DoctorOz: Jordan Peterson on Basic Human Instincts & Tribalism

At the bottom, you have tribalism. Right above that, you have religion. And then right above that, you have politics and economics. Many of our political discussions have become religious or tribal. Talk a little bit about tribe. What is the difference between solidarity, loyalty, on one side, and defining oneself in the group that sometimes you're at odds with and sometimes you're part of? So help us explain how human hierarchy has forced us into tribes. Well, I think it's probably that, it's probably our better angels, in some sense, that do it. Everyone agrees that, perhaps, that your primary loyalty should be to your family. And that logically extends to your extended kin group, like evolutionarily speaking. And then maybe that elaborates up into your tribe. Your tribe is set up to cooperate and compete towards necessary ends and to provide you with a context of friendship and a structure of meaning in your life. And that's absolutely necessary. And it can't be of infinite scope because you lose the personal relationship that's necessary to keep it functional. I think one of the things that's happening, for example, with the European economic community and its fragmentation is that the size of it is too much. So the distance between the people at the bottom and the people at the top is so great that the people at the bottom don't feel any personal power. They don't feel any connection with their leaders. So there's like an optimal tribal size. And it's a testament to people's ability to cooperate that we produce tribal groups. And we do it at the drop of a hat. We do it when we organize sports teams. And you see how powerful that tribal motivation is, well, in the case of people's allegiance, say, to a sports team. It's a very natural part of human existence. And a lot of it is admirable. The problem is that there are many tribal groups. And that puts us in conflict because, on the one hand, the other tribal groups pose a threat to our way of being in a variety of ways, like a genuine threat. Threat of disease, for example, which has been terrible, terrible threat throughout our evolutionary history, but also the threat of radically new ideas or the threat of physical conflict. By the same token, all these other tribes, well, you know, they create interesting things. They have new ideas. They have ways of being in the world that might be really helpful if we could incorporate them. And so we have this terrible tension between our in-group loyalty and our out-group curiosity. And it's one of those opponent process issues where there's positive and negative things that are pushing in both directions and getting the balance right is extraordinarily difficult. So much of human history has been one long narrative of enslavement, fighting between tribes. I remember you said once that if you met someone that was not like you, historically, one of you would die, right? That's right. So how do we begin to strive? How do we reprogram ourselves to accept a different outcome where we actually get bigger and bigger tribes and we actually feel like we're seeking the same, not the opposite? Well, I think the United States is a really good example of that, is that you need an overarching narrative. And so a narrative is a story about how you should conduct yourself in your life, right? It's a story about who you are and where you are and where you're going and why and how you're going to get there with other people. So you need that universal narrative that's acceptable to people. And then within that, you can place tribal groups, but they have to subsume their tribal loyalty to that fundamental larger narrative. And so there's a melting pot element. You can keep those elements of your tribal affiliation that aren't in contradiction with the underlying meta-narrative. Why is that dissolved now? We seem not to have that melting pot mindset anymore. Well, I think you still have it to a fair degree. We don't wanna get too pessimistic about it. The US is pretty peaceful, ethnically speaking, despite what people think and say. It's much more peaceful ethnically than it was, say, in the 1960s. And I think that's the same with most Western countries, although not all of them. So there's no reason for despair. But the problem is is that part of the narrative that united the United States and all its people was predicated on the idea of self-evident truths, right? We hold these truths to be self-evident. And those truths themselves are embedded in an underlying narrative structure that we don't really understand. That would be the Judeo-Christian narrative structure, which is thousands of years old and has its roots tens of thousands of years before that. And it consists of a series of stories about what constitutes a human being. So for example, one of the most fundamental elements of the Judeo-Christian narrative is that human beings, men and women alike, which is a staggering statement for something that was written so long, are made in the image of God. And so there's a notion that each individual has sovereign value. And that's something, you can't prove that, right? It's an axiomatic statement. It's something you have to accept on faith. And then allied with that, because the question is, well, if you're made in the image of God, what does that exactly mean? In the narrative that lays that out, what God does when you are first introduced to him is he's the creator of order from chaos. And he does that with truth, creates the order that is good, because that's repeated consistently, what I've created this good. He creates the order that is good from chaos, from possibility. And that's what human beings do. And so that's why each human being is of intrinsic value, because we have that role to play in the world. And that's part of this massive underlying narrative that composes the self-evident part of the political structure that unites all of us. When we start to lose the beliefs that enable those fundamental propositions to be self-evident, then the whole thing starts to shake and move. And that's not good. That was Nietzsche's warning from back in the, the philosopher Nietzsche's warning, the idea that God was dead. Or Dostoevsky's warning that if there's no God, then anything is permitted. There's serious warnings. And that the collapse of that underlying structure can make us hopeless and nihilistic. And that can lead to very dark places. Yeah, Nietzsche wasn't bragging that God was dead. He was lamenting. Oh yes, he was terrified. Like Nietzsche believed that the consequence of that was that we would have to create our own values, that we'd sort of have to become like gods ourselves. But the problem with that is that we can't create our own values. We don't have the capacity for that. I mean, try. Wake up at three in the morning when your conscience is bothering you about something you've done, and tell yourself that no, it's okay. You're gonna make your own value, and that reprehensible action that you undertook is now fine. You see how far you get with that rationalization? It's like you'll find that you're working against an intrinsic moral intuition that has you in its grip. And then that moral intuition is a guideline to the underlying moral structure of the world. Now, I don't know what that means metaphysically. I don't know if that means that the world really is like a narrative of the fight between good and evil. But as far as human beings are concerned and their psychological makeup, it certainly is. And so we can't create our own values. The best we can do is to go back to the values that we've already had and rediscover them. So why is it that so many people seem to hate others who have different political perspectives on what's going on? Oh, well, it's not surprising. I mean, there's all sorts of reasons to be ethnocentric. Other people are genuinely dangerous. Other ideas are genuinely dangerous. I mean, look at what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans came to the New World. I mean, they brought with them all these diseases, like dozens of diseases, measles, smallpox, mumps, chicken pox. They lost 95% of their population in like 100 years. I understand the risks of different tribes. I always thought the deep fundamental frustrations with each other would arise because of those higher stories we're telling and what we're aiming for in our lives. Well, there's that too. I never thought politics would do that. Politics is more tactical. How are we gonna tax each other to take care of some of the issues so we can all live in harmony and seek that higher goal? So fighting within religious disciplines, I sort of get that. Not good, but I understand it. It seems like religion has taken a back seat and politics seems to have absorbed some of that anger. Okay, so imagine that the hierarchy of human conflict is something like this. At the bottom, you have tribalism. Right above that, you have religion. And then right above that, you have politics and economics flowing out of that. And what's happened is that many of our political discussions have become religious or tribal. And so they're becoming more serious. So we're not talking, we're not in the domain of politics. We're down beneath that. We're into the domain of what's self-evident. So for example, there's a free speech controversy on campus, who should talk and who shouldn't. That's what people think the free speech controversy is about. That's not what it's about, because the radicals on campus who are opposed to free speech do not believe that free speech exists. They're underneath the political domain. Because in the United States, if you're acting politically, you can argue about who should speak and who shouldn't. But you can't argue about whether or not people should be allowed to speak and that would be useful. But the argument on the campus is, well look, you're not a sovereign individual. That's all nonsense. You're a member of a group. You're just a mouthpiece for your group. You don't have anything individual to add. It's not possible for groups to communicate to one another in any reasonable manner or to negotiate. And the entire political landscape is nothing but a nightmare of competing power, competing power claims between groups of different identity. The whole idea of free speech is something just invented by the dominant power group to oppress the minority power groups. So it isn't about who should speak. It's about whether free speech exists. That's not political. That's theological. It's certainly philosophical, but I also think it's theological, because it violates the claim that each person is individually sovereign and is a source of valid information. So if you and I are gonna have a discussion, I have to presume that you have the capacity to face the world and to change it for better or for worse. And I have to listen to how you lay out your propositions. I have to believe that there's something there to you that isn't just your social construction, that isn't just your political identity, your group identity. Well, if I've dispensed with all that belief, there's no possibility for us to communicate, especially across racial or ethnic or sexual barriers. One idea that I've been playing with is the thought, to help address this, is to remind people that a lot of our differences are genetic. So if these genetic differences also influence whether we're Republicans or Democrats or we're pro-life or pro-choice, then it would make people perhaps more forgiving. How realistic is that? Are we really genetically that different? And take disgust as a good domain. Yeah, well, I mean, far more of what you think politically is determined by your temperament than you think. Your genetics. Yes, yes, by biological factors. And so it's useful to know that because that helps you understand that the person that you're talking to isn't just arbitrarily different. They're actually different. When you think, well, that's a bad sort of difference, it's like, well, no. It's a sort of difference that might be useful in a particular set of circumstances. So I can give you an example. Liberal types are higher in creativity, which is a temperamental trait that's heavily influenced by genetics. And they're lower in conscientiousness, which is also heavily influenced by biological factors. And so the disadvantage to that is that they tend to be disorderly and chaotic. But the advantage is, they tend to be creative and entrepreneurial. So all the entrepreneurial types are liberals, or almost all of them. And you can see that by what's happening, say, in places like Silicon Valley. Well, that's fine, man. You need the entrepreneurial and creative types to generate new ideas. And you need to generate new ideas because the old ideas decay and age. Like, it'd be lovely if we could just fix things and then that was a permanent solution. But it doesn't work that way. But what the liberals don't understand is that, well, they're all fine. They're fine in terms of creating their new entrepreneurial ventures. But they need conservatives to run them. They need the conscientious types who are not as prone to think laterally to take the algorithmic processes that they've now invented, right? Because they have a structure. And to implement them carefully. And so there's this dynamic between the liberal and the conservative in a free market society that drives the entire economy. And so you might be annoyed at your crazy liberal colleague who's taking risks all the time and is coming up with 10 crazy ideas an hour. But without him, you'll stagnate. And he might be just as irritated as hell at you because you're so damn narrow-minded. You can't get out of your one-dimensional trap and things have to be done exactly the same way or you're going to be upset. But you two need each other. And then what you need free speech for, in particular, is to negotiate between those different temperamental types to come up with a solution that's, well, hopefully that's optimally functional. That would be the first thing. But also that you can both live with. And the great hope of societies that are predicated on the idea that the capacity to speak freely is an expression of our divine essence, let's say, speaking in this deeper sense, is that we can, in fact, negotiate our way to peace. And I think that successful human societies do exactly that. And that is the cure for the mediation between different tribal groups. It's like, well, what's your perspective? God, I have to listen to you. Oh my God, that's so terrible because it's going to undermine what I believe. I'm going to have to question things that I think of as sacred, even. I have to listen to you as if you know something. And you have to do the same for me. A terrible process. You know that if you're married to someone, you know it's very brutal to have a genuine conversation. But there is a possibility that what will come out of the chaos that that produces is a new kind of order and that that new kind of order will be superior to the previous order. And I would say that is the history of humankind because over the centuries, our tribes have united into larger and larger and more and more peaceful aggregations. And the net consequence of that seems to be a much, much less male homicide. That's the first thing. And I mean, we do have outbreaks of terrible wars from time to time. But all things considered, it looks like an upward climb as a consequence of, I would say as a consequence of careful negotiation. It's worth investing the time. So listen people, you don't even like, because I'm adding to your life. They'll also tell you things that no one else will tell you about yourself. Maybe you don't want to know those things, but your friends won't tell you that. Your enemies might. And then you'll learn something that you might need to know. You know, and it might save your life to learn that. So it's bitter and terrible, but maybe not as bitter and terrible as the outcome. Mr. Pearson, thank you very much. Be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything. And remember to check back often to see what's new.