briggs personality type categorization.

And when I—I tried to market a neuropsychological battery that involved the cognitive operations of the prefrontal cortex; that's what it tested, as well as assessing conscientiousness. I tried to market that to corporations for about 20 years, and it was, except in one case, a dismal failure.

And the reason for that was really—I'm telling you the truth—is that it was too accurate. And so one of the things would happen is that the manager that I was speaking to would want to take the test, and he would generally score somewhere around the 50th percentile, which doesn't mean he got 50 percent on the test; it meant that he did as well as the average manager, which is what you'd expect the average manager to do. That meant he was better than one out of two managers, which is actually pretty good.

But he'd look at it, and he'd think, well, I'm 50th percent, you know, I got 50 on this test because he wasn't statistically versed. I got 50 on this test—it can't be accurate because, of course, I'm a good manager. Well, which being better than one and a half managers makes you, um, you know, how can I rely on this to select people?

Well, maybe you want to select people who are better than you are—but maybe you don't, because that is threatening. And, well, it is a test that actually ranks people on the basis of their merit in relationship to a job, especially your job, is actually extremely threatening.

And what we found, despite our repeated attempts, was that it was so threatening that people were loath to use the test even though we could make a case for its unbelievable economic advantage. So, it's so advantageous to hire better people than to not hire them, then there isn't a single decision that you can make in your company that's more important than who you hire, and the economic utility of even small improvements in your hiring process is absolutely overwhelming.

And that can also be demonstrated mathematically, but that means that the person you're talking to has to be able to understand and open to mathematical arguments, and also by your story, which they aren't necessarily prone to do.

It also means that the person you're talking to who's doing the selection has to benefit directly or at least not be punished for improving the selection process, and the way that most corporations are set up is that those who accrue benefits from improving the hiring process are not those who are in control of the hiring process. So the incentives are lined up in a perverse way.

So, for example, many of the people that I was negotiating with, they would tell me they couldn't pay for the test. I'd say, well, like this test has a 500-to-one return on investment. What do you mean you can't pay for it? It's not like we were charging an arm and a leg, by the way either.

Well, I get evaluated on the cost side, and the benefits get evaluated on someone else's watch. Well, you know, then I'm dead in the water, aren't I? Because I—there's no argument that I can make that will convince you to use the test because you'll be punished for its shortcomings, and someone else will be rewarded for its benefits—end of story. And we never did market this product successfully, despite, you know, 15 years of work, much of it published in the scientific literature.

So, anyways, back to the Myers-Briggs. Well, it's a non-confrontational way of introducing discussion about personality into the workforce. And so it's to be lauded for that. And it does provide people with some information. Well, it certainly provides them with information that there are differences in personality, and that's a useful pedagogical contribution, let's say.

So thumbs up to the Myers-Briggs people for that, for making a test that people could bear using. Now the problem is that it's not the most accurate test. The most accurate test, as far as I'm concerned, and you can—for those of you who are able, you can decide whether this is a valid claim or not, is the understandmyself.com personality test—the big five, the ten aspect big five ten aspects slash big five markers.

And that paper, by the way, has been cited—I’ll just look at Google Scholar here for a minute—the paper that Colin DeYoung, who was a student of mine at the time, wrote, along with Daniel Higgins, and no, along with Lena Quilty—my mistake. Daniel Higgins is my partner in the business and also a co-author on the next three most highly cited papers that I've been associated with.

Anyways, the paper is "Between Facets and Domains: 10 Aspects of the Big Five," and it's been cited 1,700 times. Where the median citation—it’s been cited a lot. It's the highest citation count paper I have, and 1,700 citations is a very large number of citations. That would be a moderate career-level citation for a moderately successful researcher, rather than just the citation count for one paper.

So people do have some regard for the ten aspect theory, and increasingly so. That means there are more and more papers published using it. So if you really want to know what your personality is, I would say use understand myself, and then you can also understand your coupling better.

If you want a non-confrontational introduction to the idea that personality diversity exists, then use the Myers-Briggs, but it isn't going to give you the most differentiated information that you can have. So, um, I guess if I was pushed, though, and I, uh, you know, someone from a corporation said to me, well, which one would you recommend using in the corporate environment?

Well, I’d make two cases: I’d say, well, if you want to avoid conflict, use the MBTI; if you want to help people understand their personalities and use an accurate instrument to do so—for whatever cost that might have as well—then use the ten aspect scale, because it's the most accurate and differentiated personality measure that exists, as far as I'm concerned.

The HEXACO model is great, and a standard big five like the NEO-PI-R is also—these are good instruments. It's not like it's the only one, but I think it's got the stats right at the most fundamental level, and it offers the most differentiation, so it gives you the biggest accuracy bang for your buck, if you're interested in accuracy, and it doesn't take very long. You know, it's a hundred questions, and you can wrap them off pretty quickly, and you get a lot of information about who you are— that’s useful, as far as I'm concerned.

Okay, next question: how does one restore trust in our political, medical, judicial and other social systems when they're proving out to be fraudulent with every passing day? Well, look, the first thing is they've been proving out to be fraudulent to some degree every day throughout the entire span of human history. This is not new; it's an existential fact; it's a transcendental existential fact.

And that's why there's an archetype of the tyrant, and we've used the archetype of the tyrant to represent the entire patriarchy. It's implicit in that term—the culture war right now is about whether or not the patriarchy is a tyrant. It's a symbolic battle, you know, and the chaotic feminine is coming to demand the restructuring—that's what's playing out in our culture. But it's always playing out; that's why it's archetypal; that's why it's expressed in these deep symbols. It's not like I'm in favor of it exactly; it's just, as far as I can tell, that's how it is.

So, you're asking how to restore trust in our political, medical, judicial, and other social systems when they're proving out to be fraudulent? Well, first of all, you realize that doesn't make your position unique. You've realized that well; how fraudulent are they? That's the real issue. And compared to what? Are they more fraudulent than you? I doubt it, so that's a good place to start. That's why I express my viewpoint that you start by cleaning up your own soul, and maybe you start by with your room, which, by the way, you can look at my room; it's now clean, and I haven't just hidden the mess in the corner, so not that it couldn't use some more cleaning, because it certainly could and so could I.

But you know, really fraudulent—what are you doing about it? You know, being morally appalled and putting yourself on a moral plane that in some sense supersedes social institutions themselves, so that's your claim. I'm a better human being than the average social institution is moral? Really? Really, you think that? You think that you're a better human being than the American court system, for example? You know, all things considered, I understand it has its flaws, so I doubt that.

And then the next thing I would say is, so they've been proving fraudulent forever, and mostly they're not fraudulent, okay? So we've got to keep that in mind because they're fraudulent compared to our hypothetical ideal, but you have to be careful with that because, you know, if you're going to go around imposing the hypothetical ideal as the proper moral standard, well then you have to live up to it, and good luck with that.

But it also gives you carte blanche to, you know, abandon the system because of its moral inadequacy and also to claim that every action you take, which is in service of this hypothetical higher good, is justified because the higher good is so much higher, and so every iniquity on your part that can be justified by your hypothetical end is now permissible.

And if you don't think the malevolent part of you will take advantage of that moral claim, then you don't know anything about malevolence. So now, what can you do about it? How does one restore trust in our medical, political, medical, judicial, and other social systems? Well, I would say by acting as an honorable agent with integrity in all of your dealings, starting with your relationship with yourself, extending to your relationship with your intimate other, extending past that to your family, extending past that to your community, extending past that to the economic and political systems that you serve and that serve you.

And so if you want to restore trust in the system, well then start by being trustworthy, and that will help. That's what you can do, and you know, being trustworthy—that's no mean feat, right? That makes you really something; that makes you someone who can be relied on to keep their contractual obligations. It's a very powerful act. Don't mistake it for something trivial and local; it's to be a beacon on the hill, and it’s no trivial accomplishment.

So get at it. And then the next thing I would say is, well, do you belong to a political party? Have you ever? Democratic, Republican, I don't care. Have you ever contributed to the political, medical, judicial, and other social systems that you're decrying, insofar as you're able?

I mean, I've had some experience working with political parties when I was a kid, on later in life as well, but you know I had status by that point. But, so, we'll go back to when I was a kid—14—I worked with the NDP, a socialist party in Alberta, and the doors were open, man. Believe me, these political parties, they're starving to death for committed individuals to help.

So if you're concerned about these fraudulent social systems, it's like, hey, fix one, it's right there in front of you. There isn't a single political party in my country, there isn't a single political party in my country, that wouldn't welcome a young person who wanted to contribute to making it better with open arms and great relief.

And so—and it's the same with the judicial, medical, and other systems. It's like, well if you're concerned about fraudulence in the medical profession, you're really concerned about it, well then maybe you should be a nurse or a doctor. Like, this is on you; it's not they.

And maybe you can, you know, when you listen to people talk and they keep talking about the "they," that's the problem. You've got to ask yourself, well, are you sure it's there or is it us? Because for most of the time, it's us. And so, you know, how much are you proving to be fraudulent with every passing day? That's the right question, you know?

And a couple of hundred thousand non-fraudulent young people, well, that have a major impact! And so maybe you could start by being one of them.

So this standing back as a young individual and criticizing the social system, it's a fool's game. It's like you're the beneficiary and the victim, but you're all—you know, the beneficiary as well as the victim. And if it's fraudulent, well, it's fraudulent to the same degree. No, it's less. It's less fraudulent than you. You can be virtually certain of that, at least when the system is functional, because it's functional, and sometimes highly functional.

So, you know, allowing yourself to be disenchanted by that is just an excuse for not picking up your responsibility and getting the hell on with it. It's like the system's broken? Yeah, it's always been broken. The old man is blind? Yeah, he's always been blind. He speaks words of slogans? Yeah, well that's always been the case.

Bloody—the ancient Egyptians had this figured out, you know? The Mesopotamians before them had this figured out. It's not a news story. The old dying king is corrupt? Yeah, right, no kidding. That's why you rescue him from the belly of the beast. That's your goal as an individual.

So get at it and don't let your cynicism confuse you into thinking that it's wisdom. It might be wisdom compared to naive optimism, but it's not true wisdom. True wisdom is, you're the problem, and then fix it.

And if you want more reliable social institutions, well, start by becoming more reliable and then start working for the social institutions.

So you might say, well they're so fraudulent and corrupt that we need to replace them. It's like, yeah, then I just maybe will not allow you the opportunity to do that, you know? Because really, that's what you're going to do. And that's going to work out well. What else has worked out well in your life, oh radical one?

That segues into this question quite nicely. I've come to harbor some pessimistic beliefs about human nature. I'm young and optimistic about my future, but I've grown disenchanted by how I see others treat each other. How do you believe we can bring back optimism in human relationships?

Um, well, of course, you're going to be disenchanted because you were young and naive, and so being disenchanted is part of maturing. But the next part of maturing is to move forward optimistically as an axiom of your faith in mankind and yourself, as a recognition of your moral obligation to do so, right?

So now your eyes are open; you see, well, you know, there's a snake in the garden, and Cain is your brother. Well, yeah, it's always been that way, and welcome to reality. So what do you do? You allow that to make you corrupt and nihilistic? Not if you think that it's the corruption and the nihilism that's the problem.

So you're obligated to be optimistic in some sense, despite the evidence, and that's faith. So, you know, pick up your cross and stumble uphill consciously, and you bring back optimism in human relations by structuring your own to the best of your possible ability.

And that'll expand outward as you become more competent. Move through your life; be productive, generous, kind, discerning, wise, educated. You be a good father to everyone—not the tyrant that resentment breeds in your own heart—and that's an act of moral courage, and that's real maturity.

So, and if you want an adventure, well, there's one for you. I have low intelligence and feel hopeless. What jobs do you recommend I take?

Well, you're probably not particularly well suited for jobs that require a tremendous amount of transformation of thinking or a tremendous amount of abstraction. But that doesn't mean there are no jobs for you. And so jobs that are more stable and repetitive, routine, let's say, you're better suited for vocational jobs— and there's vocational jobs playing a remarkably important role in our culture.

So, and hard work can get you a long way. And so, you know, I don't know what you mean when you say low intelligence. You know, I mean there are catastrophically low intelligence ratings, say 60 and below; it's tough to find anything that you're going to be able to be productive in doing, and I don't know what to do about that. Above that, hard work is going to make a huge difference.

And aiming, right? So aim at the vocational end of the distribution and put a plan in place and stick to it and work diligently at it. That's what you've got. You've got your ability to work, and maybe you can capitalize on your other personality attributes as well.

And as I've said already in this podcast, you can do a personality test at understandmyself.com. I would also say on my selfauthoring.com website there's an opportunity for you to map out a plan, and this—one of the— to map out a plan to write about your past, but also to write about your present self.

So the present authoring program enables you to do an inventory of your personality strengths and weaknesses, and there's a virtues analysis and a faults analysis. And I would say if you're leery about your future for whatever reason, you should do the virtues analysis. It's like what have you got to offer? And hopefully, you have the ability to work hard and maybe you have other personality attributes that are important and that you could understand and then capitalize on.

So, I would say do the understandmyself.com personality test. Do the virtues section of the present authoring exercise at selfauthoring.com. Put together a plan and aim at the vocational end of the job distribution. Don't despair—there's plenty of opportunities at that level for someone who's honest, which is a huge advantage, who has integrity, and who's willing to work hard.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it; you know life is harder at the shallow end of the gene pool, let's say, to use Scar's phrase from The Lion King. We're all at the shallow end of the gene pool in some regard, you know? So the cognitive end, that's a rough hit, but general cognitive ability isn't everything even though it's a lot of things.

And so aim: integrity, hard work, a plan—that's what you've got. And so you have to make the best of it.

How can I tell if I'm being authentic or possessed by an idea? In the past, things I thought were me were just cultural fads. Another question allied with that: how can I tell if I'm being truthful in the present if I can only look reflexively at an outcome to see if it was fit enough from a pragmatic perspective?

That's a complicated question, but we'll start with the first one: how can I tell if I'm being authentic or possessed by an idea? Look, when you were possessed by those ideas, you might have been at least partially authentic because one of the things you might ask yourself is, well, were they stepping stones to a better you? You know, people get possessed all the time because they admire certain ideas, and sometimes that admiration impels them into a kind of apprenticeship.

And so they were stupider before they got possessed by that idea, and as they transformed themselves across the apprenticeship cycle, say being apprenticed to this fad-like idea, they learn something from it. So, you know, you might have learned and grown as a consequence of what possessed you.

Now, you know, it's possible that a lot of that spoke to the development of parts of you that you don't want to develop, you know, that they spoke to your malevolence and spoke to your desire to manipulate and all of that, and you have to sort that out.

But look, I also don't think it's all that easy to figure out when you're authentic— that's subtle, you know? Your felt sense of confidence in your words when you're not trying to win is something like your ability to judge your authenticity. You know, are you saying this to achieve a local end, or are you saying this because you have thought deeply and this is the best expression you can manage of a deeply held conviction?

That's a lifetime work. It's a lifetime work to sort those things out. The best I could come up with was in my first book—well, the first of the more popular books—in "12 Rules for Life." Don't lie.

Now, not lying is not the same as being authentic, exactly, because, as your question highlights, it's not that easy to tell when you're telling the truth, right? Because, well, what the hell do you know? It's certainly not the truth what you know. It might be your best approximation, but it's certainly not the truth, and you're by no means unerring in your ability to discern when it is that you're even speaking your truth because that's so complicated.

You just have to practice doing that continually to get anywhere near good at it. Like so, it's years and years of effort to—a stringent moral effort to begin to manage that. But I do believe that people can tell, by and large, when they're outright lying, and they can stop doing that.

They can stop saying things they know to be false, and so that's the most obvious impediment to authenticity is outright lies of commission. Stop engaging in those. Stop saying things you know to be false.

Now, that begs the question, how do you know them to be false? Well, that's complicated. Sometimes that's a feeling of repugnance at your own words; sometimes it's a feeling of touchy embarrassment so that if people call you on what you say, you get disproportionately angry.

Sometimes it's knowing a set of facts that you haven't let affect the way you think or present yourself. You know, you're purposefully keeping yourself in the fog, as per Rule Three of "Beyond Order." Those are all things you have to sort out for yourself, but I think it starts with an act of faith, and which is at least in part why religious systems insist upon faith.

And faith isn't belief in something that no one's saying would believe. You know, that's a misapprehension of faith. Faith is something like a decision that truth serves the good, and the good is worth serving, and so therefore truth is worth serving. It's just—that's an axiomatic proposition.

And you can debate its empirical justification, and of course, we wouldn't be tempted into temptation if we couldn't debate its empirical justification, because the objection is, yeah, and what exactly does truth buy you that falsehood wouldn't buy you better? And if you don't think that you're tempted by that counter-position, well then you don't know anything about temptation, because that is the temptation of the counter-position.

So, and it's a powerful temptation. That's why it's a statement of faith that this, um, conquers it; it's a decision. So you probably were possessed by an idea, but maybe there was something in you that was striving to be authentic, and maybe you can speed that process of transformation along by vowing, by taking a vow—which is adopting a religious commitment, which is I'm going to serve truth and the good despite the proximal cost.

And that's a statement of faith, because you're staking your life on that, right? Because every decision you make from here on in will be a—will be affected by that decision. So it's a fundamental decision, and hopefully that will guide you in your endeavor so that your possession by cultural fads, which might be a necessary part of your apprenticeship, will be temporary and serve this zig-zagging path to something that's better for you in the future.

The second question: how can I tell if I'm being truthful in the present if I can only look reflexively at an outcome to see if it was fit enough from a pragmatic perspective?

Well, you can't if you can only look reflexively at an outcome to see if it was fit enough from a pragmatic perspective; then you can't tell if you're being truthful in the present, virtually by definition. But I wouldn't say, why do you think you can only look reflexively at an outcome to see if it was fit enough from a pragmatic perspective? I don't think you're bound by that exactly.

Now, I know there's a deeper issue at hand there because I've claimed to be a pragmatist, for example—or at least to some degree. The problem with this question is there's really three questions in it, and they have to be answered at the same time.

How can I tell if I'm being truthful in the present, or maybe there's five questions if I can only look reflexively at an outcome? That's another question, because can you only look reflexively at an outcome? That's another question to see if it was fit enough from a pragmatic perspective?

I would say that there are too many questions in that question for me to unpack simultaneously, so what I would encourage you to do is to break your question down into some questions and try again, because I can't answer all of them at once. I don't have the mental wherewithal to do it.

I see what you're driving at, but it's just too much—it's too many questions packed into one to be able to unpack spontaneously.

So, it has been wonderful to see Tammy in interviews lately. Would you and her continue doing a Q&A for young couples who want to get married and for those already married who want to stay married? Would love to see you together, all the best! Another top question on Thinkspot.

Well, I think we would consider it; I can bring it up with her, um, and I will, and yes, I guess we would consider it. I don't know if I'm in a state—and I don't know if she is either—to do that in the spontaneous way that it would really need to be done, you know? Because that should be something that's live, but we could consider doing a Q&A like this on that topic.

And so, well look, we'll see what the comments section says when this is released on YouTube, and maybe we'll make our decision as a partial consequence of that. But thank you for asking, and I'm pleased that you've been positively affected by Tammy's appearances on YouTube.

Um, the general response to what—the general response to what she's been saying has been overwhelmingly positive, and so of course, that's very reassuring for me because she put herself out there and for her as obviously as well. So it would be that it would be interesting to do that with her, so I'll bring it up with her.

You know, we keep thinking—we keep thinking, well who are we to offer such advice? You know? And Tammy is doing everything she can to hammer herself into the sort of person who would be capable of doing that, which is I suppose what a grandmother should be.

So, but it's not like we're both hyper-confident in our capacity to do such things, I guess maybe we're all that you have got, and so tough luck for us and you.

So, but you know, but we struggle with that. With regard to sexuality, you said that it is a good question to ask yourself, who is in control? Well, yeah, that's the question, isn't it? You know, if you're masturbating to pornography and the consequence of that is an immediate influx of guilt, then you have to ask yourself, who's in control?

And that's a really important question. Who's in control? That's what terrified me about developing some psychoanalytic acumen, because once you realize that you're a house that many spirits can and do inhabit and that many of them aren't you and that many of them aren't working towards the purposes you might want yourself to be working to, and that's the realization of the myth that you're embodying from the Jungian perspective, it's a very, very serious question.

The fundamental human myth is Cain versus Abel, and so who are you? Are you Cain or Abel? Well, the answer is you're both. And then the question is, well, who's got the upper hand? And then the next question is, who do you want to have the upper hand? Is it God and Abel or Satan and Cain?

And that's a question that's just as germane to non-believers as it is to believers, and isn't that remarkable and appalling and overwhelming and terrifying all at the same time, if you have any sense of what it means?

So if your behavior is embarrassing you, well, there's only two possibilities, isn't there? You shouldn't be so embarrassed, and I suppose the voice that says yes to all expression of human sexuality would say that your guilt and shame is merely the detrimental hangover of an oppressive patriarchy that's judgmental in its attitudes towards sexuality.

Well, yeah, well what would you use judgment to differentiate if it isn't sexuality? So I don't think that argument goes anywhere. You have to consult your own conscience.

Like I know the conscience can become an oppressive force on its own; that's the indwelling of the great tyrant, you know? And Freud made much of that—a too oppressive superego. And I've certainly seen clients whose expression of healthy sexuality was inhibited by a too rigid superego. That can definitely happen.

But that doesn't mean that all guilt about all forms of sexual expression constitutes a superego run amok. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that there was some relationship between the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which according to Randy Thornhill, by the way, who's perhaps the world's top biological thinker on this particular topic, Thornhill believed that the liberalism of the 60s was a consequence, at least in part and in large part, I should say, of the hygienic revolution of the previous six decades and more that enabled us to reduce the impact, at least in the West, of infectious diseases.

And because we were much less prone to the transmission and receipt of infectious diseases, we could afford to be more liberal by the 1960s. So we got more sexually liberal, and what happened? Aids.

And I say that without prejudice. And what's the most effective means of facilitating the reproduction of a deadly virulent agent and its propagation through the population? Unrestrained sexual behavior, and so that would be a multitude of partners.

So sexual shame is there for a reason, and it's not a trivial reason and it's not just going to go away because we may wave the magic wand and make the patriarchal oppressor vanish, and that's not going to happen either, by the way.

So if you're ashamed of your sexual behavior, then you have to ask yourself, is the shame wrong or is the sexual behavior wrong? And I'm asking you, I'm not judging your behavior because what the hell do I know about you? And I have enough trouble with my own behavior, so you know, this is on you.

Is your shame what you should be dispensing with or the behavior? And you know, it might be a little a column and a little column B because life is never simple. But if you don't feel ennobled by your porn-related masturbation, then perhaps that means it's of questionable utility.

I certainly don't see it as a stabilizing social force; I don't see it as something people do in public and brag about. And I know that sexual behavior is private and should remain that way, but you get what I'm driving at.

So, look, I think people shouldn't lie, especially to themselves, and I think repeatedly engaging in a behavior that you judge yourself to be morally reprehensible is a form of performative contradiction, which is the acting out of a lie, and I suspect you know that or you wouldn't be asking the question. And so, you know, what should you do with pornography?

Well, you know the answer to that, and so does everybody else. Everyone knows it's not good. It's not good for those who produce it; it's not good for those who participate withingly or unwittingly, because there's plenty of them in its production. It's not good for its consumers, or certainly not the highest good.

And what's the highest good? Sexuality incorporated within a functional intimate relationship bound by vows of mutual celibacy, and we all know that too. That stabilizes our families, it stabilizes our societies, it stabilizes our psyches.

And so anything you do that isn't in service of that goal is likely to be counterproductive, and I suspect it's your own psyche, your own soul, telling you that. So get out there and find a partner and commit to her or him.

I feel like being forced to wear masks is a violation of personal rights, but I want to respect the rights of businesses to decide what they require. How do I act? I feel weak, as you say. I feel if I don't stop wearing them, I'm participating in a lie, and if I don't stop, there's no end.

Look, everybody is torn apart by this situation, and no one really knows what to do, and that includes me. You know, um, I think all—by and large, the entire human race has done a remarkable job of dealing with this pandemic, that the cities are—not burning down; our economies are not in tatters; we're not completely out of our minds.

And really, that's quite an accomplishment. Now, are our cities partly in tatters, and are we partly insane? Yes, definitely. And do we know that all of what we did was good? Well, it most certainly wasn't. But we stumbled by not too badly, and you know, with any luck, this is going to come to an end.

So I guess my advice—and this is the advice I follow myself—is I think it's time to suspend judgment for six months. Sometimes you don't know what to do. And you know your conscience is bothering you, because being forced to wear masks obviously is a violation of your personal rights, and so is being locked down.

And we've sacrificed our civil liberties in a dreadful manner, and God only knows what we're going to do when the next infectious disease cycle begins because we've—we don't know where the boundaries are.

Like, what if we have a particularly bad influenza? Are we going to be locked down again? The precedents are in—and now we have to deal with that, and that is a very terrifying issue. And to the degree that it's terrifying and that it's a real threat, you know, you're tortured by your conscience, but I don't think that it's obvious that what you're doing is wrong.

It's obvious that it's really complicated, and so I would—my response to this is to suspend judgment for six months. For six months from now, fearing as I do the loss of civil liberties and being wary as I am about what it means for how we're going to handle infectious disease in the future, where I'm, you know, I'm wearing the masks when I'm required to.

So that's the best I can do with that. I have no particular insight with regards to this pandemic; it affected me and my family in the same way it affects everyone else; it throws us into psychological disarray in all the same ways and brings up all the same moral questions. And I wish I had a better answer, but I don't.

So, I mean, I've got the vaccine, so that's part—a partial answer on my part. But I understand the position of those who don't want to take it, and I would be unwilling to compel them by force, that's for sure, because that's not the right approach.

Although I would encourage people to get the damn vaccine, and let's get the hell over this. But I did that; I put my body on the line to do it. That's my decision; I'm not saying it's right—it's what I decided to do.

So, give yourself a break; of course, you have moral qualms, and you should, and so should all of us. But you know, I guess I would close that by saying, but let's not forget we did a pretty damn good job of dealing with this so far.

I mean, it looks like a mess on the ground, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse, and I'm really amazed that it wasn't. I know that cards haven't all fallen into play yet. You know, and who knows?

Maybe one thing it could do is alert us to the presence of our real enemy, you know? Because we have lots of proximal enemies, and they tend to be other people, but we have a real enemy, and that tends to be infectious disease.

And AIDS didn't quite teach us that, but—and the pandemic probably wouldn't either. But it would be a good thing to learn, you know? Maybe we could aim our future selves at an increasingly disease-free society for everyone in the world, and that's the other thing: it has to be for everyone, right? Because we're all the same body, as it turns out.

So getting a handle on infectious disease around the world—that's an unwarranted good, and it might have extremely beneficial effects politically too, especially if Randy Thornhill is right, and you know, the worst of tyrannical authoritarianism is driven by concerns that arise as a consequence of infectious disease prevalence.

It's a radical hypothesis, and maybe it's true. And so if we got rid of infectious disease to the degree that we could, if we made that public enemy number one, we might simultaneously do be doing the best possible thing to limit the attractiveness of totalitarian ideology.

So well, you can watch Randy Thornhill's discussion with me if you want more information. If you want more information about that, it'll be released within the next two months. It's a killer theory, so to speak.

So, and do you have any advice on what to do with porn and masturbation? The less porn, the better, that's my advice. But let's make that more specific. To the degree that use of porn and masturbation is undermining your sense of yourself and providing you with a dearth of motivational reasons to get out there and engage with a real partner, then it's definitely not in your best interest.

And that's what your conscience is telling you, you know? And it's the expedient at the expense of the meaningful, obviously, right? Obviously, there isn't any more obvious manifestation of the expedient at the expense of the meaningful than pornography and masturbation, and that's hardly a heroic path.

So maybe the less of it, the better. I'm aware, by the way, of the statistics showing that the introduction of pornography into a community doesn't raise but lowers rape probability. I think that's a separate discussion from this, but I just want you to know I'm not ignorant of that.

You talk about Beauty and the Beast and the relationship between Belle and the Beast. One character I haven't heard you expand much on is Gaston. Gaston himself is a beast in his own way. Yes, he's the real beast. Can you discuss the difference between Gaston and Beast and how they relate to the real world?

Yes, to some degree, I'll do that. We'll see how much I manage it. Gaston is the persona, from a Jungian perspective, whereas the Beast is the shadow. He's the real thing. And in the Beast, there is the aggression that needs to be integrated into the character, into Belle's world. And that's masculine; that's the masculine aggression that needs to be integrated into Belle's psyche, right?

Because you can read Beauty and the Beast as a psychological drama, with Beauty as the protagonist. Beauty is more beautiful when she's in a relationship with the Beast, and that's something to think about because it's not—you know, Beauty is the heroine whose first kiss resurrects her; it's a different story.

It's the story of the soul—the necessity of the soul to encounter the best deal—the aggressive—the domineering—all of that, and to incorporate it and to be able to use it. So it's the shadow, and that's the Beast. Gaston is a persona, and the persona goes every which way, and so Gaston is the voice of the mob.

And so is your persona, you know? Because Gaston will do anything for status—anything at all—except be real. He has the same problem that Pinocchio is faced with in the Pinocchio story. So you remember—you may remember in the Pinocchio story, Pinocchio is trying to shed his strings—the way that he's been manipulated behind the scenes, right, by the forces of his own psyche—being manipulated by social forces.

We feel that intensely right now; it's given rise to all this conspiratorial thinking. Pinocchio is trying to move forward to become genuine, and what are the two temptations that are offered to him on his pathway? Well, the first is being an actor.

And I had a hard time with that for a long time because I thought, well, I mean, this is Hollywood. Why would being an actor be such a terrible thing? But I realized at some point, something that should have been clear to me much earlier—that Pinocchio was being offered a persona, right? It's act like you're the thing.

It's like the pickup artist thing. That's it. The pickup artist thing is be a great persona. It's like, well, there's actually some utility in that because no persona is not good, but all persona is also not good.

And the problem with pickup artists is that, you know, they're all persona, no status. And no status doesn't mean no participation in the power-hungry, you know, patriarchy. It means no genuine productive reciprocity, just the facade