April 2019 Q and A

Hi everyone, thanks for tuning in to the April 2019 Q&A.

Probably won’t do another one till June; I’m traveling almost completely through May. Although it’s getting easier to do these on the road, camera quality usually isn’t as good, so we’ll see what happens. I like doing them, but it’d be nice to do it with the right equipment.

So, look, before we get started, I’ve got a bunch of things I’d like to tell you about. I hope that you’re interested in them. The first one, and the oddest one, I suppose, is the fact that I’m going to be debating the renowned Marxist philosopher Slava Dziedzic, who’s a very well-known continental academic, tomorrow at the Sony Centre in Toronto at 7:30, on the topic of happiness: capitalism versus Marxism. We’ve decided we’ll livestream this event for those who might be interested in watching the events as they unfold. Tickets for the livestream are available on my website, Jordan B. Peterson dot com, but I’ll put all the proper links below. So, if you pick up a livestream ticket, you can view the debate at any time up to 30 days afterwards.

We’re also going to put the debate eventually up on YouTube, probably within a month. So, if you don’t want to watch it live, well, then you can always wait and watch it later. But if you want to participate in it, in so far as you can do that electronically, then I guess the livestream idea is the right one. We thought we’d run it as an experiment. Anyways, maybe you can have a Peterson vs. Dziedzic party, if that’s the sort of party you’re interested in on a Friday night.

I’d also like to let you know that season two of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast has now started, with the first three episodes up. Two of them are twelve rules for life lectures taken from my tour last year—one from Seattle and one from Portland—as well as an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, retired four-star general and former commander of US forces in Afghanistan. We partnered this year with Westwood One, the largest audio network in the US, and my daughter Mikaela is going to serve as co-host. So hopefully, that allowed a little bit of lightness and warmth, and a little bit of humor, to the podcast.

We’re hoping, as a consequence of partnering with Westwood One, which also means, by the way, that the podcast will now be ad-supported, that that would help incentivize me to make sure that I got a podcast out every week. It was a bit haphazard over the last year; the podcast was generally a lower priority item. And we’ve decided this year to make it, well, a top priority—or perhaps at least in the top five, let’s say.

We hope we’ll get higher production quality out of it and be able to find a larger audience, so I guess we’ll see how that goes. The initial feedback has been pretty good, with about 600 thousand or so views per episode, so that seems to be performing quite nicely, so thank you all for that.

Jordan B. Peterson videos on YouTube, which will also feature most of the podcast content, like it has in the past, will remain unmonitored as previously. Now, next we will get to the questions, I promise. I’m going to London in May to celebrate and promote the release of the May 2nd standard paperback of 12 Rules for Life into the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, and other international English markets—not including the US and Canada yet. Pre-orders of that paperback can be obtained at the Penguin website; I’ll leave the links below.

I’m extremely excited. One of the things I was really excited about this year—you know, I wrote the foreword to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s abridged Gulag Archipelago—so that was a pretty good honor. That was last week, by the way, in New York. I talked to his son Ignat, and we spent about an hour discussing material related to the Gulag, and that’ll be released with the audio version, which I’ve read the foreword for because, as I said, I wrote the foreword. They have not, I believe, read the rest of the audio, but that will be released in audiobook form fairly soon along with that interview.

So that was extremely interesting. He’s a very accomplished man in his own right; he’s a pianist and conductor and has a very successful international career, so he has his father’s intellect, that’s for sure. It was very exciting for me to do that foreword, but I would say equally exciting to have a paperback in the great tradition of Penguin paperbacks, which I’ve loved ever since I was old enough to know the difference between—let’s know, let’s rephrase that—old enough to start to read serious literature. To have a paperback come out on the Penguin label is... well, I just saw the first copy of it this week; they sent it to me. It’s hard to believe! Man, it’s, uh... I think I don’t even know how you think I even had that as a dream. You know, I didn’t think that there was ever any likelihood of that!

So, it’s better than a dream come true in some sense because it’s a dream that I never even suspected might occur that came true. So that’s good! Anyways, you can pre-order that if you’re inclined to; it’s discounted in price, of course, too, though in comparison to the hardcover. Maybe it’d make a good gift for someone you like, assuming you like the book.

So finally, most of the time when I do a Q&A, I also talk a little bit about two programs that my colleagues and I have developed—one called selfauthoring.com and the other called understandmyself.com. The first one is a set of writing programs that help you write an autobiography, a description of your present personality, and a plan for the future, and they’re all laid out so that doing that is guided and scaffolded and simplified so that you don’t have to answer the terribly difficult question, “Who was I?” from when I grew up till now, all as one question.

Anyway, a lot of people have used the programs; there are tens of thousands of them now, and we have good evidence for the Future Authoring program in particular, which helps people make a plan and develop a vision and make a plan for the future that, for example, among college students, decreases their dropout rate by about 25 percent and seems to have about the same effect on their grade point average.

So anyways, these writing exercises—if there’s anything bothering you about your past, you know you can tell that because you have negative memories, let’s say, of anything that happened to you 18 months or previous. You shouldn’t really mess around with traumatic memories before they’re about 18 months old; but if your past still haunts you, you know, if you can’t stop thinking about it, then there are things that have happened to you that you don’t understand. You don’t understand the causal pathways that led you down the path that you are now afraid of or regret, and the alarm systems that make up the parts of your brain that control anxiety never let you free of that because their job is to alert you to danger—past or present—perhaps in case you encounter the same situation again.

Unless you’ve come up with an elaborated causal account of what put you at risk, then you’re likely to suffer from those anxiety-related or trauma-related memories for your whole life. So you can write the autobiography part of selfauthoring.com; it asks you to break your life into seven epochs and write about the important positive and negative experiences in each and analyze them.

I’ve had plenty of people—I’m not making a formal scientific claim here, by the way—but there is good evidence that this kind of writing does help people come to terms with their past and increase their psychological health. We haven’t done those studies specifically on our program, so I don’t want to claim that we have, but I have had many people mention that after completing the past authoring program, a lot of the things that they had previously had begun to recede into the past where they belonged.

So anyways, we’re offering those programs. The self-authoring program, you could buy two for one; there’s a special on. It’s a rather permanent special because it seems to be very popular. Anyways, that means you can buy one for you and a friend, and it’s 20 percent off. So is understandmyself.com. That’s a personality test that I developed with my colleagues that gives you a Big Five readout: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. I think I got all five there, and ten of the aspects that make them up.

So it’s a very high-resolution personality test, and it’s a bit on the harsh side; it’s not designed to make you feel good; it’s designed to actually tell you about your strengths and weaknesses. And look, man, everybody has strengths and weaknesses, so you know, if there’s a bit that’s harsh in the test results, don’t feel too bad; it’s not like you’re alone in that.

Anyways, the code for the 20 percent discount is MAY, and it’s valid until the end of May. And so look, these programs—let’s think about the Future Authoring program. It’s really a good thing to have a plan for your life, you know? You’re not gonna get what you need; you want less; you aim at it; and you know, you’re gonna aim at it unless you know what it is, and you’re not gonna know what it is unless you think about what it is that you need and you want, and it’s hard for people to do that.

We’re not trained to do that; it doesn’t happen to us in school; it doesn’t happen to us in university. We like the Future Authoring program and just, and the Past Authoring program and the Present Authoring program; all the clinical evidence about programs like this suggests that they work very well, and you can do them badly. That’s the other thing that’s kind of cool; you don’t have to get all perfectionistic about it.

You don’t have to write a perfect account of your past, and you don’t have to come up with a right plan for the future because you’re not gonna anyways, because what do you know about what the future is going to bring? It’s still worthwhile to chart a course though, you know, because it increases the probability that you’ll get what you want.

So, you know, my colleagues, Daniel Higgins—he’s at Harvard and was at Harvard; he has a PhD from Harvard—and Bob Peel, who just resigned or just retired from McGill, we built these programs over a couple of years along with some of my graduate students, particularly Raymond Mawr, and we think they’ve been really useful for people.

We were trying to figure out low-cost psychological interventions that could be scaled, that would not do people any harm, that they could do on their own with minimal administrative overhead and cost. So like that’s the philosophy that underlies them.

Well, that’s enough of that. I should also mention, finally, for those of you who might be interested, I was in New York this week, on Monday, for example, I taped 16 interviews with Dr. Oz. Now there’s a man with energy, I’ll tell you! We did that, I was pretty much fried by the end of that. His wife, Lisa, who’s a very bright person and who knows my work very well, wrote out all the questions that Dr. Oz used to interview me, and they were killer questions. I had to think about every one of them.

And so we seemed to have a good time there. There was a bit of a studio audience there, and they seemed to like the discussion, and so these will appear as 10 to 15-minute video clips either on Dr. Oz’s broadcast show or on YouTube or both. And, you know, you never know; they might show up on my channel as well. But be forewarned, they’re coming, and hopefully—what did he call them? He thought it would be useful if there were good 10-minute clips of some of the things that I’ve talked about for people to access, and so he’s got a nice professional studio, and I like working with him.

So, well, that was New York. I also did a talk last night at the Beacon Theater, which was sold out. So that’s the third time the Beacon is sold out! I don’t know what it is about New Yorkers, but they seem to like to talk about sorrow and suffering and Russian communist camps. And, well, maybe also the possibility of having a reasonable, productive, and meaningful life— and that’s really why people are there. So it was a good event, and my daughter Mikaela opened the show, so that was kind of fun.

And she also did the Q&A because there’s a Q&A portion, and it was cute, warm, as far as I was concerned, and she’s kind of funny, and so that was helpful as well. So, anyways, there’s a lot of news. Hopefully it wasn’t too much. And so now I’ll do my best to answer your questions. I’m a little—no, I guess I’m not quite met here—a little nervous about the debate with Dziedzic tomorrow.

I’m not a political philosopher, you know, and it’s been a long time since I reread Marx. I reread the Communist Manifesto over the last couple of weeks and tried to think it through, and so I’m gonna talk to more about the essence of the capitalist flaw or the communist philosophy. Um, I don’t think I’ve read a book— well, we’ll leave it at that. I’m gonna take it apart tomorrow at the lecture, and I hope I’m ready.

I’ve got 25 minutes to make my case. Pretty short. It shouldn’t take a lot of prep time if I’m careful, but I can’t waste any of the time, and I really would like to do a good job because I think it's an important debate. No, it’s an important subject. I don’t know if it’s gonna be an important debate; I know a lot of people in Europe will be watching it.

So, alright, everyone, let’s see what we’ve got here to address. If you had been allotted the opportunity to ask Michael Mix, what would you have discussed with Nietzsche? Well, I think I would discuss with him what the psychoanalysts discovered in the 20th century, or what they claimed to have discovered, which I believe was a genuine discovery. See, when Nietzsche announced the death of God, which by the way, as you may know from listening to my lectures, was not precisely a triumph; it was an announcement of triumph. It was a warning and the tolling of bells of sorrow; that’s a good way of thinking about it.

Even though Nietzsche styled himself as a vicious, intellectually vicious critic of institutionalized Christianity—which he certainly was—it was also a strange friend to the faith. I think, in the most fundamental sense, that’s the truth. He wrote some things about Christ, for example, which were very positive. I think the reason he understood as well how important the narrative substructure of the Judeo-Christian tradition was to the maintenance of Western civilization. I learned that from him, you know?

So, see, when Nietzsche announced the death of God, he did it sorrowfully. And then he tried to think about what we might be able to do about that because it was going to lead us down two bad pathways: either towards nihilism and the belief, or what would you call it, the direct experience that because God was dead everything might be permitted, as Dostoevsky pointed out, or totalitarianism, which would arise as a rational substitute for the dogmas of religion.

He knew that both of those would be catastrophic occurrences, and so he was trying to figure out what we could do to heal ourselves, I suppose, as a consequence of this great loss because Nietzsche also believed—well, I mentioned this—that the belief in God, which is not something so simple as belief in a, you know, a bearded man in the sky, it’s sad to even have to say that! Maybe it’s not necessary, but at least, you know, more profoundly, the death of the idea of a universe ordered by something that’s akin to the living, conscious, and aware and intelligent. So it’s rough to replace that with pure random meaninglessness.

And of course, that’s the pathway to nihilism anyways. Nietzsche thought we would have to create our own values to replace those that would fall because of the death of Christianity. The psychoanalysts, Freud and Jung, particularly Jung—but Freud began, I think—and you made this explicit, I think, found a fatal flaw in Nietzsche’s theorizing, and maybe it’s a fatal flaw in relationship to modernism per se, even to the idea of rational thought itself as master of its own house.

You can’t make your own values like you can aim; you can direct your life; you can cooperate in determining the values that you pursue, but you cooperate with forces in yourself that aren’t you and can’t be made, not in any straightforward way. And it’s easy to understand this if you think about, for example, the fact that if you do something that you shouldn’t do, or if you don’t do something that you should do, that you’ll lay awake in bed at night and torment yourself about it and worry about it and consider yourself an unworthy person, you know, as if you believed in the idea of sin.

It’s a very strange thing that there’s an ethic that calls to you from within that you can’t control, that holds you responsible for your actions. That’s just one of many sub-personalities in some sense that are operative within people, and it depends, I suppose, on how integrated their personality is, though less integrated people are more different in what emotional state they’re in.

But you know, the you that’s overwhelmed with grief or the you that’s overwhelmed with love or lust, or the you that’s overwhelmed with anger—possessed by those things—is really often by no means the same you that you like to think of yourself as when you’re under full conscious control and in your normal state of mind.

I mean, even the idea of drunkenness, intoxication—that’s possession by a spirit, right? That’s why whiskey is a spirit. It’s the spirit of Dionysius, and you drink and you become something that you normally aren’t. You know, they say, “In vino veritas,” but it’s not necessarily reasonable to believe that everything you do and say while you’re intoxicated by alcohol is true. The point is that there are multiple personalities that work within you, and they have a fair bit of autonomy.

Like a stranger Tana. Me, if you could just create your own values, you could imagine, in some sense, you’d be doing what Raskolnikov tried to do in Crime and Punishment, which is a book I’d really recommend. He believed that Nietzsche—it’s an idea—that you could create your own values as a consequence. He decided to murder a terrible old woman who was oppressing many of the people in her neighborhood and seemed loved by no one and hated by everyone and who was a vicious slave master to her—not very bright, nice.

Raskolnikov thought that he could do away with her; that would get him out of some financial trouble, and then he would do good things with the money and that if he was a real Superman, in some sense, in the Nietzschean manner of thinking, that he could just dispense with all the guilt that might logically be associated with murder because after all if there’s no God, everything is permitted, and we can create our own values.

Crime and Punishment is an unbelievably deep study of what happens when you cross a line that you shouldn’t have crossed because of your own arrogance. And so, Skolnick—this is a thriller, this book; you know, a real detective story—well, hey, I’m not gonna blow the plot! But he’s sort of successful in the murder; he gets away with it, although it doesn’t exactly turn out the way he expects, even the act itself.

But what he discovers in the aftermath of what he did is that he was nowhere near as in control of himself and his personality and his emotional reactions as he thought, and he tortures himself for a very long time, with very interesting psychological and social consequences as well as driving the plot ahead very rapidly with what he’s done. Absolute shock, traumatized disbelief at what he’s done.

So what I’d like to ask Nietzsche, because that’s the question that I’m supposed to be answering, is given the mutability of man, the fact that we are composed of multiple sub-personalities—which, by the way, it was something that Nietzsche actually mentioned and that I believe both Freud and Jung relied on when they were formulating their psychoanalytic theories—given the fact that we aren’t masters of our own houses, given the fact that we’re divided amongst ourselves, how in the world is it possible for us to develop our own values when we’re a mass of internal contradictions? And each of those contradictions is a consequence of something live trying to make its case.

If you were your own creation, whatever that might mean, if you were in full control of your own consciousness, emotions, and motivations, well then you certainly wouldn’t be guilty about things you didn’t do or did do because you could just revamp your value structure at will to optimize, let’s say, your emotional state. And you know, it’s good to, to some degree, to be able to do that—to cheer yourself up and to dampen your grief—but man, you know, it is not in control of yourself as you’d like to think.

And you’re haunted by many things that you could be and many things that you are. One of the things that really terrified me, I think enough to change the way I was living when I was studying psychology, was that encounter with that psychoanalytic idea that you’re not alone in your psyche, you know?

You can even tell that if you’re a student trying to read something that you have to read. You know, there’s a difference between reading something you have to read and something that you want to read. If you want to read it, you can just read it. If you have to read it, you might not read it at all!

You might just procrastinate endlessly, even if there’s an important outcome like an exam, you know? Even if the consequence of that exam might be failing a course and destroying your academic record, you’ll still find yourself very resistant to read the paper unless you happen to be personally interested in it.

And that’s so interesting too because even at that level you’re not the sort of person that can create their own values. Man, you can’t even convince yourself to read a piece of complex writing if you’re a university student enrolled in a course that you chose that that assignment is part of! So that’s a pretty good indication of just how many directions you’re pulled in simultaneously.

So I would really like to discuss that with Nietzsche. I would like to know what he thought about that, you know? Maybe he thought that despite our disability and the multiplicity of our personality that the possibility or the necessity of creating our own values was the only chance we have.

But, but what—see, what I learned from Jung, and this is probably the most profound thing I learned, I think, of all the things that I know, perhaps—is that values aren’t created; they’re discovered. And they’re discovered through a consultation with the parts of yourself that you’re not conscious of—that you’re not fully conscious of—that aren’t articulated—articulated elements of your primary personality.

You have to discover what your values are, and you’re informed about that, well, partly by other people who will object if your values aren’t appropriate, but certainly by a dialogue with yourself and with your conscience. That’s a very important thing to know; it’s part of the reason why I think that you need to tell the truth, because you’re forced to negotiate with yourself to operate properly in the world.

And if you’ve warped yourself, let’s say, or some elements of yourself by engaging in self-deception and lies and you’re not now because of that—you’re not who you could be and you don’t live in the world as you should live in it, then when you discuss with yourself what your values should be, it will be as if you’re discussing it with someone that you can’t trust.

And that’s not good; you can’t afford that. Life is difficult, and it contains many pitfalls. Unless you’re careful and you search your cellphone properly and you aim high and walk on the straight and narrow path, you don’t have a hope of understanding where you should be and at what time when the crisis hits, and the crisis will hit!

So you want to get all those little sub-personalities in line if you can. It’s part of the reason, for example, why you thought you had me integrate your shadow, which is the dark part of your character; I thought that was necessary or it would go and have a little autonomous life of its own, maybe manifesting itself, for example, when you’re angry or drunk, instead of integrated into the rest of your personality like a properly disciplined player in a complex and sophisticated game.

So, hmm. Oh, lots of tough questions today. Here’s one from Basel: “I live in constant worry my children are going to be hit by a car, kidnapped, murdered, beaten up; it’s torture. How can I stop?” Well, I guess the first thing I would say is that you should reassure yourself, and I know that’s a paradoxical way to think about it—that these things could happen. You know, look, I’ve never been surprised as a clinician that people are anxious, so what you say doesn’t surprise me, except that the constancy part of it, perhaps, is surprising because children can get hit by cars, kidnapped, murdered, and beaten up, and it is a torture to contemplate that.

And so you might ask yourself—not Basel— not why so much you’re living in constant worry that that could happen to your children, but why isn’t everyone else living in constant worry that that could happen to them? You know, because tragedy can strike, and it strikes children, and apparently you’re quite attached to your children.

And so aren’t you very, what would you say, soothed by the realization that something terrible could happen to them? Now, you know, first of all, I might say, you might want to go talk to somebody professional about this, you know? Because maybe you’re depressed more than you should be, and maybe you have an anxiety disorder. I’m not saying that that is not a diagnosis, and I certainly couldn’t derive that from what you said, but it’s one of the possible things that could contribute to this constant worry.

You know, or maybe you’re physiologically ill and less resilient than you should be; maybe you’re not eating enough. One thing I would recommend to begin with is to make sure that you just try this; I know it’s surprising advice, but try to eat a big breakfast for like two weeks; see what happens, see if that drives the worry down.

Now then, the next thing I would ask is, when does it happen? Is it—are these dreams, are these thoughts before you go to bed? Do you wake up in the middle of the night with these visions running through your head? And again, this has to do with food—Is it more likely to happen if you’re hungry? That’s worth checking out because the next time you get worried in the middle of the day, you might try eating something.

I would recommend something high protein, high fat rather than high carbohydrate, and just see if that helps because that might indicate that some of your worry is the consequence of hyperglycemia, and that’s a lot more common than people think. So if it’s dreams and visions at night, you know, one of the things you can do that’s counterproductive is take one of those fantasies that tortures you, you know, and that you’re suppressing, because you will be suppressing it, and let it play itself out. You see what’s happening is that the parts of your mind, the parts of your brain—the parts of your psyche that are your alarm systems, the anxiety systems—they’re trying to think something through, and they’re using fantasy to think it through, right?

And so this is actually a form of thought that’s torturing you because it’s reasonable for the parts of your brain that are on the lookout for negative occurrences to think, “Well, what if, what if, what if?” That’s what thinking is. And sometimes you think positively, “What if?” And sometimes you think negatively. And well, you’re in all likelihood doing everything you can to escape from these thoughts when they make themselves manifest, but all that does is make the systems that are producing those thoughts even more likely to produce them because now they think, the alarm system thinks, “Oh, well, here’s a danger,” which is basically the vulnerability of children.

And I’m trying to present the active agent—the person who I inhabit—with evidence of this potential threat as a good alarm system should; turns out that they’re so afraid of the message that I’m delivering that they won’t even listen to it. Therefore, the situation must be much more dire than I supposed, and I’m going to have to amplify and increase the emotion of my statement and the repetitiveness of the thought. And so that’s just not helpful at all, right? Because what you’ve done is you’ve taken a worry, and you’ve now recategorized it as a worry that’s so terrible that you won’t even think about it.

And so now the alarm system thinks that you’re being chased by he-who-can’t-be-named—that’s a good way of thinking about it and a good allusion to something popular in culture—and so they’re just gonna be screaming non-stop. So what do you have to do? Well, man, this is counterproductive, but I’ll tell you, it works. Next time you have a—there are a couple of different things you could do. You could start by bringing to mind those fantasies. Sit down somewhere, take some deep breaths, try to calm yourself down a little bit, and let those thoughts come forward.

You know what they are, and then watch them like you’re watching a movie—even if it’s a horror movie. Watch them, let the whole fantasy play out and see what comes out at the end. Now, even if it’s quite horrific, you know, and the entire thought is quite horrific, you have now indicated to your anxiety systems that you have enough courage to face the worrisome event, and just that alone should be helpful.

Now, you may have to do this multiple times, and you might have to do it with all the thoughts, and you’ll know that you’ll have done it—you’ll know that you’ve done it enough when doing it starts to become mundane and all the emotion goes out of it. And if you’re particularly frightened, that might take a long time. Now, the other thing that you might really consider—this is something you can do as an adjunct—is you should think about what you would do if this would happen.

You know, as if it happened in real life, and to take even the worst-case situation, you know? So let’s say, let’s say that you received the news that your child was hit by a car. Well, you know, you could receive news like that. And then the question is, well, what would you do? And what usually—what should you do? And the answer is you don’t know! You think that that would kill you; you think that that would be unbearable, and the end of the world, and it’s not surprising that you think that, but it’s not helpful, you know?

Because people have to live through catastrophe, and you have more than one child, apparently, and I would presume, as well, that you have a spouse and other people that love you and need you. And so it isn’t good that you would fall apart and die in an apocalyptic dread if something happened to one of the people that you love because then you would leave all the other people bereft of you as well, and that’s not helpful.

And so, if your child was hit by a car, well, what would you do? You have to think it through! You know, you’d grieve; you’d go to the hospital; you’d have a terrible time—you’d have a terrible year! And that would be that, and you’d have the funeral, and you’d have the loss of the child, and all of that would be awful, but people live through that! You know, and maybe you could have a name—a name would be that if that happened, your determination would be to live through it so that you could be there for the rest of your people and so that you wouldn’t fall apart and collapse because the death of someone and the subsequent utter collapse of a person closely associated with them— that second event does not improve the first one; it makes it worse.

And it’s incumbent upon you to develop the psychological strength to be able to tolerate what it is that your anxiety alarm systems are tormenting you with. And you might think, “Well, that’s impossible,” but you know it’s not impossible because people live through catastrophe. And they do that, in large part and no small part, by discovering that there are darker and stronger forces within them than they might be willing to appreciate, and that one of the consequences of integrating those forces is that you have the strength and the cruelty, in some strange sense, to endure, right?

To dare continue to live even if the unthinkable happens, and it’s not a simple matter to think of that as a moral step forward, but you know people are called upon to be strong and strong in the face of the worst catastrophe. Your psyche is tormenting you with precisely that, you know? It won’t let you go; it’ll shake you like a dog shakes a rat. It won’t let you go until you deal with it.

Deal with mortality—even the mortality of your children—and you find within you what would allow you to withstand that, damaged or not, to withstand that. And you do that by letting yourself go where your thoughts take you, even though you don’t want to. Now, it’s a trip into the abyss, you know? That’s a trip into the underworld, and those are best taken voluntarily.

You’re being dragged down there by forces that are beyond your control, and the mythological motif is that those who are pulled into the underworld by forces beyond their control do not come out—do not come out easily. It can be the end, you know? So you go there courageously, and so if you’re a parent, one of the places you have to go courageously is to that place where your children are ill or dying or deceased. You have to do that; you haven’t grown up until you have done that even though it’s a terrible thing.

So that’s how you could deal with that. It’s rough, man, but I’ll tell you it’s a lot better than living in constant worry that your children are going to be hit by a car, kidnapped, murdered, or beaten up. So you know you’re like you’re in a situation that characterizes the situation of many people in life. You don’t have a good choice; you’ve got two rough choices.

You could go left, and that’s rough, and you can go right, and that’s rough, and that’s all you’ve got. And I would say you have the freedom to choose which of the two difficult paths you’re going to choose, and the one that involves voluntary confrontation with what tortures and torments you, with the terrible predator of death—that’s the pathway that’s going to lead back to the stability that not only you need, but that your family requires you to have. So that’s that.

And you guys are asking tough questions tonight. News of real atrocities committed by humans, especially tortured, leave me physically shell-shocked and paralyzed because if I had PTSD, is there something wrong with me? Well, you’re more sensitive than the typical person, perhaps; you’re more imaginative, you know? Maybe you’re more open; you could take a personality test and find out.

But your personality traits are that probably be the best, that could really be the best way of figuring it out. My guess is that you’re extremely high in compassion, which is an aspect of agreeableness, and it’s the maternal aspect fundamentally. And so you’re probably very high in compassion. I have a personality test at a site called understandmyself.com; you could go there, and you could do the personality test, and that would help tell you.

I would say that you’re very high in compassion, and I would guess that you’re also very high in trait neuroticism, which is the trait that measures sensitivity to negative emotion, anxiety, say, and emotional pain. And the combination of high compassion and high negative emotion sensitivity would increase the probability of someone suffering from the consequences that you described.

If that was also allied by high openness, which is the creative creativity dimension, it would mean that you’re someone who can get really lost in the stories of other people. So high people are high in openness like fiction, for example, and the reason for that is that they’re imitative in some sense cognitively. They can really take on another character, and they can take that on to the exclusion of everything else so that they’re deeply engrossed in the story, you know?

Someone who’s high in openness, you can kind of tell a person like that because if they’re reading a book—a fiction book—and you call their name even multiple times, they may not respond because they’re so deeply embedded in the narrative and have become the characters to such a degree that they’ve shut off the outside world, and they’re living in their mediated imagination.

You know, and so I’d be my guess with regards to your personality traits. If it’s really affecting you, like your statement is quite extreme—“as if I had PTSD!”—to develop PTSD generally, exposure to malevolence is necessary, and so that element of your experience is in keeping with that statement. But PTSD is relatively rare and generally requires a very intensely traumatic personal experience.

Now, one of the predictors of the development of PTSD after exposure to trauma is something called depersonalization. Some of you may have experienced this; depersonalization tends to occur when something happens to you that’s so far outside the manner that you conceptualize reality that you cannot believe that it’s happening, and so the depersonalization is that all of a sudden, you’re in a world that doesn’t seem real because something that isn’t possible, by your—as a consequence of your philosophy, let’s say, your perceptual structure, your value structure—has just occurred and posed an unspecified threat to the integrity of your entire belief system, which is really what happens when you develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

The value hierarchy that regulates your negative emotion gets destroyed at some fundamental level by your encounter with something that you didn’t believe could possibly exist. I doubt that your response is sufficient to produce PTSD. If that is the case, then you’re sensitive to anxiety at a level that far exceeds the normal, and it might be worth going to talk to someone about that.

It’s possible that, like, I don’t know because you haven’t provided me with any information; I don’t know what your mood is like. Are you depressed? Are you anxious all the time? Right? Do you wake up in the middle of the night and worry about things? You know, because maybe there’s something that’s broader that characterizes dysfunctions in your negative emotion systems that might be addressed.

Maybe you’re going through a particularly rough time in your life and so you’re hypersensitive; it’s impossible to tell from the context. But at least now you know a little bit more about what might be resulting in your responses.

God boon hem Dr. Peterson. “I recently found out that my father was a former Khmer Rouge.” Now, the Khmer Rouge exiled and killed millions of people in Cambodia, so this is a rough discovery. I feel hurt that he was part of the horror in Cambodia. How do I deal with this?

Well, you know, the first thing I’d recommend is that you read a book, and the book is called Ordinary Men. It’s a story about how ordinary men in Germany—policemen—were trained and encouraged to become cold-blooded murderers of naked pregnant women in Poland during World War II. And it’s a horrifying book.

So, you might think, “Well, why in the world would you read a horrifying book of that nature?” And I would say because it will help you understand that people who did such things were, in Nietzsche’s phrase, human, all too human. And it might help you bridge the gap between the father that you thought you knew and the father that once was, and to bridge the gap between you and those two.

If you understand that the sorts of things that your father may have been involved in—or in, or the organization at least that he was involved with—if you understand that people, including yourself, have the propensity to behave in that manner and that it’s not something unique to your father, terrible though it may be, if it’s part of the, what would you say, the eternal proclivity for malevolence and evil that’s part and parcel of the human spirit—you know, as the Catholics have always insisted with their doctrine of original sin—then that may allow you to understand the situation of your father better.

That’s the first thing: you have to learn something about evil, and you have to learn something about how it possesses people, and you have to learn something about how it possesses ordinary people. And that will mean you’ll have to learn something about how it might possess you. And that’s rough learning, so you’ve got rough learning to do.

And then the next thing I would say is, look, it was a long time ago, and what’s your father been like for you? You know? Like maybe he’s changed! You know, people can repent and rejoin the world. The Christian idea—which is a remarkable one—is that there’s no sin that you can commit that’s so terrible that you can’t be redeemed.

Now, people laugh at that idea because they think, well that means that you can—they think cynically that that means that you can be the worst and the most impulsive sinner possible throughout your entire life and then conveniently, in the moments before death, repent and you know, enter the everlasting kingdom of God. And unfortunately, it’s not that simple because to repent and to be redeemed is to truly understand what you did, to allow the parts of yourself that did that to wither away and die, or burn away—which I think is a better metaphor—because there’s plenty of pain involved to chart a new course and to swear by everything that’s holy that you’re going to stay on it.

And maybe your dad did that. And so, in which case, your job is to find out how, even now, knowing something about the evil that can possess people and even people that you love—even yourself—you’ll have to find it within you to forgive if you determine that this man, with all the hidden complexity that you’ve now discovered, is someone you love.

And so good luck because that’s a tough road you’ve got to walk there. So, but like I said, I would say read Ordinary Men; that’ll teach you something that you need to know.

The Greeks, by anonymous, had the maxim “know thyself.” How do we come to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and, more importantly, potential?

Well, you know, one of the things I often told my students and all my clinical clients as well, I guess I probably told my family members this as well. One of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don’t. And that you all still know the people you love very well, but we’ll get to that.

You know, you can learn to kind of watch yourself like you’re watching a stranger, but you have to adopt a position—a position of radical humility, I would say, both humility in two senses. So one sense would be the humility of recognizing your ignorance. So you have to understand that you don’t know who you are, and that’s not easy to understand.

Because you think you know, but then, you know, you remember you can’t control yourself very well; you’re not very disciplined; you’re full of flaws. Maybe you don’t know yourself as well as you think, but it’s hard to get low enough to understand how deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are.

Now, there’s an upside to that too, which also is that you’re also ignorant about who you could be. And so the discovery of that, you know, is some reward for the horror of determining who you actually are.

Then I would say, whoa, then you watch yourself, you know? And you attend to your conscience and you see—you watch yourself like you’re watching a stranger. You watch what you say, and you listen. You think, “What sort of person would say that? And how am I reacting emotionally when I’m communicating in that manner? You know, is that making me feel stronger, weaker? Is it filling me with shame? Is it helping my confidence?

Am I laying out a lie? Am I deceiving myself and other people? Am I adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress and to amuse and that comes across as nothing but self-centered narcissism? What are my dark fantasies? What are my aggressive fantasies? What is it that I’m willing to do? What am I interested in so that I’ll spontaneously pursue it? What do I procrastinate about, and why? What am I unwilling to do? What do I think is good? What do I congratulate myself for accomplishing, and what do I berate myself for failing to confront and implement?

Those are all incredibly complicated questions, and you don’t know the answers to them, so that’s a start. And then, in terms of potential, well, you’ll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are, especially the darker parts of yourself, because then you discover your potential for mayhem.

There’s some real utility in that, you know? The discovery that you’re dangerous is such a useful discovery—it’s actually something that strengthens you because the first thing that a realization like that can, in fact, produce is the ambition to incorporate that danger into a higher order personality, that dangerousness into a higher order personality, and that can make you implacable.

It can make you someone who can say no when you need to say no. You know, that can make you someone who won’t avoid necessary conflict, and so that’s unbelievably useful. And so that’s one of the potentials that you might discover. The other thing you do to discover your potential is—well, you challenge yourself.

You know, it’s like rule four in my book 12 Rules for Life is comparing yourself to who you were yesterday and not to someone else today. That’s kind of a good way to start this. It’s like, well, take a bit of a look at yourself and think about what’s not so good that you could improve, that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve, you know?

And set yourself a little goal. You know, maybe you’re not studying at all at your university, or maybe you’re at work and you’ve got this stack of paper there—you know, and you haven’t looked at that damn stack for like a month, and you know that you should be and you’re bothering yourself at night because you’re avoiding that.

It’s like maybe they got avoided that stack of paper completely for one month. I’m quite a coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper. How about tomorrow I just, like, put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk, and I glance through it for 15 seconds? See if I can do that!

It’s like, well, you set yourself a goal of improvement, you know? It’s a humble goal because really, are you such a coward that the best that you can bloody well manage after a month of avoidance is 15 seconds of exposure to that thing I’m afraid of? You know, it could easily be you’ve been avoiding it, so you’re obviously afraid of it, and so the situation could be that dismal and dire, and you might think, “Well, geez, it’s no bomb to my ego; it’s not fostering the strength of my ego to recognize myself as someone who could only withstand 15 seconds of exposure to that thing.”

I’m afraid of—and so that’s a form of humility too. It’s like there are things you could do to improve, and you know what they are, and there are small steps that you could take that you might take that would put you in that direction, and then the question is, “Are you big enough to take those small steps?”

You know, are you capable of grappling with the fact that you’re fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost childlike steps in order to manage them? And the answer to that is, “Yeah, you are.” And that’s the Lot in life, I don’t know if it’s the lot of everyone; most people have things they avoid, you know, and they’re afraid of.

So I would say that to some degree, it’s the lot of everyone. People vary in the degree to which they’ve conquered them, and you do meet people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined, but most of the time, they’ve got disciplined in exactly this manner: it’s through slow incremental improvement.

And then you challenge yourself—it's like, “Well, could I do this that would be better?” Then you find out. And then you think, “Well, is there something slightly larger and more challenging that I can do that would be better?” And you try it, and you find out. And as you try it and you find out, generally you get better at it, and you can take on larger and larger challenges.

That’s why I suggested again in 12 Rules for Life and also in Maps of Meaning is that, you know, you take responsibility for yourself—that’s part of standing up straight with your shoulders back. It’s like take on the world, man, but only in the—in the, what would you say, only at the level that you can manage.

You know, when you’re deeply, when you’re ignorant and biased and deeply flawed and immature—it’s where everyone starts. You don’t want to take—you don’t wanna bite off more than you can chew, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t wrestle with it; it’s part of reality. You know, some part that’s small enough so that you have a good shot at victory, and then you attain victory over some small part of the chaos. And then you’re the person who’s victorious over chaos!

You’re just a beginner, but that’s who you are. And then maybe you can get unbelievably good at it—a gaining of that ability to recast tyrannical order into chaos and restructured into something deeper, more profound, and more suitable for human habitation—that’s the other half of the hero myth, right?

Half is to overcome chaos itself, and half is to confront tyranny where it needs to be confronted—to allow the chaotic reconstruction can allow the chaos to emerge in place of the tyranny and then to recast that into the order that’s proper.

And you do that by challenging yourself humbly at the level that you’re able to function—that’s right! And you can think of it, you know, it’s easier to understand if you think about a child that you’re trying to rear properly, and you want to make that child help that child reveal their highest potential, whatever that is, whatever that means.

And what you do is you don’t set them a series of impossible tasks in the hope of undermining their self-confidence; you form a relationship with them that is predicated on your interest in their highest mode of being, and then you offer them challenges that are precisely optimized to their ability, right?

So they can do them, but they have to stretch—the two elements of their ability would be what they can do and what how much they’re capable of that transforming what they can do. An optimal challenge stretches you to the end of what you can do and then into the domain of what you—of how you can transform. And so if you love a child, then you set them tasks of that nature.

And maybe they have a reasonable chance of success—70 percent chance of success or an 80 percent chance of success might depend on how sensitive your child is. You do the same thing for yourself, but you have to be humble and wise enough to understand that you might have to aim pretty damn low, especially in those places where you’re not functioning well.

And it might be so embarrassing that you even can’t bring yourself to fathom that that’s actually who you are, but you know, you described the fool—the archetypal figure of the trickster and the fool—as the precursor to the savior, to the Redeemer, and that’s an unbelievable bit of wisdom because what you meant was that to put yourself together—which is to follow the path of redemption, to follow the Redeemer—if the Redeemer is a type of personality that you could in fact be inhabited by or manifest, then this first step towards that is to allow yourself to be a fool, right?

It’s because you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to admit that! And there’s going to be a loss of ego or a destruction of ego—an arrogant ego—that necessarily accompanies that. But you need the loss of that arrogant ego because it’s precisely what’s interfering with your movement forward, you know?

It’s part of the adversarial process, mythologically speaking, that stops moral progress. You’re too proud of who you think you are to notice what you’re like so that you could change properly. You don’t want to sacrifice that part of yourself; it’s probably associated with some delusion that helps you maintain, you know, what would you say, a positive, although very fragile self-image, you know, in the absence of genuine effort.

It’s not to be recommended, so you know yourself by watching and paying attention. That’s why the Egyptians worshipped Horus, the eye, as a god. They knew that attention was important, and the Mesopotamians did the same thing with their god Marduk.

It’s not thinking exactly; it’s not imagination; it’s just—it’s watching like you’re a snake! A snake, you know, it’s a symbol of wisdom in part because a snake is a symbol of many things, but wisdom is one of them I suppose. It’s because encounters with snakes, if they’re not fatal, they make you wise because a snake watches, like cold-bloodedly, with no emotional reaction just to see what’s there, doesn’t allow, symbolically speaking, doesn’t allow what is wanted or desired to interfere with what is observed.

So you watch yourself like that as if you don’t know who you are. Well, that’s the beginning! And then you challenge yourself continually to see how far past yesterday you can push today and tomorrow, and to continually experiment with expanding that domain, not only of your competence but of your ability to increase that competence.

And it’s not obvious to me that the upper limit to that is proportional to the moral effort that you put into it. The more that’s guided by the highest of all possible visions, right? The alliance with the highest of all possible conceivable good, and the more it’s motivated by truth in speech and action, the more you will develop your potential.

And I believe that potential to be as unlimited in the upward direction than it is unlimited in the direction that brings people to the political and social hells that so often characterize the world that we inhabit. And so you also, I suppose, have to be willing to undertake that as an adventurer because it’s a hell of a thing to bear that kind of responsibility, you know?

It takes a person out of the ordinary. It takes them out of themselves, and there’s an inalienable honesty and a great sorrow—all of that together. But there’s deep meaning to be had in it, and it’s—and there isn’t anything better that you can do!

So that’s the answer to that question. Anonymous asks, how do you reconcile the fact that Nietzsche is often taken to be a precursor to postmodern philosophers such as Foucault? Do the postmodernists misuse Nietzsche?

Well, Nietzsche is a precursor to the postmodernists. I mean he’s a precursor to virtually every strand of serious literary, philosophical, and psychological thought since Nietzsche, for the entirety of the 20th and the 21st centuries. And to say that he—the only way Nietzsche could not influence the postmodernists would be if he wasn’t a great philosopher, which he was, or if they didn’t know his writings, which they do to some greater or lesser extent.

The postmodernists read Nietzsche. I would say as someone who was essentially triumphal about the death of Christianity and about the rise of the individual human, let’s say, as the locus of values. But, but first of all, I don’t think that’s true; I don’t think Nietzsche was triumphant about that at all. I think that he was wise enough to understand the catastrophic price we would pay for the breakdown of our meta-narrative.

See, the postmodernists disbelieve above all, perhaps—I mean if you needed one phrase to define them, it is that they don’t believe in meta-narratives, so overarching stories that bring communities together.

Now, you know, there’s a problem with disbelief in meta-narratives because I don’t know where you stop. Like how big does a narrative have to be before it’s a meta-narrative and therefore no longer worthy of belief? Do you end up not believing in any narrative whatsoever all the way down to the bottom? Which means your entire value arc is destroyed, which means technically that you would be unable to act because you act within a narrative framework that posits that one thing is more important than another and therefore worth moving actively toward.

So you lose that whole structure, and what you can’t lose it—you’re done! It’s not even technically possible! You might be able to fragment it badly— that happens in schizophrenia; you might be able to subvert the positive elements of others having it subverted, as happens in the case of depression. You might lose faith in it, as happens with the nihilists—but there’s no demolishing your faith in narratives all the way down!

So they misused Nietzsche in that manner because they take his criticism of—his criticism of Christianity and his statement about the death of God to indicate that all narrative has now become invalidated, and they offer nothing as an alternative.

Now, Nietzsche at least offered the idea that you could create your own values. It’s not obvious to me that the postmodernists have incorporated that element of Nietzsche in thought. I don’t think they misuse Nietzsche; that’s the funny thing. It’s not based on a misunderstanding of Nietzsche.

His pronouncement of the death of God was his conviction that the meta-narrative had disintegrated and that the consequence of that would be disintegration all the way down the structure. And the postmodernists believe that that disintegration—this is maybe—see, it isn’t obvious that Nietzsche thought that that was, he thought it was inevitable.

I don’t know if he thought it was right; it’s not always obvious reading Nietzsche if he believed that the reason that God had died was, as he put it, because we had killed him. You know, there’s a—there’s a, there’s an idea of criminality there, that our carelessness—you see the same thing echoed in the old Mesopotamian myth of the Anu Malus where the younger gods get careless and kill the father upon whom they rest.

That’s absolute! And because of that chaos comes back in the form of Tiamat to destroy all of them—that’s the same story Nietzsche told with the death of God. And he does treat the fact that God is dead as a murder that was undertaken by careless human beings and seems to hold us morally responsible for that.

And I don’t believe the postmodernists are sensitive, or I don’t believe that they—I can’t get the word right. I don’t believe they’ve adopted that element of Nietzsche’s sorrow, let’s say. The postmodern description of the demolition of the narrative is triumphalist. It means that the old—this is where it gets oddly mixed up with Marxism, in my estimation.

It means that the old power structure, which was by definition tyrannical and oppressive, no longer has any justification, and those who were alienated and isolated by that set of presuppositions can now compete and take their rightful place. And so they replace it. It’s a funny thing; they replaced the overarching narrative with a landscape of warring smaller narratives that are tribal, and they disguise that to some degree by associating them with ethnic and racial and sexual characteristics, right?

What seems immutable in some sense and therefore not so obviously tribal? It’s a very tricky game. They don’t seem to, as they should, extend their skepticism—even if they were avid followers of Nietzsche—to the narratives that make up the notion that there’s something coherent and useful and superordinate, let’s say, about group identity predicated on race, ethnicity, and sexuality.

And so that’s not precisely a misuse; that is a misuse of Nietzsche, I suppose. It’s the arbitrary determination of where his prognosis of narrative degeneration would stop. The postmodernists say it stops at ethnic, sexual, and racial identity, and I don’t see a justification for that. So they’re misusing Nietzsche that way, I think.

The people who use Nietzsche properly were—I think that was Jung particularly, that Freud to some degree, but Freud’s solution, although useful, was not as deep as Nietzsche, as Jung’s. You know, Jung’s solution to the problem that Nietzsche posed was that we had to go into the abyss to rescue the father who had collapsed and died, and that meant to go to the darkest possible places to find the brightest possible light.

And I believe that you was correct. I think Camille Paglia has said the same thing about Erik Newman’s works, especially two books, one called The Origins and History of Consciousness, which is a great book—it’s on my list of great books on my website, which you could go take a look at. It’s a hard book; it’s quite a bit like my book Maps of Meaning, like they’re really the same book in a funny way.

There are three books that are the same that were published in the 20th century; there’s Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, there’s Erik Newman’s Origins and History of Consciousness, there’s my book Maps of Meaning. I’m not stating that they’re all of the same quality, by the way—that would be a bit on the presumptuous side; and I guess you could also include Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

They’re all trying to tell the same story, and that story is precisely the reclamation of the fractured and mortally wounded father. So, that’s God in the final analysis, although it can also be your own father or the father within you or the father you could be—from that, from the abyss into which he’s fallen.

Then it’s an ancient archetypal motif that’s required of each individual. It’s an existential requirement for each of us to rescue our fallen society from the abyss into which it’s eternally plunging. That requires our attention and our sovereignty and our citizenship and our ability to adopt responsibility and our willingness to work to envision and work towards a better future—one that’s better in the Piagetian sense, better in the integrated sense, right?

Better for you, better for your family, better for the community, and to think that through carefully and to understand that the world is structured so that you’re either doing that or you’re wasting your potential in a manner that allows terrible things to enter the world.

For me, it was really the second realization rather than the first that was transformative. It wasn’t so much that I believed that I could do good that motivated me to begin to be a conscientious person and dedicated to something. It was the realization that in the absence of that, I would be a conduit through which things that should not be allowed into the world would pour—would inevitably pour—even by mere inaction, even by merely not being who I couldn’t be.

And that after I had read the literature on totalitarian atrocity and on general criminal psychopathology so deeply, I couldn’t allow that to be something I would partake in. It was wrong enough in my estimation, it appeared wrong enough in my estimation, so that I was properly cowed into the sort of submission that might possibly make you attempt to be a decent person.

And whether or not I’m a decent person seems to be subject to a substantial amount of debate, some of which I take part in myself. But I would say that there’s been some effort put in that direction.

How am I prepared for my debate with Dziedzic? What are your goals for the conversation to be productive? Well, I haven’t prepared enough, but I’ve got tomorrow, you know, and you can do a lot with one day. I want to review some more of Gjx’s YouTube videos, I want to go through a couple of his books, I’ve got some good lists of what seems central. But what I’ve done so far—I really have 25 minutes to make my case, you know? The rest of it’s discussion and Q&A, and not too worried about that, because it’s easier for me to answer on the fly than to deliver a prepared argument.

There’s something more involuntary about it, you know? Something more habitual. Anyway, I don’t know the reasons precisely, but it’s definitely easier. I’ve got 25 minutes to make my case, and the way I prepared for that was that I reread the Communist Manifesto and thought it through.

I’ve identified what I think the fundamental—every philosophical treatise or every treatise that purports to be philosophical is predicated on a set of assumptions or axioms that make up the undeclared articles of faith of the statement. And so I’ve tried to identify what those are—some of them, anyways. I won’t have time to cover all of them. So I’ve identified, let’s say, five. It’s going to be somewhere between five and ten.

And then I’ve thought through whether or not they were credible as axioms, and I don’t believe that— I don’t think I discovered a single axiom in the Communist Manifesto that was credible. I discovered—instead, I think—is that that tract was written by two people who could think but who couldn’t think about what they were thinking, because the propositions that they put forward are so uncritically accepted by the writers of the tract that it’s actually a kind of miracle.

You know, I’ll just give you one example, and I will bring this up tomorrow in the debate: Marx and Engels—because Engels also helped, right? The Communist Manifesto appeared to presume that—and also to hope for and to wish for and to work in a revolutionary manner towards ensuring that private property would be abolished, and that, that means of production—so the entire economy, in some sense—would be held by the dictatorship of the proletariat. And that would be a consequence of the working class seizing control.

But there’s no real development of that as an idea. It’s like, “Well, seizing control—how? And who?” Like, and did you really—is it really the case that just because it’s members of the working class that have now seized control of the means of production that they’re going to be benevolent in a way that the capitalists weren’t? I mean, that seems to be psychologically naive beyond even the capacity of Marx. And I have to watch the sarcasm because I’m going to try to keep that and any potential anger at a minimum tomorrow.

But to not think that through, it’s like—and then, well, really, you’re gonna centralize all the production, and that’s going to result in better decision-making than a distributed market? Who are going to be these geniuses that will run the centralized decision-making of the dictatorship of the proletariat assuming that it isn’t the most malevolent of the proletariat that’s risen up to take control, which is the most likely outcome if you’re not absolutely naive about human nature?

So the fact that—and then they, they presume that somehow—and this is not specified either—that the dictatorship of the proletariat, I suppose, perhaps because it would free the working class from the enslaved shackles of their labor and motivate them more effectively—though they do not elaborate on that—you’re left to guess that an era of superabundance, material superabundance, would manifest itself in which everyone would have what they needed so that they could pursue their creative endeavors in freedom. And that would constitute the communist utopia.

It’s like, there are so many unexamined assumptions in that set of propositions that it’s almost impossible to know even where to start. It’s like, I don’t understand how this hyper-abundance was supposed to manifest itself.

Um, it certainly didn’t manifest itself in any actual communist countries. It’s especially peculiar because Marx, even in the Communist Manifesto, admits that one of the things that communism is really good at doing is producing a surplus of commodities. But—and so that seems to me a paradoxical contradiction with the whole communist what would you call it ambition, because if it’s hyper-abundance that’s going to bring about the Marxist utopia, and capitalism is good at producing hyper-abundance, why wouldn’t you just let the capitalist system run out until it produced universal hyper-abundance, and we’d have the utopia now?

The Marxist answer to that would be that it would be because the selfish capitalists, for structural and class-based reasons, would keep all the excess production to themselves. But, God! That’s a lot of pessimism with regards to those on the capitalist side and a lot of optimism with regards to those on the working-class side. No real understanding whatsoever of their common humanity and common flaws!

And then the idea that the best way to read history is as the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—that strikes me as almost impossibly one-sided and naive. I won’t get into that tonight because I’m going to discuss that quite substantially tomorrow.

But first of all, there are lots of reasons for conflict, and class position might be one of them, but it is by no means the only one. And even if it was, there’s no reason to assume that that’s a natural and unique consequence of capitalism.

And so the other thing that’s staggering about Marx’s Communist Manifesto is its absolute—the absolute absence of any form of biological conceptualization! You know, maybe that’s not surprising given when it was written; you know it was pre-Darwin. And biology has really exploded in the 20th century.

But I read that track now, and I think, “Well, you just didn’t—you just don’t know anything about human nature!” And I don’t mean the human nature that’s on the surface, you know? That we only share with other human beings, for example. I mean nature itself and the nature of social interactions and the structure of social hierarchies and the nature of implicit motivation. You knew none of that!

And like that’s actually, that’s actually a big problem a hundred and sixty years later when we do know something about human psychology. And so, well, and then the other thing I hope to do—see, I’ve probably taken 15 minutes up just to answer that! I’ve only got 25 minutes in total.

The other thing that I want to do is just lay out some of the statistics that have been gathered over the last 10 years by people like Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling and Miriam Toupie at Human Progress and just point out the magnitude of the absolute economic miracle that’s occurring all around the world as millions of poverty-stricken people are lifted out of abject and horrible privation at a rate that’s, um, it’s incomprehensible and it was unforeseen.

And so, I don’t know what a Marxist does with that—deny it, I suppose? Certainly, the working class in the US—and perhaps elsewhere in the Western world—has taken a certain relative hit as a consequence of opening up competition to the rest of the world and then being exposed to competition by third world working-class people who could, you know, work for lower wages.

But the net consequence of that, as far as I can tell, is that things are so much better economically now than they were like when I was born that you can only describe it as miraculous. I mean one exam—just one example: is the child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952!

Like that’s within the span of a single lifetime, and that’s in the poorest place of the poorest area of the world! It’s absolutely miraculous! And so, you know, I know 10 statistics of that magnitude, and, well, I’m gonna review them and make sure I get the correct ten to just make the case that while all the dismal consequences of capitalism have fundamentally failed to manifest themselves, especially in comparison to the sins of other forms of communal organization.

And so then after that, well, he’ll have a chance to make his case, and we’re going to ask each other some questions, and then the moderator and the audience will participate in questions, and I hope I can have a good conversation with Jigsaw, because he’s an interesting thinker, and it isn’t even clear to me why he identifies as a Marxist, because he’s creative enough in his own right, in some sense, to be his own man, you know, to be his own thinker.

So, anyways, that’s how I’ve prepared. Well, you know, whatever preparation—forty years of thinking and argumentation might also constitute!

So, ok, so look, it’s 9:30, and I’ve got a big day tomorrow because I have to prepare for a debate with Slava Dziedzic, and I have to do a good job because it’s an important topic and it could have repercussions that are of sufficient magnitude so that it should be taken with the utmost seriousness.

I hope I can keep my sense of humor, and I can keep my anger under control. I hope I can listen to him as if he is someone who knows something I don’t. I hope we can have a productive discussion. I hope I’m prepared properly.

I let you all know that you can pick up livestream tickets for that event—that’s at 7:30 tomorrow night Eastern Standard Time. If you go to my website, you can find it under talks; you can find the link, but I think I’ve already put it in the description of this video. So, if you want to participate in this live, then you can electronically!

Anyways, otherwise, we will put the lecture, the discussion or the debate, up on YouTube within approximately 4 weeks, and so that’s that, I guess. Thank you all for tuning in. Those were good questions; we didn’t get too many of them, but they were deep and well worth answering and well worth contemplating.

And hopefully, so that mutual active, participative contemplation that we all just engaged in will have salutary effects on each of us—that would be the hope. So best of luck to all of you, and good luck moving upwards. We’ll see you in June.