Ben Shapiro & Jordan Peterson (and a 12 Rules US/Canada Tour Update)

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Hi.
This video has two components.
A three minute announcement of the remaining venues of my American 12 Rules for Life Tour and the new Canadian venues that will open up in July and August, followed by a lengthy discussion with Ben Shapiro on the narrative substrate of human commission derived from his new Sunday YouTube video and podcast.
So hi there, I'm in Denver, Colorado.
Today.
It's May 7th 2018.
I'm going to give the fourth talk of my American 12 Rules for life to her tonight.
Or maybe it's the fifth.
1st 1 Was Toronto in Washington in Chicago, then Detroit, now Denver.
So, yes, I guess that's the fifth.
I'm announcing the remaining venues today in the US, where tickets are still available and the dates and places for my Canadian tour.
10 Canadian cities in July.
So there's tickets remaining to 10 venues in the United States on May 23rd Philadelphia on May 29th Houston on June 8, Richmond on June 10th.
Charlotte June 12th Nashville June 14th Louisville June 15th Indianapolis June 16th Milwaukee 25th Portland 27th Sacramento And in between all that on Wednesday, June the fifth will also be in Reykjavik in Iceland, so tickets are available for those.
And then I'm going to be touring Canada in July and August on the 19th in Toronto, on the 20th in Hamilton.
That's July again 21st in London, Ontario, 22nd in Kitchener on the 23rd in Ottawa on the 26th in Vancouver on the 27th in Calgary, on the 28th in Edmonton in August, on the 14th at Regina and on August 15 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
You can find out more about that.
If you go toe Jordan, be Peterson dot com and look up events.
That's Jordan.
Be Peterson dot com under events.
Also in this video is a discussion that I recently did last week, in fact, was just released with Ben Shapiro as part of his New Sunday podcast initiative.
And I think we had a very good conversation and so the rest of this video was taken up with the conversation that I had with Ben.
I think we got farther on the issue of how human perception and cognitive function is nested inside a fundamental narrative substrate, and we related that to modern findings.
Neuro psychology related to hemispheric function.
I think it was an excellent discussion, and so I'm very happy to bring it to you.
There's some ads in it because I took it directly from Ben's video.
So anyway, so that's the tour.
Philadelphia, Houston, Richmond, Charlotte, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Portland and Sacramento.
And that's all in June and May and then Richter, Vic in June as well, and then the candidate tour in July and August.
Toronto, Hamilton, London, Kitchener, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina and Saskatoon.
And as I said, you could find out about that at Jordan.
Be Peterson dot com events, Thank you very much and I hope that you can come to one of the talks.
They seem to be going really well so far.
We sold out a very large number of them and the people seemed quite enthusiastic and I've been able to get farther in my thinking than I was in my book.
And each of the talks is designed to illuminate a different element of, let's say, the 12 rules and the topics that are associated with that.
So thanks very much and I hope you enjoy the discussion with Ben Shapiro.
There's lots of times in your life, you're not going to be happy.
And so that's not gonna work.
You wanna have something meaningful?
That's the boat that will take you through the storm.
Well, here we are with Jordan.
Peterson and I could not be more excited to talk with the best selling author of 12 Rules for Life, and I will talk with him.
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Okay, so I could not be more excited to speak with Jordan Peterson.
Well, as Jordan knows before the show, we talk for an hour before the show.
Just about interesting things we should have caught on tape.
But now we're actually gonna get a chance to do it live.
So here is the Jordan's new book.
Everybody get Everybody on Planet has bought this book.
I was walking through the office today.
We don't have a copy in the office person.
The front desk had a copybook just sitting on desks up.
That's the way this works.
12 Rules for Life, an antidote to cast a fantastic book, obviously topping all the best journalists all over the world.
Jordan, thanks so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for the invitation.
Well, you know, obviously your prominence has just blown up in the last year and 1/2.
We were talking before the show about why that is and why there's so many people who suddenly are very angry about you.
Notice there's an article in politico suggesting that young, angry white males you are now their leader.
So congratulations.
Oh, yes, I want to ask you about that.
Why do you think that?
Number one your profile has become so big of late.
And number two Why do you think it is that so many members of the of the left are so angry about that?
Why are they characterizing people who listen to you as angry, enraged young white?
Well, we could We could look at the characterization to begin with, you know, because I think it speaks to the pathology of the radical left.
Instantly, they're absolutely incapable of viewing the world except through group identity terms, you know?
And so if someone comes out and disagrees with them, then they have to characterize them by their fundamental group attributes, whatever that happens to be.
Maybe it's gender because that's a favorite.
Or maybe it's race.
And so angry White men, young there we go sexist, ageist and racist all at once.
Right there.
Angry young white men.
Well, it has to be that way if you're gonna be the if you're gonna play the left this game because that's the only way that you can look at the world.
And then if you can't make your opponent reprehensible in some manner and it's strange that they would attempt to make the reprehensible on the grounds of race, age and sex, since that's precisely what they stand against Hypothetically.
But if you can't make your enemy reprehensible along some dimension, then you have to contend with them seriously.
And so you know, if I'm not in all right, fascist like Hitler, you know, or Milo Yiannopoulos, which was how I was characterized in Canada because the radical leftist can't even get their bloody insult straight.
He's like Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.
It's like there's no difference between them, right?
No obvious difference.
It's just another attempt to Hillary as far as I can tell and I think that it's it's dreadful.
I really think it iss There was an article written by the by, I believe, the editor of the New York Review of Books that was just re published in the Globe and Mail, talking about the emergence of hyper masculinity and how it was somehow responsible for that or contributing to it like Mussolini.
And I ran that.
And I thought, Yeah, like Mussolini and I thought, Okay, so what are you doing?
I see you're you're defining masculinity.
You're conflating masculinity and hyper masculinity at the same time, then your virtue signaling by being against hyper masculinity.
But really, what you're trying to do is bring down whatever it is that's masculinity.
And what masculinity is in this frame is something like confidence.
And so it's part of the radical leftists General war on competence as well, which I think is one of the most pernicious elements of the culture wars, the dissolution of hierarchies, the assumption that every hierarchy has to be based on power and serve the needs of your group, whatever that happens to be, that there's no such thing as confidence and so and then the other thing that's reprehensible about it because that's not enough, is that it's just wrong.
Like there's, I've got tens of thousands of letters from people and people come up to me all the time on the street and I'll give you an example.
This is a great story.
This is really touching.
So I was in L.
A.
About a month and 1/2 ago and I was downtown L.
A.
And downtown L.
A is kind of rough, and I was wondering around and with my wife and this young guy pulled the car up beside me and hopped out, and he was kind of a stylish looking 21 year old Latino guy.
Something like that.
He was all excited, he said.
He asked me who I was, and I told him, and he, you know, that's what he had presumed.
And so he was kind of excited about that.
He said, Look, I've watched all your lectures and it's really helped me, and I've been straightening out my life and trying to get my room clean.
And he laughed about that.
But, you know, developing some names and trying to tell the truth and Look, I've really fixed up my relationship with my father.
And so then he said, Wait, wait.
Just wait a minute.
I thought.
Sure, sure.
So he went back in the car.
The guard is farther out of this car, came over with his dad like they have their arms around each other.
And he said, Look, we've really improved our relationship.
They're both smiling away had, you know, that's man.
If you're gonna target me for that, just go right ahead and hands me a white supremacist.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And it's wherever I go now, when this is one of the things, this is the thing that's so wonderful about that.
All of this, as far as I'm concerned, is that people come up to me all the time, and that's exactly what they say.
They say, Look, I was lost aimless, depressed, nihilistic, anxious, drug addicted, alcoholic, wasting my time, masturbating too much.
Although they don't generally use that particular example.
You know, loss is essentially and hopeless in some sense.
And I've been watching your lectures and they've really helped, and I've really been putting my life together, and I've been trying to say what I believe to be true and develop a vision, and it's really helped and like and it's so overwhelming, You know, like if I'm doing book signings after a talk, then there'll be a dozen people or more who and these aren't like I'm only talking to people for about 15 seconds, but you can have a very intense conversation in 15 seconds and they'll say, Look, you know, like I was suicidal, man, like I was really hanging onto the edge of the earth by my fingernails and I'm better and they have tears in their eyes is like it's a little of that goes a long way.
Well, I think that when I look at your eyes and look, I talked to people who love what you d'oh.
I mean, every time I go on the road and I'm speaking at a campus, you're the number one name that gets mentioned that people would buy people who come to my lectures, and I think that the reason for that that I've that I've seen is really twofold.
One is that one of the things that you really talk a lot about is the notion of self discipline and purpose in your life and control, and the idea that you are in control of your decision making in your decision making matters that's one and the other is that you have.
You have a unique capacity to to say no to things that when somebody says something to you that is illogical but popular, you have the capacity to say no.
That's what happened in that Cathy Newman interview that Then somebody was saying something.
You've made no sense.
And you just said, Well, no.
And then you just stood on that now.
And when you stand on that no, I think it gives people a lot of courage.
Yeah, well, I mean, the gender issues really an interesting one because one of my professional domains of expertise is individual differences.
I'm I'm a personality psychologist, And so I know the gender difference literature, and it's it's a very solid literature.
Well, first of all, it's very solid.
It has a 30 year history.
One spur.
Psychologists got the personality models down, so that would be the Big Five model.
All empirically derived straight statistics, right?
Brute force empiricism.
Nobody had a theoretical axe to grind with the Big Five except to say, Maybe there are human traits.
Maybe they're encapsulated in language.
We can use statistical techniques to find out what they are.
That was it.
That's the whole ideology.
So very, very neutral.
As faras ideologies go, five trades emerge.
Okay, Are there differences between the sexes?
Turns out there are all right.
They're not massive, although if you sum them across all the traits, you can separate men and women with about 75% accuracy.
So it's not trivial, but you have to some across all the traits.
Then another question comes up Well.
Are those differences social, cultural or biological?
Okay, we contest that.
We'll go around the world, will look at cultures, will rank, order them in terms of the gender equality of their sociological policies.
We can do that with broad agreement from the right in the last.
Then the hypothesis would be if gender differences decrease among Maur egalitarian societies, then the gender differences air socio cultural or at least more social culture.
That's exactly the office it of what was found repeatedly that pseudo science.
It's like, no, that's mainstream psychology.
Those papers have thousands of citations and write the average humanity's paper has zero citations, right, and then the next most common one has won 3000.
That's a that's an unbelievable classic.
And here's the other bit of brutes like you say, Well, how do you know that you can trust someone's judgment about a fact?
The fact emerges, despite their ideological presuppositions.
Okay, so it's well known that the social sciences and the humanities have, ah, have a left tilt, and a lot of that's temperamental and the tilt has become more pronounced.
But as Jonathan Hyde has pointed out, there are no conservatives among social personality psychologists or none to speak of the very few, vanishingly few.
And if the field has a bias, it is definitely and indisputably a left wing bites.
Okay, so you have to fight that if you're if you're a scientist, right, Even if you're a left wing scientist, you have to fight that because you want to get to the facts.
It was these social scientists who generated the data that suggested that the gender differences not only were real, but that were bigger and egalitarian societies.
They didn't do that to grind the radiological acts because their ideological presupposition was No, no.
You make the society egalitarian.
Men and women get more of the same.
It's like no bigot more different.
Oh, Ruth, isn't that something?
And so then there's a corollary there, which is all right, you could still say and they're kind of pushing in this direction.
In Scandinavia, boys and girls are different men and women are different.
It looks biological, but because people are malleable, you could push the sociocultural structure harder and harder to minimize the biological differences.
Okay, well, first of all, maybe, and maybe not.
Maybe you'd get a rebound and they'd get even, like the clubs would rebel.
That could easily happen.
But let's say, okay, you could.
The problem with that is is that if you see that much power to the state like you're basically giving the state the right to socialize your kid's rights like you really, you really you really want to do that?
I mean, people in Israel couldn't do that with the kibbutz is right.
It didn't work, so people aren't gonna give up their Children to the state and thank God for that.
Well, I mean, this is one of the big questions that were discussing earlier is that we're talking about the polarization, politics between right and left.
And obviously you're You're a psychologist, you're a philosopher.
But you've been dragged almost kicking and screaming into this political sphere because everything has been so politicized.
So when you say when you cite social science statistics and they're scientifically based, you're called a racist or called the sex sister called the Homophobes and all my, you know exactly.
So why is it that so why do you think it is that so many folks on the left who purport to be all about reason and science and objective factor so willing to throw those out the window the minute that it becomes politically inconvenient?
Well, because imagine that cognitive systems Unterberg Station of the World has levels there.
Axiomatic levels.
Some fundamental pre suppositions are more fundamental than others.
When you could say well, the leftists, historically maybe because of their atheistic rationality arm or on the side of science than, say, the fundamentalists off of any sort.
But when push comes to shove, you find out how the axioms are are nested.
There's deeper axioms underneath out, which is that all hierarchies are based on power and all power plays are based on group identity, tribal identity essentially, and that the entire history of the world is nothing but a power play between between these different identity groups.
It's like Okay, well, if the science indicates that some of that's wrong, then do you alter those beliefs are duel to the science and the answer.
That question is, Well, it depends on how you've hierarchically arranged those.
If the science is at the bottom, then you alter your beliefs.
But if if the scientific facts are the axiomatic, some structure, then you then you alter your beliefs.
If your beliefs are the axiomatic sub structure, then you alter the science well.
We've seen how that plays out, and one of the things I've tried to do so to speak is to diagnose the axiomatic structure.
It's like, Okay, what's the What's the metaphysical presumption structure of the radical left?
Well, what what it is is you're basically your group.
Your groups are basically engaged in warfare, right?
And the warfare is arbitrary except insofar as it serves your group.
Okay, I don't buy any of that.
I think that's I think that's a route to certain disaster.
I think it's a degeneration into tribalism and that we will seriously pay for it, not only because it returns us to tribalism and tribes fight as the anthropological evidence for that is overwhelming.
Tribes fight.
It doesn't even matter if they're chimpanzee tribes.
Even chimpanzee tribes fight.
So not only do you regress to a tribalism, but you also invalidate the one proposition that's being able to help us a rise above the tribal, which is the idea that the individual should be sovereign.
And so I think the culture war is about what's the proper framework within which to view human identity.
And what's the relationship between the individual and the group in relationship to that identity?
And the leftist answer is, it's all group and it's all power.
It's like, Okay, so in just a second I want to ask you a little bit about some of the some of the more enlightenment minded thinkers who are out there right now, because it seems like we've been discussing the big gap in Western civilisation right now, which is between the collective ists and the individualist.
If you're headed broadly.
But I wouldn't talk about some of the divisions among individuals in just a 2nd 1st I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
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OK, so Jordan, One of the things that we've been talking about, obviously, is the big gap that I think we certainly agree on.
Between the collectivist identity, politics and and the sublimation of science in favor of subjective politics that favours up our group.
But I want to talk a little bit about a division that is also now breaking out among those of us who I think would consider ourselves friends of the Enlightenment.
So you consider yourself in front of the Enlightenment style thinking, at least in the essence, that individuality matters into the individual sovereign of the scientific.
And after the size that matters, data is useful.
And in this group, you know, I consider myself as part of this group.
People have started to call it the intellectual dark Web.
Sam Harris is part of this group.
They're a wide variety of folks with a lot of broad political differences that are part of this group.
But there are some real differences that have broken out.
Even among people who consider themselves part of this group, Right?
Steven Pinker has a different perspective on the world than then.
You d'oh!
I have a different perspective than Sam Harris says.
You and I have our differences, probably on some matters of philosophy.
So where do you think the vulnerability lies in the in the possibility of revivifying enlightenment mentality?
Because it seems to me that one of the big problems that's that's popping its head up above the water now is the rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of this old style tribalism that you've been talking about, that we're now going to repeat history because we've benefited so much from the Enlightenment that we forget that things don't have to be this way.
We've got so much nice stuff.
We live in so much freedom that we forget that if we just toss those Enlightenment ideals out the window, things get really ugly again.
I think that's what unites Well, that that's the question.
Is that what?
What?
What do you toss out the window before things get ugly, right?
And the Enlightenment proponents, You could say Harris, you could say Pinker, Charles Taylor.
In Canada, they trace back the development of the modern self.
Let's say Table wrote a book called Sources of the Modern Self to the Enlightenment.
And it's quite interesting because if you look at the typical academic psychologists say their historical knowledge generally runs back about 15 years, and so because they're all concerned with the with the modern literature and there's some utility in that But the downside is they don't have any historical context.
So you read someone like Taylor and you think, Wow, he's stretching it back 500 years, you know?
But there's there's reading that goes way beyond that, to look at the sources of the self and the source of the water ethos.
And this is a huge bone of contention between people like me.
Saying people like Harris and I think between people like you and people like Harris is that my sense is that the Enlightenment values themselves are grounded in an ethos that's much deeper and much less articulated.
And that would be beneath us of metaphor, image, drama, ritual, religion, art, music, all of that dance, even, for that matter, the nonverbal, the pattern recognition.
And My Gilchrist has written a book called The Master in His Emissary, which lays that out quite night nicely with regards to hemispheric specialization.
It's kind of predicated on L.
Conan Goldberg's observation that the Left Hemisphere is specialized for what we know and the right hemisphere is specialized for what we don't know, because that's an order chaos dynamic, And the rough idea would be that the Left Hemisphere generates paradigmatic systems.
So that would be like the Enlightenment system Axiom predicated right, even stay doble axiom predicated, but that that entire axiomatic system is based in a non verbal in the non verbal domain that's associated with while it would be associate with right hemisphere but would also be associated with deep motivations, biological motivations and emotions.
And so because here, here's one way of looking at it.
You think?
Well, how do you validate an axiomatic system of ethics?
And the answer is quite straightforward.
John P.
J.
Figured this out is you play it out in the world, literally.
You acted out in the world, and then you watch each other's emotional responses.
And if the thing that you're playing out, if the axiomatic system that you're playing out satisfies the motivations and the emotions of the people who are engaged in that system, then the system is justified.
And then you say, Well, it's not just that their motivations and emotions are satisfied.
It's more complex.
It's that the motivations and emotions of each individual are satisfied, but not only now, but now, next week, next month and next year.
So you have to stay extended across time, and not only my emotions and motivations, but yours as well.
Now, next week, next month and across time.
So there's there's terribly tight constraints, the or placed upon an axiomatic system.
Validity.
Now, the way Jean Pierre J.
Thought of that, he said, We'll think about it like a child's game.
A bunch of kids get together and they decided to play.
Pretend okay And pretend is, let's mortal, the world right.
And as a place to act because to pretend you are get out right So the kids get together and they assigned rules and they say, Well, you're gonna be mom, you're gonna be dead, You're gonna be the dog and we're gonna play house.
And then they acted out and what they're doing, miss seeing if they can regulate the Mandarin, which they're constructing the game so that everyone's emotions and motivations are so well satisfied that they want to continue the game.
Okay, And so that's so cool.
So what it shows you is that's how unethical system is, is tested and justified.
It's like you play it out and you see if everyone wants to keep playing, and so that's a whole different methodology than the scientific domain.
So the axiomatic system isn't the ethical axiomatic system isn't justified by reference to the scientific method.
It's justified by reference to the emotional and motivational wellbeing of all the players of the game.
Now that game emerges.
This is the second part of this, and this is so cool, then the question is, Well, how does that game emerge?
And the answer is the same way that Children's games emerges.
So what PJ noted is that kids would get together and they play marbles.
And if they were young kids, they could all play marbles, say, 66 years old.
They could all play marbles.
And if they were in a group, they were playing marbles.
And it all worked out fine squabbles and all that.
You know, the kids would keep playing right, validating the games.
But if you took the kids out of the game and you said, what are the rules of the game?
They would give completely disparate accounts so they knew how to do.
It was like the wisdom was in the group, huh?
The wisdom was fragmented enough among the individuals, so if you pulled the individuals out.
They'd give desperate accounts, but if you put them all together, they could play the game.
But then, if you wait until they were 11 or 12 and you pulled them out of the game, then they could tell you the rules.
Then at 14 or 15 they would be willing to.
This is with more sophisticated games.
They would be more willing to regard themselves as makers of the rules.
Okay, so here's how it happens in an evolutionary sense.
People going all the way back to our primate forebears organized themselves into functional hierarchies, okay, and the the Hierarchies air complex.
And they're not just based on power.
Despite what the idiot Marxists say even do.
Wall has noted that chimpanzee hierarchies are unstable.
If they're only based on power, they don't last.
They degenerate into violence.
So you have, ah, hierarchy.
That's that works.
But it's acted out.
No one knows why it works.
It works because everyone seems to be happy with it, Okay?
And so those hierarchies get more complex and more sophisticated, and then people start to observe them and talk about it.
It's like a while we thought this hierarchy here what's it like?
And then they spin off dramas about the hierarchy.
Here is a hero who climbed up the hierarchy, and here's what a hero looks like.
Okay, so then you get the idea of hierarchy, and then you get the idea of the hero as the person who moves up the hierarchy and generates it.
Okay, then, out of that you get the extraction of the idea of the hero.
And then you get development of that idea and it's out of that.
You get the monotheistic religions, and so it's like the procedure and the hierarchy come first.
No one knows what the rules are.
It's all played out the same way that wolves played out in a pack or chimpanzees.
Play it out in the troupe.
Then we wake up and think, Oh, we live in a structure.
Here's the structure that would be oh, Cyrus in the Egyptian mythologies.
Here's the structure.
Here's how the structure goes wrong.
Here's what the structure does here is its tyranny.
Tyrannical aspect.
Here is what you have to do to generate the structure and to thrive it.
Okay, that's even more important.
The hierarchy is important enough, but What we want to know is how to master the hierarchy.
Okay, that's where you get the mythologies of the hero.
Okay?
And then So then there's generates all sorts of different heroes because there's different ways of being successful.
Then you have a panoply of heroes.
Then you think.
OK, well, now we've got all those heroes.
That's a set.
We can move, pull back and say, Okay, something about all these heroes is what makes them heroes.
That's when you extract out the monotheistic savior because that's why in Christianity, Christ is the king of Kings.
It's actually you can think about it as a literal statement for Forget about the religious overlay.
It's like, OK, you got a bunch of people.
Some of them are kind of King like Okay, so you admire them like for whatever reason, that is.
It's not easy to figure out why you admire someone right.
That's complicated, but let's say you've got admirable, admirable people you start telling stories about.
That's why you go to a movie.
You want to go watch someone you don't care about your board by no, you want to go watch someone admirable and interesting or maybe the opposite about it doesn't matter.
It's the same thing.
Then you think, OK, well, we've got all these admirable people.
They're generating the world properly.
That's what makes them admirable.
There's a principle they embody.
And that principle is the process by which the admirable world is generated.
That's the logos.
Okay, that's the thing.
That's operative at the beginning of a Here's my here's my question about about all of this, because now we're really not talking about liberals.
For life is much of maps meeting, which is your first, but which are you're doing?
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It's It's definitely a harder book, The 12 Rules for Life in a much more complex book in a lot of ways than 12 rules for like so, how universal are these systems?
Meaning why isn't that the Enlightenment only arrives at one time in human history in one place in human history, as opposed to if human biology is essentially consistent across, you know, across humanity, then why is it that, you know, if at the at the apex of the levels, you end up with the Enlightenment idea, which is why I started this particular question then Why is it that it only arrives in one place at one time, as opposed to arriving in a variety of places in the right side of the agreement?
That's okay.
The first thing we would say is the process by which this the hierarchy itself and success within the hierarchy has generated.
That's to be accounted over millions of years, at least hundreds of thousands of years.
But I would push it back because you can see Anna logs in the chimps.
So 20 million years.
Let's say that's a long time on that time scale, the fact that the Enlightenment values arose in Europe 500 years ago before anywhere else, it's like, Well, who cares?
It's It's It's five old men, long, right?
If you have put 5 100 year old men in line, it's like it's yesterday.
It's this morning, so we've We've evolved these hierarchical structures.
That's our culture.
We've evolved ways of maneuvering within the hierarchical structures that were successful, and now we've started to evolve ways of mapping our our adaptation, not just adapted, but mapping it.
Okay, so how does the mapping occur?
First admiration, second imitation of admiration and that would be drama.
It's like you dramatize Shakespeare extracts out what's admirable and interesting and plays it out.
So that's the use of the body as a representational structure of the body.
So we act out what's admirable.
You think.
OK, now we've kind of got the drama down.
We're all captured by this drama.
It's like, Well, then the literary critics come along the philosophers and they say, Oh, what are the principles by which the admirable people operate?
It's like chimps woke up and said, Oh, well, some chimps are more successful than others.
What are the rules of success?
It's like, Well, there were no rules because they weren't running by rules.
There aren't rules.
Until you describe the patterns, then you have a rule.
That's what happens with Moses by the women, right?
Moses has a revelation.
Here's the rules, right?
Yeah, We've been living out those rules forever, but we didn't know what they were because they weren't rules.
They were customs.
Okay, so you start by mapping your customs in drama and story, and that way you can represent them and you can transmit them.
Then once you have them in your grip, say they're represented now, not just acted out.
Well, then you can move one step backwards from them and you can say, Well, what's the commonalities among these?
What are the general principles?
That would be the development of something like the code of Hammurabi.
Eye right.
It's like what?
We've got all these customs.
What are they right?
Revelation.
It's like, Oh, here's how you map the customs.
That's the deck.
A log.
It's the same idea.
So it took human beings a very long time to evolve their hierarchies, to evolve their structures of success and then to have enough people around with enough spare time to engage in the cultural process of the artistic cultural process of mapping the adaptive structure that only emerges in mythology and drama.
Then that lays the groundwork for philosophy.
Then the philosophers could come in, especially what's it's written like in the studio Christian pantheon.
It's like, Oh, now we've got it written down.
Oh, well, we don't have to remember it right.
We can read it and well, we're reading.
We can think about it.
And so then out of that starts to come.
The semantic coats.
Well, then you get the Enlightenment.
It's like, Oh, well, here's a bunch of semantic codes.
It's like, Yeah, yeah, those are great.
So this is really interesting, because if you if you read Pinker or three journal Goldberg's new book, Essentially, they attribute the Enlightenment to Jonah Goldberg calls it the Miracle.
It's almost as though it accidentally occurred in a certain place at a certain time.
John doesn't quite go quite that far, I think, to be fair to him.
But I think that that philosophy that this sort of sprang up randomly here is very much embedded in a lot of Sam Harris's thinking, a lot of thinking and you're taking it further back.
But I do wonder if this may be an area of actual disagreements with us.
It'll be fun.
Are you attributing the growth of the Judeo Christian ethic that emerges into the Enlightenment as also accidentally just pushing timeline further back?
I don't think it's accidental.
Okay, I'm not making a reductionist argument, so the first thing is I'm going to say this is how religion evolved.
But I'm not saying I'm not saying that this explanation exhausts the phenomenon because it's a very strange phenomenon.
It's very, very strange, But that doesn't mean we can't generate a plausible evolutionary account.
It's like if you have a bunch of motivated, emotional, limited beings occupying the same territory and competing and cooperating for the same resources, including the resource of cooperation, which can generate more resources, is not a zero sum game.
There are going to be patterns of adaptation that emerged from that that are similar.
So here's the way of thinking about it.
If you put a bunch of kids together, they're gonna evolve games, right?
Well, which games while a bunch of different games?
Yeah, but they're old games, right?
So even though.
So that's the moral relativist element.
A bunch of different games.
Okay, but the moral absolutist element is yeah, yeah, but the role gates and the games have to be Plame ball, which means they have to continue in an iterated way, right?
So that's a big constraint.
People have to want to play them.
So not only do they have to be games no and comprehensible to everybody and enjoyable but people, but they have to be self maintaining, and everyone has has toe wanna play them?
Okay, that's the answer to the post modern conundrum.
A plethora of potential ethical implications of the world.
An infinite variety.
Yeah.
Okay, fine.
Not an infinite variety of pragmatically applicable interpretations.
You instantly constrain the universe too.
Well to what?
Well, this is why there's commonalities and mythologies is like if you put enough people together in enough different places, the commonality of the groups of people there because of the grounding in common motivation and emotion and embodiment because we're embodied means that they're going to generate hierarchies that are broadly similar with strategies of success within those hierarchies that are broadly similar with descriptions of the strategies that are broadly similar.
And so you could say in some sense, the ethic that gave rise to the Enlightenment is in place more or less everywhere.
Now it's tricky because not every hierarchical system is this functional is every other hierarchy system some of them could degenerate into tyranny.
We're talking about the set of all voluntarily playable games rights or something like that, and that could degenerate out of that.
You're gonna get common hero myths you have to, and then that not lays the groundwork that lays the groundwork for even our ability to communicate, Right?
Right.
So this is the Enlightenment, guys.
They just they're not getting that.
So And this gets to, I think, the broader question that I know you and Sam went on for three hours about about the nature of truth because particularly truth in the morals here.
I think that I'm would be fair to say that you guys agree on the idea of truth in the scientifics fear that, you know, if something that there is such a thing as objective proof or are you?
I would say we agree on a lot of that.
The question is to some degree, Why do scientists accept the idea that objective truth is true?
And then I would say we probably don't agree about that because I would groan that in pragmatism.
And Sam would ground out in the idea of an independently existing objective world, which is a leap of faith, more like my own, actually than the pregnant his view, right?
And if you believe that there's a God who's out there in the universe who created the structures in a particular certain way, then what he created is the truth, and it is apart from you.
If human beings didn't exist and they weren't able to utilize the truth, the truth would still exist out there.
Where's the pragmatists?
And say it's truth is in the use that it has for that exact.
That's the thing Is that you know, I don't know if we would consider scientific truth true, unless we're also simultaneously accepting the idea that scientific truth is good for people.
So there's one other thing I wanted to bring up that that's relevant because you brought up the idea of God.
So here's a way of thinking about it, and and I don't know what to make of this because this is stretching me.
This is stretching my thoughts out beyond where I've been able to develop them.
So this is the intuition that I have based on a variety of things, experiences I've had, so imagine that there's a very wide range of human behavior's OK, and some subset of those are both admirable and not admirable.
So let's call them good and evil at this empty extremes.
Okay, then we might say, Well, there's a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are good and a pattern that characterizes all the actions that are evil.
And that's a trans personal pattern because it's it's not just about you or me.
It's about everyone, okay?
And so then that gets personified.
That's Christ and Satan lets Air Cain and Abel, right?
That gets personified.
And that's a bad guy, a good guy in a movie, like it's personified all the time.
It's Thorin, Loki, you know, in the Marvel movies, you know.
So now you have the let's state.
You take the idea of Christ and you think, OK, so that's the abstraction of everything.
That's that's admirably good about the set of all human behaviors.
Okay, And then you think, Well, what sort of reality does not have?
And this this man pulls back into the reality of the idea of the logos and the idea that it was the logos that God used at the beginning of time to extract order out of chaos.
So you think, well, it's trans personal, the goodness because it's not just characterized stick of any one person.
It's more like something that inhabits of person, but other than that a person is you can really see this.
For example, on the other end to with a satanic end.
Because if you read the writings of people who do absolutely horrific things like the shooters, you can see that possession extraordinarily clearly.
If your eyes are open, it's like and it's shocking, so people don't usually look at it.
And they even say that themselves like that.
The Columbine kids, their writings, their hair raising, you know.
And they were clearly possessed by an evil that you only encounter.
If you sit in a dark place and brood on your hatred for months and years, right, you go places that you go places where all the dark people go, right, right on.
Then that that takes you over.
Okay, so the good can take you over as well.
Okay, so there's this.
There's this spirit of good, let's say, and what the spirit of good does is act in the world on the potential of the world to generate the actuality of the world.
And the Judeo Christian proposition is is that if you confront the potential of the world with good in mind, using truth, truthful communication, then the order that you extract is good and then that's echoed in Genesis when God is using the word and he creates Cosmos out of potential and every time he does that, he says.
And it was good, which is, I think it's so interesting because there's a proposition there in the proposition there is that if you encounter potential with truth, the cosmos you create is actually good.
Well, that's that's just an absolutely overwhelming idea.
It's like if it's true, if it's true, it's the greatest idea.
The river.
What are your thoughts on this, actually, from maps of meeting help generate what we in injuries and cultivar Torah Hebrew leading the A thought about about the Bible.
But this merged with a little bit.
First Italian thought led me to the idea that when it comes to the mystical notion of the tree of good and evil in Eden, what is that supposed to be?
What, what people do wrong by eating from the tree of good and evil?
And my feeling is that what they did wrong is that God created the universe in which the value was embedded in the object right there, in the same way that you in your in your book talk about If you're teaching a child about an object.
The rules of the object are embedded in the teaching about the object.
So you used the example of base.
We're discussing this earlier, but you used the example of a base where you teach a child.
Don't touch the vase because baseball break so that the rules embedded in the object in the same way in arrest Italian thought the rules for behavior are embedded in the nature of the universe.
Meaning what makes a man good is what makes man unique, which is the reason they is.
That reason is what makes man unique.
So acting in accordance with the right reason is what makes something is what makes an action good.
So if you believe that God created the universe along these lines and that what natural law is is just the human attempts to understand the lines along which created God created the universe, Then where human beings went wrong is when they decided to separate values from the universe.
When we decided to take values and say this is a completely separate thing.
So this vase has no rules attached to it anymore.
It's just events, and we construct the rules arbitrarily as to what to do with this vase.
And so eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil changes the nature of good and evil from the universe.
Comes along with a set of rules to human beings.
Think that they can use their own intuition to supplant God's rules and to supplant universal rules with their own particular