Name: Iceland: 12 Rules for Life Tour: Lecture 2
Uploaded: 2020-04-07T10:10:05.000Z
Duration: 2 h 2 min 4 s
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It's very nice to be here and to see you all come out two spend a couple of hours thinking about difficult things.

There seems to be an appetite for that, which is really something.

So I started working on the ideas that I outlined in 12 Rules for life.

Well, a long time ago and really started when I was about 13 I I was a junior high school student, and, um, I met this librarian who's kind of eccentric person, very well educated person.

And she we are used to hang around with my delinquent friends in the library, which tells you how eccentric the librarian was, because that's not normally the place where the delinquent kids hang out, you know?

But she talked to us like we're adults, and that was ah, what would you call it?

She gave me one day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was the first book published by Al Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union.

It It's a story about the day of a political prisoner in a work camp and brave new world and 1984 an animal farm and a kn Rand's books, which was quite interesting because she was the wife of our member of parliament, who was the only member of the opposition in our province.

And he was a socialist, an NDP new Democratic Party leader, as a matter of fact.

And But despite that, she gave me in Rand's books because she thought that I should be exposed to the other side of the argument.

So I read, Atlas shrugged and, um, the Fountainhead and, well, she was the first person who help me discover literature, Let's say, and while at the same time I got interested in what had happened in Nazi Germany and I wrote an essay about that when I was about 13 or 14 about our schwitz and what had happened there, and I never read that really never left my mind, I would say I think I read Victor Frankl's Man's search for meaning at that point, which is a book I would highly recommend.

By the way, at Jordan, be Peterson dot com.

And so there's a variety of books there that have really influenced me, and and I put them up for other people's use Anyways, I never what what I learned about Auschwitz and about Nazi Germany never really left my mind and because I couldn't understand how people could act that way, how they could not only be possessed by an ideology to the degree that the Germans were very civilized country Germany, you know.

So it was, I suppose, even a more spectacular shock that something so catastrophic happened there.

There wasn't just the ideological possession.

It was the cruelty and the gratuitous cruelty in the service of that ideological possession that I couldn't understand.

It didn't couldn't establish a relationship between my own being and and those patterns of action.

And as I got older, that concern transformed itself into an obsession.

I would say not so much with what had happened in Nazi Germany, but with, I think, what happened, what was happening as a consequence of the collectivist philosophy per se, which you might think of something that manifested itself both on the right in Nazi Germany and then on the left in all the multitudinous and catastrophic communist regimes that characterized the bulk of the 20th century on their insane, murderous nous.

And that probably culminated for me in the 19 seventies when I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which is another book that everyone should read because in some sense it might be the defining document of the 20th century.

The fact that everyone in the West isn't familiar with that book is actually a a signal of our catastrophic moral failing.

I would say, Um, I started writing this book called Maps of Meaning in about 1985 although I had been working on variants of it before that, and what I was trying to understand was maybe the psychological motivations for the Cold War, something like that.

Many of you were old enough to remember what it was like in the 19 eighties.

We just went and visited the house in in Reykjavik, where garbage Kevin Reagan met, which was quite something to see when they decided they were going to bring at least some of the insanity to a relative halt.

Thank God the eighties were a very contentious time.

You know, the Cold War I sort of peeked into two times.

It peaked in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis.

I don't know if you know this, but I visited a nuclear missile site in in Arizona 10 years ago.

Intercontinental ballistic missile has very large rockets and can go halfway around the world and its ballistic, which means it has the same function as a bullet.

The bullet is ballistic because once you fire it, it's gone.

So once you launch a ballistic missile, it's launched.

And they told us they did a simulation launch, which is very eerie thing.

And so to launch a nuclear missile, there's a big console that sort of looks like the star trick control, uh, control model, Let's say, and one person stands here and one person stands about 20 feet away, each have a key around their neck and put the key in the lock simultaneously and then turn it for 10 seconds.

And at the end of 10 seconds, the missile is gone, and that's that.

And they both have their keys in the lock in 1962.

So and we came close again in 1984 when I don't know if you know this.

But the Soviet missile detection system signaled the launch of 45 missiles from North America, and a single Russian soldier decided that it was a false alarm and refused to push the button would have resulted in major retaliation.

You can read about him on Wikipedia anyways.

I read Soldier Nixon in 19 seventies and and that made me me, even, I would say, more obsessed with what was happening in in on the world stage.

I was trying to understand why it was that the systems of belief that we inhabited, let's say one, typifying the Soviet Union and and similar states Maoist, China, North Korea, wonderful places like that versus the West.

We each had our own way of construing the world.

The ways of construing the world were set at odds with one another, and the fact that they were set at odds with one another appeared to be so significant that we'd armed ourselves with 50,000 harder hydrogen bombs on each side.

I don't know how much you know about a hydrogen bomb.

You know that a hydrogen bomb has an atomic bomb for the trigger, right?

So So, like the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

That was something that was a vision bomb.

Not standard atomic bomb, the first generation.

But hydrogen bomb is incontestably more powerful than that, and we were producing them in the tens of thousands.

It's not like we don't have any now, but it was really some insanity in the 19 eighties, and people seem to have a very itchy trigger finger.

So I was very confused about this in two ways.

Because by that time, I did study, decided to study psychology instead of political science, which is my original major.

I get I got disenchanted with political science because I didn't believe that people were fundamentally motivated by economic issues.

They're motivated by whatever they're motivated by.

It's very curious about what it was that was so important about a belief system that people would risk putting the entire planet to the torch to ensure that their particular motive construing the world prevailed is interesting psychological problem.

What was so important about belief system that would justify destroying everything that's there, risking destroying everything?

Because that was certainly the situation we put ourselves in.

And more to the point, I guess, are equally to the point.

One was Were these differences in belief systems just arbitrary?

And that's actually a postmodern question.

No, because you might say the postmodernists do say there's a very large number of ways of interpreting the world, and it isn't obvious how you determine which of those ways are correct.

And so perhaps you can't determine that any of them are correct.

And then, as a consequence of your inability to determine if any of them are correct, then you have to turn to something like power dispute to establish which interpretation is going to take precedence, I would say in a nutshell, that's a post modernist theory now that's tainted to some degree with Marxist preconceptions, but we won't get into that.

It's an idea with a certain amount of justification.

There is a very large number of ways of interpreting the world, and it isn't obvious which way or ways are right or why they're right.

And so I was curious is like, Was this merely a difference of opinion?

The West had a certain set of axioms that it was acting out in the world.

And there Soviet Block and the rest of the communist countries have another set of axioms, and they were both arbitrary and it was a matter of power.

Was there an alternative to brutal combat?

Was there an alternative way of solving the dispute to brutal group combat?

And because I always believed that if you understood the problem that you could solve it, in fact that if yes, if when you analyze the problem, a solution didn't emerge from the analysis than you actually didn't understand the problem.

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Iceland: 12 Rules for Life Tour: Lecture 2

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