The Spiritual Void in the West | Rav Arora | EP 225

And one of the things that I pointed out earlier in my writing last year, which was so influential and a lot of my articles went viral right away, was that race is not a barrier to my success. Like, I live such a privileged life. Stop telling me that I suffer from, you know, racial disadvantage or that other people have white privilege that's helping them get ahead. Like, I found that to be totally counterproductive and pathological, like that whole narrative.

Why was it? Why did you regard it that way? Because I want to take ownership of my own life, and there is no supernatural force of racism that's keeping me down, right? Like, I can write essays and publish my work in all these influential places, and I get to talk to you here right now, and I'm at a fairly young age, and I'm doing all these important things. Race has impacted me, yes, but it's not a systemic barrier. It's not stopping me from succeeding in life.

But that seems to be the narrative perpetuated by so many white people, especially, that there is this overarching force of racial victimization that's at play. And so I stepped in.

Yeah, well, I think part of that, too, on the part of the white people, let's say, is that they get to have—and this is something that really bothers me about the radical left—you get your privilege, and you get to be more morally superior because you're standing up for the victim. So it’s like you get to be privileged and a victim at the same time. It's like, hey, pick one, okay? Like maybe it's just too much to be privileged and a victim at the same time. And that really, I've—that it’s not an effective psychological practice. It's terribly socially divisive, and it's unbelievably hypocritical.

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Hi everyone, this is Rav Aurora, independent journalist based in Vancouver, Canada, most frequently contributing to the New York Post and The Globe and Mail, and I am most known for writing about crime, policing, racial identity politics, and vaccine mandates. The following wide-ranging conversation with Jordan Peterson centers on the absence or decline of spiritual experience in Western secular culture. We specifically talked about how ideological worship and political activism often unknowingly replaces real spiritual practices and contemplative traditions.

Unbeknownst to me at the time of this recording several months ago, this whole conversation gradually inspired my new journalistic adventures in psychedelics, mystical experience, and new interesting mental health treatments. Over the past few months, I've been exploring the possibilities of human consciousness and inner healing grounded in science and reason, and my new Substack newsletter titled Noble Truths with Rav Aurora documents my experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, mindfulness meditation, and talking to Sam Harris about learning how to live in the present moment and breaking down the mechanics of mental suffering.

And my new essay published today, February 10th, documents my incredibly profound and transformational experience with MDMA therapy, in which I journeyed into the depths of my subconscious mind and gleaned new insights and lessons to apply to my daily life. And as I write in this essay on MDMA therapy, this whole process mirrors the hero's journey in which the hero has a call to adventure, and then eventually, a part of him or herself dies, and then a new transformed self emerges—as Jordan Peterson has talked about before several times with respect to psychedelics in particular. So this whole conversation inspired my new work and inspired my new newsletter on Substack dedicated to psychedelics and spiritual experience.

So I hope you enjoy this conversation, and I hope it similarly sparks a call to adventure for inner transformation in your life. Away we go!

Nice to see you!

Yeah. So you devote a whole chapter in the book about abandoning ideology and political dogmas. Now, you know, we as humans, we're primed for meta-narratives, right? Like we have spiritual impulses that need to be satisfied, and so one of the struggles right now is that religion is on the decline, and it has been for a number of decades.

You refer to Nietzsche in the book about God being dead and his observation about the rise of totalitarian ideologies coming with the decline in religion and the various problems that come with that. And right now, particularly among young people and older people as well, we're seeing politics replace religion. We're seeing people now replace spiritual meta-narratives with ideological meta-narratives.

So how do we figure that out? How do we—perhaps we're seeing that, you know, that's one hypothesis, and that's one I favor. I did see polling data at one point, for example, from the Gallup Corporation, indicating that lapsed Catholics were something, some multiple of times more likely to be separatists during the heyday of the Quebec separatist movement.

And I lived in Quebec during that period, some of that period, and it did appear to me that nationalism was functioning as a replacement for lapsed Catholicism. I mean, Quebec was an intensely Catholic country until the late 1950s. So in some sense, they underwent their transformation to a secular society somewhat later than most other European nations, let's say, and I thought that was reflected in the tremendous attractiveness of nationalism as a spiritual movement.

One of the things I learned from studying the psychoanalysts, both Freud and Jung in particular, was that Jung, I suppose, had to do with separating ultimate moral authority from the figure of the father. So you might say that as you mature, it's useful to replace your—to realize that your particular father, your specific individual father isn't omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He's another person, and you have to realize that to some degree to become a mature adult.

So you don't want to confuse your father with the ultimate moral authority. And in the same sense, it's psychologically dangerous to confuse political explanations and ideologies with religious and spiritual ideologies and movements. You don't want the political to carry the weight of the spiritual, I don't think. I think it's dangerous.

I also believe that ideologies essentially function as crippled religions. So they have the motive force of religious belief and the attractiveness of religious belief, which I think is actually a necessity for human beings because we're religious by nature, but they don't have the symbolic complexity that a religion has—a well-established religion with its mystical elements and its dogmatic elements.

Now you say, too, that religious belief is on the decline. Certainly, organized church attendance in some countries is radically declining. Christianity is growing at an unbelievable rate in China, for example, so it's not necessarily a global phenomenon. But I'd—and with regards to abandoning ideology, there's danger in confusing your political beliefs and your religious beliefs—not noting that there's a difference between them.

One of the associated dangers there, I think, especially in totalitarian utopian systems, is the proclivity to raise the leader, whoever that might be, to the status of a demigod. That certainly happened in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China. Maybe it will happen again in modern China; who knows? As the Chinese premier centralizes his authority, which he appears to be doing. You know, you're supposed to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar, and render unto God that which is God. That's the fundamental ethos that underlies the idea of separation of church and state, and I think it's a good psychological truth as well, right?

So it's almost like you can't replace religion with politics. Like if you try, you'll only get, let's say, 60% of the way there. Like you'll get the community, you'll get the group discussions, you'll get people who are like-minded who want to make change, want to enact change, but you don't get that spiritual fulfillment at all, right? You just get the community part of it primarily, right?

Well, it doesn't seem to me to be the right place to look for that spiritual fulfillment. Yeah. I also think in the chapter from Beyond Order, so this is the book that we're discussing, Beyond Order, there the problem with ideologies, as far as I'm concerned, is that they're not useful as practical problem-solving guides. Most of the problems that beset us are very, very complex, and they need to be decomposed in a sophisticated way into their constituent elements until they're differentiated enough so that partial solutions for some of the problem can arise as a consequence of practical endeavors.

And that requires the willingness to do that kind of detailed thinking, and it requires the development of specialized expertise. And ideology can blind you to your own stupidity, and that's actually dangerous. So we could take the case of poverty, for example, and I think we could all agree that poverty as such is undesirable. So that's the starting point and the motivation. Then you might say, well, what is poverty? And you could conclude that it's lack of money.

From that, you could conclude, because there's an unequal distribution of resources, that if the rich would only loosen their grip on wealth, then there wouldn't be poverty. And then it's not much of a leap from that to, "The rich are, by definition, causing poverty and morally culpable for it." And even though there is some truth to that some of the time in some situations, that doesn't mean that it's always true, and it's the only reason all the time.

Then there's an additional danger, which is that you now have a solution, and so you're smart. You're not the problem. You have a convenient enemy, so your dark, unexamined motives have a valid target which you've already defined as immoral. And that means that you're more likely to give rain to violent impulses, let's say, that you should otherwise keep in control. And that's all very dangerous. It's not sophisticated. It's emotionally and motivationally dangerous. It interferes with proper problem-solving. It confuses you as to the limits of your and the depth of your own knowledge.

You end up thinking you actually understand how the world works, and you don't understand it at all. You don't even understand the problems. Think about poverty: okay, so what do you mean by poverty? Do you mean alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, physical illness, lack of education, lack of intelligence, lack of conscientiousness, antisocial behavior, relative poverty, absolute poverty? Do you mean corrosive worldview? Do you mean lack of ability to plan for the future? Do you mean absolute privation of material goods? That's all poverty, and that's just the beginning of a decomposition.

All of those problems are markedly different, and it isn't obvious that there's one solution that will address. It's not obvious at all. In fact, it seems highly improbable that one solution is going to address all of them. And then there's the complex problem that you have a theory that identifies a problem and explains its existence and offers a solution. So now you're going to assume that if you could only put that solution in place that you would do that competently, and it would produce the result that's intended.

That's wrong. It's unlikely that you would do it competently because it's very, very difficult to solve a problem. And even if you did, it's also unlikely that your intervention would produce only the positive result that you intend and nothing else.

Well, that's a lot of problems.

Yeah, right. And then the ideology, I suppose it's the enticement to pride that ideology also produces. Well, now I have an explanation for how the economic system works. No, you don't. You don't know the first thing about it. You're like a monkey looking at a military holocaust helicopter, right? You don't have a clue, and you don't even know it.

Okay, yeah. So let me just contextualize this topic here. So among young people here in the West, here in Canada certainly, and in the United States, members of Gen Z particularly, there's this growing sort of political culture right now where young people are out protesting the patriarchy, protesting against white supremacy, and they've turned that into a religion. They've—they're fighting against this evil satanic force of sorts, which is white supremacy, or it's, you know, toxic masculinity, or it's transphobia, Islamophobia. These are the things that they are fighting against, primarily, opposed to fighting sort of the monster within, so there's kind of like an external locus of control here, right? It's fighting against the external opposed to the internals.

Well, this is why—and I outline this to some degree in Beyond Order and also in my first book, Maps of Meaning—there are—the world is characterized by ignorance and malevolence and danger always, always, always. It's an existential truth. And then you might ask yourself, well, if that's the case, how might you best conceptualize that? Now, you can find malevolence and ignorance at the level of the individual, and so we would say that's the malevolence and ignorance that characterizes you and other individuals, and it's a viciously powerful and terrifying force.

And then there's the malevolence and ignorance that characterizes social institutions. That's the great father—the negative aspect of the great father in my terminology, and that's derived to some degree from Jungian theory, especially through a man named Eric Neumann, who is a brilliant student of Jung. You're always a victim of the evil tyrant, and the reason for that is that human beings have a lengthy period of intense socialization, and that fosters and develops your individuality in some ways, but crushes and maims and distorts and destroys it in all sorts of other ways.

And so it's a universal tendency to feel oppressed by the evil tyrant, and it's so powerful symbolically. It's such a powerful symbolic tendency that people don't even notice that it's a symbolic tendency. So I've been taken to task, for example, for insisting that we use gendered metaphors to portray the two fundamental attributes of experienced reality: chaos and order. Order is patriarchal, that's the symbol. Well, people accept that at face value and don't even notice that they're trapped in a symbolic world. The very feminists who will criticize me for pointing out that femininity is associated with chaos symbolically accept the idea that masculinity is the proper representation for social order without question and are irritated beyond belief if you point out that things are not so simple.

They're caught in a myth—a religious myth—and they don't even realize it. And so, if you accept that the patriarchy is masculine, well then what's feminine? Well, the opposite of patriarchy and order, and that's creative chaos. And that's not my theory; that's the Taoist theory of being, for example. It's the ancient Greek chaos and cosmos theory of being. It's the ideational structure that underlies the first chapters of Genesis, where God makes order out of a patriarchal God—makes order out of tohu vabohu, which is the primordial chaos.

So now young people find themselves motivated to stand up against the evil tyrant, and of course they should because it's at that point when you're differentiating yourself that you want to take a look at the group that you're going to pledge allegiance to and note its shortcomings. But you don't want to be blind while doing that and fail to notice that, well, the social world is full of pathology and danger, malevolence and ignorance, let's say. But the natural world, which you will automatically tend to romanticize if you only believe the patriarchy is evil—the natural world is doing everything it can to kill you every second, and the only reason you're not dead is because the evil tyrant has a benevolent aspect that protects you in ways that are so deep and profound that you don't begin to understand them.

I mean you are shielded, as am I, by a nuclear umbrella, for example, none of which you have to attend to. And the other loss, of course, is that yes, there's evil in the patriarchy. That's always how things are, and sometimes it's much worse than other times—not right now, by the way, not by historical standards. But it also blinds you to the fact that you're culpable too, deeply.

You have more ignorance and malevolence in your soul than you’ll ever get into in your entire life, and that should be part—that should—the knowledge of that stops you from being carelessly judgmental. Carelessly. You should be judgmental; you have to differentiate and discriminate between things, but you shouldn't do it carelessly, and you certainly shouldn't assume that all the fault lies outside, which is the point that you made.

And so ideology is extremely dangerous if it convinces young people that the moral stance is that all malevolence and ignorance lies outside of them.

Right. What do you think is motivating this kind of hallucinatory interpretation of our society being uniquely racist, sexist, homophobic? Like there's this kind of self-delusion going on here where—well, some of it's ignorance, right? And I mentioned this in one of my Colette essays about our society being one of the most free, liberal, open-minded, inclusive societies that has ever existed, right? It is the most—for ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, transgender folks, all of that. But yet there's this narrative that, you know, me as a brown person, as an immigrant from India, like somehow I'm more of a victim than you are.

That I live under this—on average, you might be somewhat because it's probably harder to be a minority in any culture than it is to be the majority. But it isn't accounting for—it isn't the fundamental determinant of the outcome of your life. It's one element, and it's an important element. It's not good for anyone if prejudice doesn't allow us to use all available human capital, right? Even from a purely selfish perspective, yeah, it's foolish.

So, and why do we think that? A lot of it's ignorance. You know, people don't know, for example, that up until 1880, 95% of the Western world lived below today's UN-established poverty line. We have no idea how much dramatic improvement has been made in the last 150 years and how absolutely God-awful things were before that. It's—and we don't know that because we've never been hungry, for example—not for one day.

Right, okay. So now that we've laid out that, yes, we are living in the most free, open-minded, inclusive societies on earth—then what's driving this?

Well, ignorance is part of it, right? We just don't know. And you look around and you see, well, things could be better. So they're bad. It's like, true, things could be better. And right, that is bad. Well, bad compared to what? Well, certainly bad compared to a hypothetical ideal, but not bad compared to all extant historical comparisons. So, but you need—but that requires differentiated knowledge, and once you have the ideology, you don't need the differentiated knowledge because you already have the explanation, plus it's convenient. You don't have to look at yourself, and you have an enemy, and that's the part that scares me the most, you see?

I mean, you don't have to look at yourself.

Yeah, that's a bad. But now you have an enemy, and that enemy is the cause of everything you hate. And now you have all moral justification to go after them, to hurt them, to stop them, because they're evil, and to elevate yourself morally as a consequence. So you have this unearned pathway to moral superiority that's actually dependent on your willingness to unfairly persecute based on your ignorance. It's terrible, and universities promote this. Well, you should be an activist—that's essentially what every 19-year-old is taught. It's like, no, you shouldn't be an activist; you should get your own house in order, and then you should cautiously proceed to more difficult things if you dare, right?

Yeah, and you can be an activist when injustice happens, which it does. Just the problem that I'm finding right now among young people is the complete fabrication or at least a total exaggeration of injustice happening. Like, yes, something bad happens. Yes, if there is an act of racism or sexism, let's fight it. But this whole idea of our society being governed by these supernatural kind of forces of white supremacy and patriarchy, it's—it’s almost like I'm listening to these people, I'm talking to young people.

They are supernatural forces in some sense.

Yeah, I mean, symbolically speaking, yeah. White supremacy is satanic, and the patriarchy is the evil king and it's got a satanic element too. And that's the transcendental symbolic locale of malevolence and evil, and those things have to be contended with. But you have to do that in a sophisticated way, or it's better if you do it in a sophisticated way. You know, there are other technical issues here as well that we have to attend to.

We're so connected that any instance of racial injustice is immediately broadcast across our experiential landscape. And so if you ask people—the social psychologists have established this—if you ask individuals how much prejudice has interfered with their movement forward, they generally claim that they've been relatively unscathed. They've emerged relatively unscathed.

But if you ask them to what degree their group has suffered or is still facing impediments, they rate the group's victimization as much higher than their own personal victimization. Well, you hear about all the group victimization. Plus, now you add to that the fact that we have a bias towards negative information, we find it more informative in some sense, and that's perhaps because we should be alert to areas of danger.

You don't see headlines of peaceful non-eventful racial harmony, which is what exists almost all the time. It's not news that, you know, I can walk by you, your skin is slightly differently colored than mine, and we can walk by each other on the street without hacking each other to death with machetes. That's not news, thank God! But how do you make peaceful, you know, infinite instances of peaceful coexistence newsworthy?

Yeah, you can't. You can do it with historical comparison.

Yeah, so that's a big problem, and some of this is probably a positive feedback loop gone astray. We paid more attention to issues of racial prejudice, and perhaps that was good in many ways, but because we’re doing that, more attention's being paid to it, and it becomes more and more salient. And you can see that that can ease, especially given all the new communication technologies and the rate at which outrageous occurrences can be distributed and our intense difficulty at separating, at establishing base rate.

It's like, well, who knows how many racial incidents of hate there are per day in a given city? Is that going up or down? Well, as individuals, we don't know that. The historical answer is, it's obviously going down, way down, really fast.

Sure, yeah. And one indication, in my view, of just how rare and marginalized racial prejudice is right now is when people are fabricating claims about racial prejudice or exaggerating them significantly.

So there was a recent shooting in Atlanta that happened, which was horrible. The Atlanta shooter, he went to three different massage parlors, and he killed a number of people. And out of the eight deceased victims, six were Asian women. And if you look at all of the available evidence right now and if you read what the actual shooter said about his motivation, he said that it was due to his sexual addiction, and he was addicted to pornography, and he also seemed to be kind of a religious fundamentalist type of person who felt guilty, and he felt very ashamed about his sex addiction.

And he would go to these massage parlors to get these other illegal sexual services there, and he felt bad about doing it every time, but he kept on doing it. And so then one day he thought, this temptation is bad; I know it's bad, but I can't stop myself from doing it. So why don't I go and just physically murder these people?

So that's a good of demonization. Exactly what I was talking about before. It's like, right, his problem was within. There's a societal element to that—perhaps the transformation of our society so that pornography is so rapidly accessible—but we can leave that aside for the time being.

He had an internal moral struggle, and instead of dealing with that at the individual level, he demonized the handy enemy—those women who are tempting me in this satanic manner, essentially, right? Opposed to my own uncontrolled sexual impulses that I need to get in order, right?

Yes, right, right precisely. But so the point that I wanted to make here was about the media response. Okay, so we just discussed basically, in a nutshell, what the current motivation seems to be here. But the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, The Guardian— all these big outlets, they all jumped on racism in their headlines. You know, a racist shooting, America's story of sexualized racism.

And so this other—no, some of it's a baseline problem, right? You said six out of the eight were Asian, okay? Well, six out of eight of the normal population, the general population aren’t Asian. And so it looks like a preponderance of Asians. But then you have to take the local environment into account. Well, most of the sex workers in that area were Asian.

So then the question is, well, did it deviate from baseline? But that requires sophisticated thinking to ask that question and willingness to dig in. And the newspapers, you know, they're becoming, in some sense, desperate. Yeah, of course, they don't have the resources they once had, and they're very likely to jump on something salient and salacious. And then, of course, also, the most effectively salacious article tends to rise to the top, so that's another feedback loop that we are caught in and don't know how to regulate.

Right? Yeah. And obviously, you know, six out of eight victims being Asian women, you know, people make this mistake all the time of confusing disparities with discrimination. Just because—well, they make that mistake because sometimes disparities are a consequence of discrimination, right?

And sometimes—well, and often enough so that it's a reasonable hypothesis, right? But often, I mean, look, it's definitely the case that in the United States in particular, native-born Black Americans are underrepresented in positions of authority, power, and economic dominance, right? Okay, and so you might say, well, that's a consequence of systemic racism, and there's no doubt an element of systemic racism.

The question is, how much of the outcome is that accounting for? Okay, so—and you might say, well, we could use that as the default hypothesis, given the history of slavery, which is clearly unacceptable in every possible way morally, although pretty much par for the course for most human societies throughout history, right?

Right, right. And Jim Crow and other discriminatory policies afterwards, right? So you say, well, systemic racism, and fair enough, that's a reasonable hypothesis. Well, except that there's a disproportionate number of other minorities who are overrepresented in pinnacle positions.

In fact, that is happening compared to the cocaine, you know, the native-born Caucasian group. Indian Americans, for example, their family income now is almost twice that of the typical median Caucasian family—twice! And the top six or seven are all Southeast Asian. So then you say, well, if it's systemic racism, what about, you know, maybe you could write off the Indians and the Muslims because they're more or less Caucasian. And I don't mean that positively or negatively, but then the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans— they’re more visually different than Caucasians, but they're doing just fine too.

And if you assume systemic racism, it also blinds you to all sorts of other factors, as we already discussed, that might be contributing. So I know, for example, and I looked into this 20 years ago, that it looks like it's the familial structure, an ethos of Southeast Asian first-generation immigrant families that are producing overperformance in their children that disappears by the third generation as assimilation completes itself.

So among Southeast Asians, the emphasis on conscientiousness essentially, perhaps with an additional, what would you call it, a positive aspect of a higher likelihood of an intact family—two-parent family, there’s this emphasis on conscientiousness. And conscientiousness is essentially hard work. Southeast Asian students, that's—children of first-generation Southeast Asian immigrants do homework, spend many more hours on homework.

Well, conscientious driving actually does predict success. And the data that I reviewed—this was two decades ago—indicated that the typical Southeast Asian child gains a competitive advantage from the conditions of their upbringing that's equivalent to 15 IQ points.

Yeah, and that's a huge difference. It's the difference between someone who's normal and someone who's borderline mentally handicapped. It's the difference between the typical high school student and the typical college student. It's a walloping difference.

Well, now, if you're blinded by the fact of racism to everything else—because racism exists—then you're not going to be able to decompose the problem and say, well look, those Southeast Asians, they're outperforming Southeast Asians who are third-generation in the U.S., also Caucasians. Why? Well, it looks like there are familial structure issues and an emphasis on work. Well, you don't want to miss that, man, it's actually important.

Yeah, and also the attitudes on life—like in my Colette essay, “The Peculiar Racist Patriarchy,” I looked into different attitudes towards life, towards education. And one interesting finding that I came across was that if you look at various polls, Asian Americans are most likely to believe in the idea of self-made success. They’re most likely to believe that if you work hard, you can achieve what you want in your life compared to—right?

A white supremacist racist trope. That's now, what would you understand?

Well, it's a form of microaggression that's frowned upon, whose utterance is frowned upon in many universities. Formally you can't say that hard work puts you ahead; it's like a microaggression.

And you can see why—look, here's the reason. It's like, yeah, well there are lots of people who are poor who are poor and dispossessed despite the fact that they've worked hard, right? They're ill, let's say, or they're impaired in their intelligence, or they haven't managed an education, or there's all sorts of reasons that hard work isn't going to work. But that doesn't—bad luck, even bad luck, of course. Tragedies that happen in your life, yeah.

You get hit by a bus because you're standing in the wrong place, that's why you need enough sophistication to look at a multifactorial explanation, right? And even, you know, you can control for economic status and still find some of these racial disparities. So low-income Asian Americans have higher upward mobility compared to low-income Black Americans and White Americans and Hispanic Americans.

So, and it's probably native-born Black Americans because Nigerians seem to do pretty well, and yes, generally speaking, Black immigrants to the United States outperform just as, just as, let's say, people from the Indian subcontinent outperform native-born Caucasians in the U.S.

The immigrant Black population outperforms the native-born Black population in the U.S. by a substantial margin, yeah. Even if you look in the same city. So, Thomas Sowell has done some great research on this in the city of Boston; you have the native-born Black Americans, and you have the immigrant Black American group. And the immigrant Black American group, their performance is much higher—their education rates, their high school completion, their earnings—they're much higher.

But so, in that same city, right, whatever force of systemic racism that exists, it's constant, right? Because you can't distinguish between somebody from Nigeria versus somebody who's Black. Well, you might think that it's actually worse for the immigrants because they have an accent, and you know there are other features that mark them out as strange and different—lower rates of English speaking proficiency. All those things matter.

But there seems to be this kind of disinclination towards behavioral explanations for success. There only seems to be sort of external prejudice-based explanations, so part of it is that people are loathed to blame the dispossessed.

Yeah, and fair enough. But fair enough—it's reasonable to check yourself against doing that because you can pass the homeless person on the street and say, “If you weren't so goddamn useless, you'd get a job.” It's like, well, you know, maybe, but maybe not.

And there, but for the grace of God, go I, which is something always useful to keep in mind. But the problem with not assuming that individual planning and diligent effort and moral evaluation and ambition matter is that you take away the very tools—you deny the validity of the very tools that could be most effectively used by most individuals who are dispossessed.

And that's a terrible thing to do. I mean the reason I emphasize individual responsibility, there's two reasons. One is, well, you can start right now, right where you are, no matter what you're doing. So you have that at hand. Second, if you become more responsible, you probably won't hurt anyone by doing it.

Right? It removes the convenience of the enemy, and that's given how terrible it is for us to generate, say, class-based explanations of enmity or racial-based explanations of enmity, that's something we really have to step carefully around. I mean the worst crimes the human race has ever committed have been generated by class-based hypotheses of malevolence, or ethnicity-based hypotheses of malevolence.

It's terrible. And we need to avoid that. And I don't see that adopting more individual responsibility, even though it's not a cure-all, it doesn’t—that's one danger it doesn’t pose in my estimation.

Right, yeah. And just to go back for a second to the white supremacy discussion and the different racial groups, you know, that whole narrative seems to be on life support right now—the idea of white supremacy being the governing force of Western society, whether it's the U.S. or Canada.

So one thing that I mentioned in the Colette essay—the main finding that I was exploring there was the fact that last year, for the first time in history, Asian women had higher earnings than white men did for earnings in 2020. And this was—where was that? In the U.S. In the U.S. And this was controlling for full-time working Asian women, so that was the variable—full-time, yeah.

But that's a staggering finding, and the difference was very—it was marginal, but still for—you know, there are various gender differences at play here. But that finding is completely—it shatters the whole narrative of race and gender for that matter, and the whole intersectional claim of race plus gender giving you various disadvantages.

And so I looked into this, I said, I, you know, I went on this about two months, I looked into the data, and I wanted to answer that question of why. Why are Asian women making more than white men? What are the explanations? And a few of the things that I found was that Asian women are least likely to have kids out of wedlock compared to women of other racial groups. They have less kids on average compared to other groups, and they tend to have kids later.

So the median age for having kids is about five to ten years later compared to white women, Black women, Hispanic women, and they tend to have more family support in raising their kids. They tend to have more support from their parents, grandparents in helping raise their kids.

Another advantage—intact family structure. Another advantage. Now, you know, moral judgment is irrelevant here, right? You know, I'm not saying that, you know, you should have less kids or you should have more kids.

But no, but you connected a limited moral judgment: you can say if you want to be hyper-competitive in the male-dominated capitalist environment, here's the sacrifices that are useful, right? It's a bounded moral claim, right? Because you don't have to say, "Well, that's how you should be." Who knows how long you should put off having children? But if you want to compete economically, that might be a strategy.

That doesn't mean it's an advisable strategy. No, and that's not the only way to be happy in life, too, right? Like if it's—maybe not even the most effective way, sure, yeah. If a woman doesn't want to work so many hours and have less kids and devote so much time towards education, career, right, that's her choice, right?

But these explanations, these factors that I just laid out for you, this explains so much—having more stable families, more financial security, and more time devoted to pursuing a career. These are the results of having kids later, having less likely to have kids out of wedlock, right? These are some of the consequences of these decisions, but these behavioral explanations just seem sort of taboo in a way because the implication there would be that if you make these decisions, if you take responsibility, you can actually achieve success.

It doesn't matter if you're Asian or if you're a woman, and of course there is sexism, of course there is anti-Asian bigotry, which seems to be on the rise, by the way, in Canada and the U.S. over the past year since COVID started, right? All those things exist, but they're not a barrier to success, right? They don't stop you from getting ahead in life.

But the narrative seems to be that it is, which just seems totally perverse and counterproductive to me. Well, it is. It has perverse and counterproductive effects. There's no doubt about that. And those can get very badly out of hand.

Um, any political movements that are motivated by resentment, any actions that are motivated by resentment are, uh, to be viewed with extreme skepticism. It's a very, very, very dangerous state of mind—resentment, right? So yeah, now going back to the earlier discussion we were having here about spirituality and young people, so observing that young people are becoming sort of increasingly politically active.

They're engaging in this protest culture, this fight against these various forces that they've identified, and it's being incentivized by the university, by mainstream media, by Hollywood celebrities—people posting about racism all the time—and so there's this exaggerated sense of this problem existing.

So all of that being true, you know, how do young people get out of that position? How do they find—and this is a question that I really want to ask you here—is how do young people find a value system to adhere to, given that religion is on the decline, given that religion doesn't seem cool, or just for whatever reason, it's not resonating, right? Ideologies resonating, not religion.

But how do we replace that with something spiritual that fulfills our inner innate desires to strive for, you know, God, the infinite being, the divine, whatever name you want to use for that? Well, we could take that apart. I mean, sure, you might say, well, what might you replace an ideology with? And I would say, well, a differentiated view of and strategy for life.

And so when I work with my clients, I never start with high-order problems to begin with. Like, how do I orient myself spiritually? So let's just leave that aside for a second. Okay, we'll return to it. So what do you need to get straight in your life? Well, you need a job or a career—career preferably. Perhaps the advantage to a job is that you do it for eight hours, let's say, and you're done.

Right? With a career, you're in it all the time. Now, you'll make more money, you'll advance up the economic hierarchy, but you're never done with work if you have a career. And maybe that's what you want. But in any case, you have to have a job or a career.

Why? Well, you don't want to starve; you want to take care of yourself and the people that are dependent on you. They're practical, obvious practical reasons. But there are psychological reasons, too. I mean, a job gives you something to do every day, just as your career does. And it also addresses the deep human need to be of value and service to other people, and so that needs to be attended to.

So if you're a young person, it's like, okay, have a plan. You need a job and a career. It would be good if it was something that you could be competent at. So the smarter you are—pure IQ, the more complex job you can manage. And then if you add the development of discipline to that, so that's the development of conscientiousness, that can further you.

So you need conscientiousness and intelligence to be competent. And the more hardworking you are, and the more intelligent, the more complex the job you can manage. So if you're of average intelligence, which you've probably figured out by the time you're 18 or so, um, it's going to be very, very difficult for you to be a high-end corporate lawyer unless you work insanely hard.

So your better bet is to pick a profession that isn't so cognitively demanding that's still useful. And trades are great as far as I'm concerned. There, it's not like tradespeople aren't skilled, and it's not like intel—it's not like trades don't require intelligence; I am not saying that—but it doesn't require as much abstraction, generally speaking.

Like if you want to be a lawyer, you have to be hyper-literate and like 90th percentile literate fundamentally, and you have to be able to formulate verbal arguments, or you're going to get crushed by someone who can do it. Okay, so job and career—you need a plan. Okay, education—you should be as educated as you are intelligent. You should have a plan for that.

Yeah, okay? And it should continue because things change quick, and you better keep up. Okay? So you should have a vision of that. People don't seem to do well without an intimate relationship. It'd be good if you could have a family and bring peace to the family that you have because family is important—extraordinarily important, those connections.

So intimate relationship and family, whether that's your parents, your siblings, or the family that you start, you need a plan for that, a vision of that. You have to take care of your physical and mental health. You have to regulate your drug and alcohol intake. You have to figure out how to make productive and meaningful use of the time that's allotted to you outside of your obligations.

That's extraordinarily useful, and you have to address your philosophical or spiritual/aesthetic yearnings, such as they might be. Well, so that's better than an ideology—a plan, right? Now, you know, as you climb up your career, as you expand your competence and power, well, then you can get involved in larger scale transformations if that's where your interest takes you.

And so with job and career, you should be competent and interested in it. That's a good pathway to success. All right, so that's the right place to focus, as far as I'm concerned. If you're a young person, it's like, well, have a plan. Have a plan, right? Make a plan, and then educate yourself because you're much more powerful and competent if you're educated, right? So why not do it?

Yeah, but the thing is, if you have a plan, that's great, and young people should have a plan, and they should stick to it, and they should have a vision for themselves of what they want to do, and they should persevere towards that vision.

But the problem is finding meaning is like, what?

Oh, look, we worry about that afterward. Look, we outline domains of meaning. Look, family is meaningful, right? Career is meaningful. You can mentor people. Helping other people develop, that's extremely meaningful. A lot of the high-end people that I've seen who are extraordinarily successful in the socioeconomic domain derive a tremendous amount of their meaning from fostering that development among young people.

And so there's micro meanings to be found in all of those domains. Now, you still might be searching for something transcendent, right? Whether you know it or not, even—like, well, something, something you think is some kind of—something you need, as like the analogy would be like a crush, right? When you're striving towards your vision and things don't go your way, tragedy happens, malevolence happens, as you say, and you're suffering in your life, you need some kind of base meta-narrative, something, you know, whether it's prayer or meditation or you're reading various types of scriptures—something to give you meaning, to give you hope, faith, and trust in something else and just let you know that you're not in this alone, that you can get to where you want.

You need that kind of emotional, spiritual crutch in your life. And this is what I wanted to ask you about—is that young people, they seem to have that less and less. So how do we find that spiritual crutch, is the question?

Well, I wouldn't say it's a crutch. I don't think that's reasonable because any genuine spiritual practice places a tremendous moral burden on its practitioner. So let's say foundation—a spiritual foundation. Well, and some people need that more than others. Like if you're the sort of person who—and I would say that that's likely associated with high trait openness—that's the creativity dimension. And so if you find yourself yearning, well, how do you address that?

Literature, art—that's the domain. And then in that domain, there's the mystical, religious domain, and the philosophical domain. Well, reading is your best way into that. And you also describe the ritual practices, and they can be very useful to people. I mean, my wife found repetitive prayer of aid when she was undergoing interminable repeated scans for the presence of cancer. It's like, well, what do you do in a situation like that?

Well, one thing you can do is turn to a ritual. And you might say, well, that's a crutch. It's like, well, no, it's a practice. It's a meditative practice that helps regulate your physiological reactions under extreme duress. People who think that religious belief is a crutch, first of all, they're guilty of something I think is an unbelievable impediment to reasonable progress, which is casual contempt.

Like, are you sure you know enough about that to be contemptuous of it? Religious belief has a history that's tens of thousands of years old. The capacity for religious experience, and perhaps even the need for it, is coded in us biologically. It's an unbelievably complicated problem and solution. You don't want to casually dismiss it.

You can read philosophers and great writers and great religious thinkers and great psychoanalysts. Carl Joseph Campbell, for example, is a great entry place for anyone who wants to take religious thinking seriously.

Right, and so this is where I'm getting at here—so you're saying spiritual experience is encoded in our genes. And I agree with that. Whether you know, even people who say they're atheists or they don't believe, I think this is universal for everyone. But for people who don't have religion, who just have ideology, well, the atheists—when you watch Star Wars, right?

You know, the atheist materialist types—the engineers, skeptical and unlikely to personalize the world—they get their mythology through science fiction, and they don't even notice it. But people who don't have that spiritual practice, don't have that religion, who are watching Star Wars, participating in protests against white supremacy—how do they find that spiritual experience?

How do they achieve that state? That's kind of the fundamental thing that I'm wrestling with as our society becomes more and more secular and saturated with technology and political polarization—all these other forces that seem to be distracting us from our inner private need for spiritual experience.

I would say to some degree that's the fundamental unanswered question of our age. You know, I'm reading this book right now—Is It the Religion with No Name? It's about the Elusinian Mysteries. I should get that right—the Immortality Key, the Secret History of the Religion with No Name.

So the Greeks, Greek society was grounded in a spiritual experience and practice that centered on Elusis; I hope I have that pronounced properly. The initiates were inducted into the Elusinian Mysteries, and this book is one of a long line of books—a relatively long line of books, really started in the 1960s—suggesting that shamanic experiences, which are tens of thousands of years old, perhaps older, and religious practices in more sophisticated societies that were profoundly influenced and affected by hallucinogenic substances, it seems highly probable to me.

In fact, I think the evidence is incontrovertible. We have no idea what to do with that fact. Now, the hallucinogens, the psychedelic experience adds an experiential element to religious belief, religious thinking, but we don't know what we don't know.

We don't know what to make of that. We don't know what to make of the fact that Apollonian Greece, this shining beacon of rationality, was embedded inside a mystical psychedelic experience.

Right, well, and so our modern religions—they're experientially dead in a very unfortunate way, and I mean that really mean that it's unfortunate. But even the materialism, it suffers from the same problem. So what do you mean by that, that they're dead? What do you mean exactly?

Well, if you go to a rave, even if you don’t take any substances, the music and the dance can produce an experience that lifts you outside of yourself. An intense aesthetic experience can do that, and we have a—our religious structures in the West are divorced from that to a degree that I think is untenable over the long term.

And we insist upon faith. We insist upon a faith that the rational atheist types find contemptible and have very powerful arguments at their fingertips to drive home: Dawkins and Sam Harris and Hitchens, those people are formidable intellectually and they take apart, at least from their perspective, these preposterous supernatural claims and leave everything in ashes on the ground.

What to do about that, I don't know. I mean, I would say that’s something I think about all the time. I mean, I've been talking as well to people like Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley, who are these rational optimists who note that human material progress is progressing—Michael Shermer would be in that camp as well—human material well-being is progressing at a staggering rate, and we're going to solve a lot of the problems of absolute material deprivation in the next 30 years, and that data is there and it's available.

But it has almost no compelling nature. It's the same problem we discussed earlier. That yeah, there's not a story there. Like when you take your ideal ideologue, your 18-year-old highly committed ideologue out of the crowd and you say, “Look, we're going to incrementally improve our way out of absolute privation over the next 15 years, so just calm down, do something productive and wait,” and they say, “To hell with you! What I'm doing is way more exciting,” which is true.

And so we have a real problem. We don’t know how to marry either reformalized religious belief, let's say, or even utopian materialism in the Enlightenment manner. We don't know how to marry that to the Dionysian, and that's a big—now the thing about an ideology is that that gives you the Dionysian. Man, you can go—you know, so you're part of Black Lives Matter, you're part of Antifa. So what do you do? Instead of being like a 7-Eleven clerk and relatively unattractive romantically, by the way, because of that, particularly if you're male, you put on a mask and you take your club and you go out to fight evil, and you know, there's fire, and there's noise, and there's the terrible tyrannical police, and like you get to be a hero.

And that's real. Now, you can say, well, that heroism is misguided, and I would say it is, ultimately considered, but it's not obvious to me that the desire for adventure that possesses the 7-Eleven clerk who's dissatisfied with his, you know, comfortable satiety—the call to adventure is real.

Well, it's incumbent upon the culture to satisfy the call to adventure, right?

Well, we don't know how to do that. We don't know how to do that. And so the whole Black Lives Matter thing or fighting against even climate change, white supremacy, then that becomes the spiritual mission. Then that becomes the goal. That becomes the vision opposed to something truly spiritual and religious, right?

But so one thing that I wanted to question, one thing I wanted to pose to you here was, so you're saying that in Western religious traditions—so you're saying that they are divorced from spiritual experience? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, they're divorced from practical mysticism. You know, you can—that's more of an Eastern type of thing, right? So like meditation, contemplative practice—that's something that, well, there are contemplative practices in the West, but very few people, very few people. They're certainly not popular, like yoga, and there is a mystical tradition in the West. But very few people, very few people.

They're not popularized and detailed and available to people to practice. There are mystical prayer traditions, and they can be very useful to people. I mean, my wife found repetitive prayer of aid when she was undergoing interminable repeated scans for the presence of cancer. It's like, well, what do you do in a situation like that?

Well, one thing you can do is turn to a ritual. And you might say, well, that’s a crutch. It's like, well, no, it’s a practice. It’s a meditative practice that helps regulate your physiological reactions under extreme duress. People who think that religious belief is a crutch, first of all, they're guilty of something I think is an unbelievable impediment to reasonable progress, which is casual contempt.

Like, are you sure you know enough about that to be contemptuous of it? Religious belief has a history that's tens of thousands of years old. The capacity for religious experience, and perhaps even the need for it, is coded in us biologically. It’s an unbelievably complicated problem and solution. You don't want to casually dismiss it.

You can read philosophers and great writers and great religious thinkers and great psychoanalysts. Carl Joseph Campbell, for example, is a great entry place for anyone who wants to take religious thinking seriously.

Right. And so this is where I'm getting at here. So you're saying spiritual experience is encoded in our genes, and I agree with that. Whether you know, even people who say they're atheists or they don't believe, I think this is universal for everyone. But for people who don't have religion, who just have ideology, well, the atheists—when you watch Star Wars, right?

You know, the atheist materialist types—the engineers, skeptical and unlikely to personalize the world—they get their mythology through science fiction, and they don't even notice it. But people who don't have that spiritual practice, don’t have that religion, who are watching Star Wars, participating in protests against white supremacy—how do they find that spiritual experience?

How do they achieve that state? That's kind of the fundamental thing that I'm wrestling with as our society becomes more and more secular and saturated with technology and political polarization—all these other forces that seem to be distracting us from our inner private need for spiritual experience.

I would say to some degree that's the fundamental unanswered question of our age. You know, I'm reading this book right now—Is It the Religion with No Name? It's about the Elusinian Mysteries. I should get that right—the Immortality Key, the Secret History of the Religion with No Name.

So the Greeks, Greek society was grounded in a spiritual experience and practice that centered on Elusis; I hope I have that pronounced properly. The initiates were inducted into the Elusinian Mysteries. And this book is one of a long line of books—a relatively long line of books, really started in the 1960s—suggesting that shamanic experiences, which are tens of thousands of years old, perhaps older, and religious practices in more sophisticated societies that were profoundly influenced and affected by hallucinogenic substances, it seems highly probable to me.

In fact, I think the evidence is incontrovertible. We have no idea what to do with that fact. Now, the hallucinogens, the psychedelic experience adds an experiential element to religious belief, religious thinking, but we don't know what we don't know.

We don't know what to make of that. We don't know what to make of the fact that Apollonian Greece, this shining beacon of rationality, was embedded inside a mystical psychedelic experience.

Right. Well, and so our modern religions—they're experientially dead in a very unfortunate way, and I mean that really mean that it's unfortunate.

But even the materialism, it suffers from the same problem.

So what do you mean by that, that they're dead? What do you mean exactly? Well, if you go to a rave, even if you don’t take any substances, the music and the dance can produce an experience that lifts you outside of yourself. An intense aesthetic experience can do that, and we have a—our religious structures in the West are divorced from that to a degree that I think is untenable over the long term.

And we insist upon faith. We insist upon a faith that the rational atheist types find contemptible and have very powerful arguments at their fingertips to drive home: Dawkins and Sam Harris and Hitchens, those people are formidable intellectually and they take apart, at least from their perspective, these preposterous supernatural claims and leave everything in ashes on the ground.

What to do about that, I don't know. I mean, I would say that’s something I think about all the time. I mean, I've been talking as well to people like Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley, who are these rational optimists who note that human material progress is progressing—Michael Shermer would be in that camp as well—human material well-being is progressing at a staggering rate, and we're going to solve a lot of the problems of absolute material deprivation in the next 30 years, and that data is there and it's available.

But it has almost no compelling nature. It's the same problem we discussed earlier. That yeah, there's not a story there.

Now you've said yourself, we appear to have a decent life. How do you make sense of the kind of disillusionment and just the loss of meaning that exists amongst so many Millennials and Gen Z right now?

You've just touched on it, the meaning crisis. Yeah.

And this is where we seem increasingly lost, not just regarding political causes, but regarding an inability to see meaning in our own lives—an inability to recognize what fulfillment could look like. How do we overcome that?

Well, so much of meaning is contingent upon relationships, people—you know, altruism, other people. If you take the extreme, the nihilism of the early 20th century, the growth in moral relativism, the rise of technology, and, more recently, social media—the young are almost indoctrinated with the idea that status defining success can be amassed via media likes or followers.

It's a social dilemma, raising the stakes, especially concerning identity struggles since everything is easily plaid out in public view. And this is compounded by how social media facilitates groupthink, where you lean on others' opinions for validation rather than genuinely trying to discern your own authentic views and feelings.

People latch onto the wrong ideation as a result.

You know, if they're feeding off only negativity or virtue signaling rather than engaging with each dimension of constructive dialogue and critical thinking, it can lock them into a cycle of dissatisfaction. The pursuit of truth often necessitates grappling with complexity, nuance, and self-reflection—a daunting task for anyone.

Meaning, then, becomes something to actively engage with, a continuous process, rather than a state to be achieved instantly.

And we know that good things take time—effort, building connections, actual life experiences. It's important for young people to have these deeper, genuine interactions, rather than existing in variables of status based on fleeting social trends.

There’s space for joyful engagement, meaningful relationships, and challenges in the chaos of life that allow for profound growth, development, and eventually, fulfillment. How can we mobilize to halt the erosion and reclaim our pathways to fully realized lives?

That's still the question.

That's the question, wrapping back to our conversation about spiritual fulfillment—what is required to ignite the deepest essence of our potential? What insight would go unnoticed as we wrestle daily with fear-induced uncertainties and self-doubt?

But at the moment, we have to see these insights being realized while desiring more than superficial identities and transient value systems—seek the narratives that enrich our existence, celebrate individuality, and connect to a shared humanity amidst all the chaos.

And perhaps through this ongoing exchange and openness to philosophy—the heart of collective inquiry—may extend beyond understanding into action—a means for awakening latent potentials within us.

[Music]