DoctorOz: Jordan Peterson on Science, Religion, and Finding Meaning

After meditating on this alchemical issue and the problem of nuclear destruction essentially that beset us after the Second World War, I think the horrors of the Second World War, Jung developed this proposition, which was, well, we're all now too technologically powerful to be as ignorant and malevolent as we are. And so we have to make our religious dream much more conscious, because each of us is now a world-destroying force. And probably we won't be able to manage that, but we need to recognize that and to think it through, which is, who wants to do that? It's like, don't muck about. When you say bring religion more into your consciousness, to bring it into the world, what does that look like for a real person trying to live their life today, watching all this political mumbo-jumbo happening around them? I've been watching some of the comedians, especially, who've been following my lectures and who interviewed me, some of the younger guys particularly, and they're searching for their words the same way that I do. They're mimicking that. And so I'm always feeling out these words. It's like, is that solid? Is it a good place to stand? Am I being careful? Weigh your words. Weigh your words. Why? Because the world depends on it. You think that's not true. It's, yeah, that is true. That's who you are. That is who you are. If you're not terrified by that, you don't understand it. Now, I've got an adjunct to that story that's quite interesting. So I had a discussion with Camille Paglia, who's quite genius and unbelievably verbal and enthusiastic and eccentric and interesting in every good way, and quite far on the left. And she said something very interesting about this man named Eric Neumann. And Eric Neumann wrote a book called The Origins and History of Consciousness, and another called The Great Mother. And they're great books. The Origins and History of Consciousness, the foreword was written by Carl Jung, and he said he wished he would have written that book. So that's something, man. That's something. It's like all of Jung's works, 40 volumes condensed into one book. And Paglia said that had the humanities departments depended on Neumann's thinking about literature and narrative, instead of Foucault and Derrida, everything would have been different. And that just blew me away, because I'd never met anyone who was, like, smart, who knew of Neumann. And I had come to precisely that conclusion 20 years ago. And that's part of Jung's endeavor. What did Neumann say that was so much more powerful than this? He said that the divine word was at the top of the hierarchy of value, essentially, which is exactly the opposite, in a very real sense, to what the French postmodernists claim. They don't like the faculty of discrimination, which is why they're so concerned with, well, no discrimination. It's like, really? No discrimination? Everything's okay? Really? Well, wouldn't that be convenient? And if you look at the life of someone like Foucault, you might well ask yourself, well, tell yourself, well, it's no wonder he didn't want any discrimination. What's so addictive about getting rid of all discrimination? It's so many... You can do anything. It's like Dostoevsky, you know, no God, everything is permitted. Well, wouldn't that be something? There's no high, there's no low. Well, then what? Well, we have pleasure. I don't know what. What do you do in the absence of that? If there's no highest good to aspire to, well, what happens to people concretely and practically when that highest good vanishes is that they become nihilistic and desperate, and then they become malevolent and cruel. It's terrible. But maybe you dream, I'm not going to be burdened by this. And, you know, I don't want to be... A lot of the atheists who've been watching my lectures have been people who are very damaged by their religious upbringing because there was a totalitarian element to it. They were really hurt, I suspect. Now, I won't go into that. And so they have their reasons to rebel against the religious enterprise, but, you know, they think they understand it. And that's something to think. It's like, that's the hubris of the rational mind. You really think you understand the human religious enterprise? And all it is is like superstitious pseudoscience? That's your conclusion? Well, what do you make of psychedelics then, just out of curiosity? This weird substance that's in mushrooms of all things that reliably produces a mystical experience that completely transforms people's notions of death when they're dying of cancer? It's like, what's that, some rational thing? And what about music and what it does to people? You don't see anything divine in that? And all that means is that you don't have a very good... What would you say? Ah, you're muddying up the waters surrounding what divine means. Music. Music feeds people's soul. This Rex Murphy, the journalist I was telling you about, he had this great line. He came to visit me a few days ago. It's not his line, but he remembered it. All art aspires to the condition of music. Yes. Well, the rationalist psychologists, psychologists are really guilty of this, even brilliant psychologists, that all that artistic endeavor, that's just a spandrel of human cognition. It doesn't really mean anything. It's like, that's why I like Jung's approach. No. Drama, art, literature, music, all of that dramatic narrative endeavor, that's everything. We're embedded in that. It's not, well, culture is something we do when we aren't concentrating on something practical and important, which a conservative might think. And I'm not trying to damn conservatives. They're less interested in aesthetic experience, and that's a temperamental issue. But it's completely wrong. Dream, action, dream, rationality, statable propositions. A tiny world of statable propositions surrounded by this immense endeavor that's acted out in large part and then represented in images. My friend Jonathan Paggio, I watched a lecture of his a couple of days ago. He's an icon carver. He showed one icon. It had like 400 figures in it. He unpacked it for five minutes. It was just, it was like being struck dead by a wind. There was so much in that image, incalculable wisdom in one image. And yet, if I look at the art around our world in this era, it doesn't seem as rich as in past eras. Now, that's my hypothesis. Well, it certainly has become detached from an underlying narrative. Now, I tend to like a lot of modern art for various reasons, and I understand some of what's being played with, but it has become detached from the underlying narrative in the same way that, well, that so much of our rational thought has. And we can't do, there is no escaping from the underlying narrative. People say to me all the time, you don't know what belief means. You don't know what it means. You can't help it. I'm writing a new book, I hope, called We Who Wrestle With God. That's what Israel means. Jacob wrestles with God. And then he gets his leg broken, essentially. Is it an angel? Is it God? Who knows? Well, do you know? You don't know when you're wrestling with your conscience. Is it a devil? Is it an angel? Is it God? You don't know. You wrestle with it. I'd rather have my leg broken than wrestle with my conscience. I mean it, man. I mean it. Especially if you're wrestling about something vital. It's like, hey, that'll heal. It's just some pain. No problem. I can hobble around for three months. Wrestle with your conscience, and all that happens is your leg gets broken. And you say, well, I don't wrestle with God because I don't believe in God. It's like, no, you wrestle with him more. You wouldn't be watching my biblical lectures otherwise. You're obsessed with it. I don't believe. You don't accept a set of stateable, explicit propositions that have been presented in a pseudoscientific manner that has nothing to do with the issue, almost nothing to do with the issue. So let's circle back to this issue of how a political leader, or a leader, addresses the needs of society. You argue, reach across the aisle, love your neighbor. Yet you have diametrically opposite perspectives. Not just liberal and democratic, but you have fundamental disagreements about what the future could look like. And I'll give you an example. If someone's belief system is essentially Marxist, even though they might not call it that. Well, within that framework is the idea you must destroy capitalism. It's not just nice to get along with the capitalists. No, the system itself is intrinsically corrupt. So it must be destroyed. I'm not a good Marxist if I don't destroy a capitalist. Capitalists probably feel the same thing about Marxists. I can't possibly be truly a capitalist if I don't destroy a philosophy that wants to destroy me. So how do you reach across the aisle and sort of high-five? The best way to do it is to offer a more attractive alternative. So what is that more attractive alternative? That's what I'm trying to puzzle out. Why hasn't that been at the forefront of all academic debate for at least the last 20 years? Why isn't it what we're truly fighting over now? Well, it's partly because a lot of academics are seriously obsessed with their specialty. Like, that's what they do. I mean, one of the scientists in Toronto who got tangled up in the trans debate, I'm afraid I can't remember his name. He ran a major institute here. He's a scientist. You talk to him. He's a research scientist. He's very interested in this one issue. He's not political, which is partly why he got ground up. And most people in academia are weird hyper-specialists. And thank God for that, because they're out there beetling away on problems that are really important, or perhaps not, but might be. And they're not paying attention to the political. And then the second-rate thinkers who can't do that and are jealous of it turn to political activism and say, well, here's an ideology. I can understand it. And it's smarter than all that rational specialty nonsense. And I can just accept it. And besides, what a really ethical person would be doing is going out there and protesting about how society should be changed. It's unearned valor and unearned virtue. And I don't care if the ideology is on the right or the left, but it's the leftist ideology that possesses 15% of the university. So it isn't the right that was my concern at that point, even though I'd taught about Nazism and all of that for decades and made it a central focus of my concern. That isn't threatening the universities. But I do think that what you do is you tell a better story. That's what I'm trying to do. It's like, what's the better story? Well, it's embedded at least to some degree in our Judeo-Christian tradition, probably entirely in the final analysis. It's like, well, why should I prefer that to Marxism? Marxism, it's got this call to a materialist utopia sort of at hand. And it makes sense, which it certainly does once you accept a few propositions. It's very fully fleshed out rationally. It's very attractive. I mean, I fell deep into that in its socialist version, which is quite different. And in Canada, that derives from the English socialist tradition. So it's quite different. But I can certainly understand what's attractive intellectually. You can just offer it to kids who are in the messianic phase of their development, something Piaget observed, a great child psychologist, but no one ever talks about. It's late adolescence. And so there's this messianic urge to serve the world properly among adolescents. And we say, well, here's an ideology. And bang, it fills the hole. But it's not the right story. So what's the right story? Well, you know, that's what we're trying to work out. But I've told some of it. It's this idea of the divine word. It's at the center of that. And that's part of your soul. And that's part of what gives you the intrinsic value that the notion of natural rights is predicated upon. You say you don't believe that. It's like, what do you mean? Do you believe that people are of intrinsic worth? Or do you believe that they're of equal intrinsic worth despite their variability? Yeah, but I don't believe in the soul. It's like, yes, you do. You just don't know it. Well, what is that soul? Well, I don't know. Because there's so much we don't know. But I would say it's part of what calls to you to further your development. It's part of what is embedded in the manifests itself in the instinct to imitate that which is admirable, which is an unbelievably deep. I'll give you an example. I've been thinking about this a lot. So I have this new cottage that's up north. And it's dark there at night. And I can go out in the dark. And I can look up into the night sky. Now, I've been talking in parallel with my wife about this image of Mary. And it's an image that if you Google Mary serpent stars, you'll see many images painted in the Renaissance. Mary, head in the stars, foot on a serpent and the world. What is that? What's that image? It's an image of divine femininity. What is that? Okay. You look up at the stars. What are you looking? The infinite. Actually, at least insofar as it's accessible to us. What's the experience? Wonder and awe. What's embedded in the awe? A compulsion to become more than you are. The stars themselves call to you genuinely. What's that about? Well, we imitate. It's deeply embedded as this proclivity. It imitates how we learn language. It's deeply embedded. We want to imitate what is best. We're so possessed by the imitated spirit that the cosmos itself calls us to imitate its infinite, its infinite nature. And everyone experiences that when they look at the night sky. Mary has her head in the stars. She's the feminine insofar as it's related to the infinite. And because of that, she can put her foot on the serpent. Well, what's the serpent? Well, that's the thing that threatens our children. Well, it's actual snakes. It's actual bears, lions, monsters, reptile. That's one part of it. But the snake in the Garden of Eden is also Satan. So what does that mean? Well, what's the worst thing that can threaten your child? A bear? No, no. It's malevolence itself, a malevolent person, a child molester, say, or someone worse. But worse than that, the spirit that inhabits that person. But worse than that, the manifestation of that spirit inside your child himself. And the good mother attacks against that, entices. And that's part of what we also need to do with our political enemies. Enemies entice, right? It would be better if we were in this together. It would be better if we dispensed with this ideological nonsense and put things where they should be, subdued them properly. And so that's the alternative. Person by person, you know, salvation, so to speak, redemption, that's an individual matter. Now it has to be, in some sense, it has to be collective too, in that that has to be a value. Political leaders. This is what happened in Mesopotamia to the emperor. Once a year, at the time of renewal, the New Year's festival, when the old year had to die because it was archaic and outdated, and the new year was about to be born, the new hero. When the sun reappears in the darkness, the Mesopotamian emperor would go outside the gates of the city. So that was out into chaos. And the priest would strip him of his kingly garment, make him kneel and hit him with a glove. It's like, you are not God. You're subordinate to some higher principle. And if you don't remember that, the entire state will crumble. And then they would act out. The Mesopotamians would then act out. They had a ritual to act out the war between the gods and the raising of Marduk, who was their ultimate God to the highest point. And Marduk had eyes all the way around his head. So he paid attention. He didn't think. See, when you pay attention, words appear in your mind. That's not the same as thinking towards an end. You pay attention and the words appear. So he paid attention and he spoke magic words. That was Marduk. It's the divine word in the Mesopotamian guise. The proper sovereign was subordinate to that and attempted to embody it. And so what should political leaders do? Well, once a week, they should go to church and confess their sins and be struck with a glove to remind them who they are. Do you believe there's evil that is driving some of this? Always. But it drives everything. You know, a little drop of poison in Tom Waits' words. And God only knows maybe what we would do without it, because we might need a worthy adversary. You know, things are very complicated. I had a vision once, I was in a stadium, fighting this adversary. It was a terrible thing. And when the battle was over and I had won, I asked God himself, why would you do such a thing? Why would you put us through such part of the vision? I'd seen my father transformed into like the set of all fathers. And then behind that, I could see the spirit of the patriarchal deity shining through the good things they had all done. The answer was, I knew you could win. It's a hell of a thing. Who knows what we need to have set against us in order to become who we can be. It can't be nothing. And for us to become all we could be, maybe it has to be almost everything that's set against us. Who knows? Who understands the role of consciousness in being? No one. And scientists are becoming increasingly aware of that. There's a revolution taking place in cognitive science based on the observation of the primacy of consciousness in the elaboration of the objective world. So there's many things moving underfoot.