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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:47 - Dostoevsky
11:48 - God
19:58 - Science
32:21 - Death
35:15 - Elon Musk
39:13 - Global Crisis
51:26 - Dangerous ideologies
1:02:40 - Justin Trudeau
1:16:46 - War in Ukraine
1:34:14 - Day in the life
2:10:18 - How to think
2:25:26 - Depression
2:33:33 - Advice for young people
2:47:22 - Russian literature
2:59:10 - Meaning of life

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Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.

And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

If you gaze into the abyss long enough, you see the light, not the darkness.

The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, an influential psychologist, lecturer, podcast host, and author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, and Beyond Order.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, Here's Jordan Peterson.

Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot, spoken through the character of Prince Mishkin, that beauty will save the world.

Solzhenitsyn actually mentioned this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

What do you think Dostoevsky meant by that?

Well, I guess it's the divine that saves the world, let's say.

And then you might say, well, Are there pointers to that which will save the world or that which eternally saves the world and the answer to that in all likelihood is yes, and that's maybe truth and love and justice and the classical virtues Beauty perhaps in some sense foremost among them.

That's a difficult case to make, but definitely a pointer.

No, I think that that which it points to is what beauty points to.

Because we could define the divine in some real sense.

So 1 way of defining the divine is, what is divine to you is your most fundamental axiom.

And you might say, well I don't have a fundamental axiom.

Then I would say, that's fine, but then you're just confused.

Because you have a bunch of contradictory axioms.

And you might say, well I have no axioms at all.

And then I'd say, well you're just epistemologically ignorant beyond comprehension if you think that.

So you don't think a human being can exist within contradictions?

Well yeah, we have to exist within contradiction, but when the contradictions make themselves manifest, say in confusion with regard to direction, then the consequence of that technically is anxiety and frustration and disappointment and all sorts of other negative emotions.

But the cardinal negative emotion signifying multiple pathways forward is anxiety.

But you don't think that kind of entropy signal can be channeled into beauty, into love.

Why does beauty and love have to be clear, ordered, simple?

Well, I would say it probably doesn't have to be...

It can't be reduced to clarity and simplicity.

Because when it's optimally structured, it's a balance between order and chaos, not order itself.

If it's too ordered, if music is too ordered, it's not acceptable.

It has to have, well, It has to have some fire in it, along with the structure.

I was in Miami doing a seminar on Exodus with a number of scholars, and this is a beauty discussion.

When Moses first encounters the burning bush, it's not a conflagration that demands attention.

It's something that catches his attention.

It's a phenomena and that means to shine forth.

And Moses has to stop and attend to it, and he does.

And he sees this fire that doesn't consume the tree.

And it's the tree of life, and it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the fire in it is the transformation that's always occurring within every structure and the fact that the fire doesn't consume the bush in that representation is a an indication of the balance of transformation with structure.

And what attracts Moses to it, in some sense, is the beauty.

Now, it's the novelty and all that, but a painting is like a burning bush.

That's a good way of thinking about it, a great painting.

You know, my house was, and will soon be again, completely covered with paintings inside.

And it was hard on people to come in there because, well, my mother, for example, say, well, why would you want to live in a museum?

And I think, well, I would rather live in a museum than anywhere else in some real sense.

They're terrified of buying art, for example, because their taste is on display.

And they should be terrified because generally people have terrible taste.

Now, that doesn't mean they shouldn't foster it and develop it.

But and, you know, when you put your taste on display, it's a real really exposes you

Even to yourself as you walk past it every day.

Yeah, well, and look how mundane that is, and look how trite it is, and look at how cliched it is, and look at how sterile or too ordered it is, or too chaotic.

Or how quickly you start to take it for granted because you've seen it so many times.

Well, if it's a real piece of art, that doesn't happen.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

I mean, there are images, religious images in particular, so we could call them deep images, that people have been unpacking for 4,000 years and still haven't...

So, I did a lecture series on Genesis, And I got a lot of it unpacked, but by no means all of it.

When God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he puts cherubim with flaming swords at the gate to stop human beings from re-entering paradise.

Cherubim, and why do they have flaming swords?

And then I found out from Matthew Pazio, who wrote a great book on symbolism in Genesis, that cherubim are the supporting monsters of God.

It's a very complicated idea and that they are partly a representation of that which is difficult to fit into conceptual systems.

They've also got an angelic or demonic aspect.

Well, a sword is a symbol of judgment and and and the separation of the wheat from the chaff use a sword to cut away To cut away and to carve and a flaming sword is not only that which carves It's that which burns and what is it carve away and burn?

It carves away everything about you that isn't perfect.

So you could say that the entire Christian narrative is embedded in that image.

Well, let's say that flaming swords are a symbol of death.

Let's say further that they're a symbol of apocalypse and hell.

That doesn't seem completely unreasonable.

Not only do you have to face death, you have to face death and hell before you can get to paradise.

Hellish judgment and all that's embedded in that image.

And a piece of art with an image like that has all that information in it and it shines forth in some fundamental sense it reaches into the back tendrils of your mind at levels you can't even comprehend and grips you I mean that's why people go to museums and gaze at paintings they don't understand and that's why they'll pay what's the most expensive objects in the world.

If it's not carbon fiber racing yachts it's definitely classic paintings, right?

It's high-level technological implements or it's classic art.

Why do we build temples to house the images?

Well, What makes you think you're secular then?

It's arguable that the thing many, many centuries from now that will remain of all of human civilization will be our art.

Well, you know, a book has remained a very long time, right?

But that's in the full arc of living organisms, perhaps will not

Well, we have images that are, we have artistic images that are at least 50,000 years old, right, that have survived.

And some of those are, they're already profound in their symbolism.

Secular people all over the world make pilgrimages to Europe.

And it's partly because there are things in Europe that are so beautiful, they take your breath away, right?

They make your hair stand on end, they fill you with a sense of awe.

And we need to see those things, it's not optional.

The cathedrals, I was in a cathedral in Vienna and it was terribly beautiful, you know.

Is that the highest form of beauty it really challenges you?

Yeah, yeah, I got a good analysis of the statue of David, Michelangelo's statue.

It says, you could be far more than you are.

And this cathedral, you know, down, we went down into the, into the under structure of it.

And there were 3 floors of bones from the plague.

It's no joke to go visit a place like that.

And our religious systems have become propositionally dubious.

But there's no arguing with the architecture, although modern architects like to, with their sterility and their giant middle fingers erected everywhere.

And you know, a secular person will say, well, I don't believe in God.

You cannot move forward into the unforeseen horizon of the future except on faith.

And you might say, well, I have no faith.

It's like, well, good luck with the future then, because what are you then, nihilistic and hopeless and anxiety-ridden?

And if not, well, something's guiding you forward.

It's faith in something or multiple things, which just makes you a polytheist, which I wouldn't recommend.

Well, let me ask you 1 short-lived biological meatbag to another.

Let's try to sneak up to this question if it's at all possible.

Well, it better be, because otherwise there's no communicating about it.

It has to be something that can be brought down to earth.

Well, we might be too dumb to bring it down.

It's not just ignorant, it's also sinful.

Because there's not knowing, and then there's wanting to know or refusing to know.

And so you might say, well, could you extract God from a description of the objective world?

Is God just the ultimate unity of the natural reality?

And I would say, well, in a sense there's some truth in that, but not exactly, because God in the highest sense is the spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive.

The spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive.

So it's a kind of, in 1 sense, when we say the human spirit, it's that.

And you might say, well what's the pattern?

Okay, well I can tell you that to some degree.

Imagine that like you're gripped by beauty, you're gripped by admiration.

It's like, oh, turns out I admire that person.

Well, it means I would like to be like him or her.

It means there's something about the way they are that compels imitation, another instinct, or inspires respect or awe even.

Well, let's say, okay, fine, but it grips you and you want to be like that.

Kids hero worship, for example, and so do adults, for that matter, unless they become entirely cynical.

And there's no that worship that Celebration and and proclivity to imitate is worship.

That's what worship means most fundamentally now imagine you took the set of all admirable people and You extract it out AI learning you extract it out the central features of what constitutes admirable.

And then you did that repeatedly until you purified it to what was most admirable.

That's as good as you're going to get in terms of a representation of God.

And you might say, well, I don't believe in that.

It's not a scientific theory about the structure of the objective world.

And then I could say something about that, too, because I've been thinking about this a lot, especially since talking to Richard Dawkins.

It's like, OK, the postmodernist types, going back way before Derrida and Foucault, maybe back to Nietzsche, who I admire greatly, by the way.

But Nietzsche said, God is dead and we have killed him, and we'll not find enough water to wash away all the blood.

And so, then you think, okay, well we killed the transcendent.

Well, it frees it up, because all that nonsense about a deity is just the idiot superstition that stops the scientific process from moving forward.

That's basically the new atheist claim, something like that.

It's like, wait a second, do you believe in the transcendent if you're a scientist?

And the answer is, Well, not only do you believe in it, you believe in it more than anything else, because if you're a scientist, you believe in what objects to your theory, more than you believe in your theory.

Now, we got to think that through very carefully.

So your theory describes the world, and as far as you're concerned, Your description of the world is the world But because you're a scientist you think well, even though that's my description of the world and that's what I believe there's something beyond what I believe and that's the object and so I'm gonna throw my theory against the object and see where it'll break.

And then I'm going to use the evidence of the break as a source of new information to revitalize my theory.

So as a scientist, you have to posit the existence of the ontological transcendent before you can move forward at all, but more You have to posit that contact with the ontological transcendent Annoying though it is because it upsets your apple cart is exactly what will in fact set you free.

So then you accept the proposition that there is a transcendent reality, and that contact with that transcendent reality is redemptive in the most fundamental sense.

Because if it wasn't, well why would you bother making contact with it?

You're going to make everything worse or better.

Why does the contact with the transcendent set you free as a scientist?

Because you assume that, you assume, I mean freedom in the most fundamental sense, It's like, well, freedom from want, freedom from disease, freedom from ignorance, right?

Yeah, it's the direction, let's say, the directionality of science.

That's a narrative direction, not a scientific direction.

And then the question is, what is the narrative?

Well, it posits a transcendent reality, it posits that the transcendent reality is corrective, it posits that our knowledge structures should be regarded with humility, It posits that you should bow down in the face of the transcendent evidence.

And you have to take a vow, you know this as a scientist, you have to take a vow to follow that path if you're going to be a real scientist.

It's like the truth, no matter what, And that means you posit the truth as a redemptive force.

Well, so people don't starve, so people can move about more effectively, so life can be more abundant, right?

So, it's all ensconced within an underlying ethic.

So, the reason I was saying that, while we were talking about belief in God It's like, this is a very complicated topic, right?

Do you believe in a transcendent reality?

See, okay, now let's say you buy the argument I just made on the natural front, and you say, yeah, yeah That's just nature.

That's not God And then I'd say, well, what makes you think you know what nature is?

Like, see, the problem with that argument is that it already presumes a materialist, a reductionist, materialist, objective view of what constitutes nature.

But if you're a scientist, you're going to think, well, in the final analysis, I don't know what nature is.

I certainly don't know its origin or destination point.

And so when I say it's nothing but nature, I shouldn't mean it's nothing but what I understand nature to be.

So I could say, will we have a fully reductionist account of cognitive processes?

And the answer to that is yes, but by the time we do that, our understanding of matter will have transformed so much that what we think of as reductionist now won't look anything like what we think of reductionism now.

But the notion that we have, you know, that if you're a reductionist, a materialist reductionist, that you can reduce the complexity of what is to your assumptions about the nature of matter.

Your specific limited human assumptions of this century, of this week, that, so in some sense, without God, in this complicated big definition we're talking about, there's no humility, or it's less- There's not enough.

There's less likely to be, or rather science can err in taking a trajectory away from humility.

Without something much more powerful than an individual human.

Yeah, well then, and we know, you know, the Frankenstein story comes out of that instantly.

And that's a good story for the current times.

It's like you're playing around with making new life?

You bloody well better make sure you have your arrows pointed up.

And it's interesting because you said science has an ethic to it.

Well, there's a, you know, science is a big word.

And it includes a lot of disciplines that have different traditions.

So biology, chemistry, genetics, physics.

And I think biology, especially when you get closer and closer to medicine and to the human body, does have a very serious, first of all, it has a history with Nazi Germany of being abused and all those kinds of things, but it has a history of taking this stuff seriously.

What doesn't have a history of taking this stuff seriously is robotics and artificial intelligence, which is really interesting, because you don't, you know, you called me a scientist, but, and I would like to wear that label proudly, but often people don't think of computer science as a science, but nevertheless, it will be, I think, the science of 1 of the major scientific fields of the 21st century, and you should take that very seriously.

Oftentimes when people build robots or AI systems, they think of them as toys to tinker with.

But at a certain moment, isn't this nuclear explosion cool?

Or birth control pill cool, or transistor cool.

Well, the other thing too, and this is a weird problem in some sense, the robotics engineer types, they're thing people, right?

I mean, the big classes of interest are interest in things versus interest in people.

Some of my best friends are thing people.

Yeah, right, and thing people are very, very clear, logical thinkers, and they're very outcome-oriented and practical.

That makes the machinery and keeps it functioning.

But, there's a human side of the equation and and You get the extreme thing people and you think yeah.

Well, what about the human here and When we're talking about we've been talking about the necessity of having a technological enterprise embedded in an ethic.

And you can ignore that, like most of the time, right?

You can ignore the overall ethic in some sense when you're toying around with your toys.

But when you're building an artificial intelligence, it's like, well, That's not a toy.

Yes, and you notice how many of those things you can no longer turn off.

And what is it with you engineers and your inability to put off switches on things now?

It's like, I have to hold this for 5 seconds for it to shut off.

Or I can't figure it, I just want to shut it off.

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Jordan Peterson: Life, Death, Power, Fame, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #313