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  • tonight's talk.

  • This is the most popular talk we've ever done in 15 years.

  • Theme tonight is the third s.

  • Oh, it's been a weekend of Jordan Peterson, which has been a huge pleasure for anyone who doesn't know him.

  • And last night I think it was one babe in arms, and tonight it's probably my mother.

  • Hey, is a was a professor associate professor at Harvard University and is now the professor of clinical psychology, Toronto His first book was a huge success.

  • It revolutionized the psychology of religion, and his latest book, of the 12 Rules of Life, is set to do exactly the same.

  • Just a few housekeeping things.

  • At the end of the talk, we're gonna have a Q and A, which I'm good moderate eso do Prepare your questions, please make them questions on Dhe.

  • Also, for those people in the live stream, there'll be posted notes and you couldn't hand questions for the ushers and will be taking those as well.

  • S o.

  • I look forward to that, and at the end of it, we're going to be doing not so much a signing, but here on stage, a dedication.

  • Everyone's book is pretty but everyone's book is already signed.

  • So if you want to, if you don't want to dedication, then just leave you on the third page.

  • You'll find the signature in order to last night.

  • There was a huge queue, as you could imagine in order to make the cue run smoothly on.

  • Sorry to sound bossy, but he's not going to be doing selfies just because it means he's got to stand up the whole time and it'll slow down the flow.

  • But he's very happy to be photographed, and you can photo bomb him if you'd like.

  • I'm also because all of us, particularly me a really keen for him to solve the problems of our lives.

  • Please resist doing that during the dedication because it'll really slow everything down.

  • I think the three things that you can take away from this evening on you'll be the judge is first of all be inspired by the talk.

  • Secondly, read the book and thirdly, marry a Canadian.

  • I've feel rather fortunate to have now done a ll three Um, also, if you would like to tweet, it's hashtag the rules that 12 rules of life.

  • So without further ado, please welcome.

  • One of the world's great public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson.

  • Thank you.

  • Well, that was a nice No.

  • So I thought I'd I talk about my book tonight.

  • Um, I given to talks now, and I didn't actually talk directly about it.

  • I sort of talked around it, so I thought, I don't like to give the same talk twice.

  • So I thought I'd actually walk through it and outlined a little bit, so I had to spend most of the day memorizing the rules.

  • You know, you think if you worked on something for three years or being five years, I guess you'd actually have it memorized.

  • But memory is a very strange thing, and it's very particular and goal oriented.

  • And I actually didn't have the rules memorized and certainly not their numbers.

  • So hopefully I do by now.

  • So I guess we're gonna find out.

  • But I have a copy of the book here in case I, in case I forget.

  • So I think we'll go through them one by one, and we'll see how.

  • See how that goes.

  • Seven o'clock.

  • So All right.

  • Good.

  • Um hmm.

  • The first rule, which is kind of a comical rule is stand up straight with your shoulders back, and it's a meditation, among other things, on the habits of lobsters.

  • I read some papers on lobsters.

  • Boat must be 10 years ago, I guess, and they just absolutely blew me away.

  • And one of the things I've really loved about being a psychologist There's many things, but I've really loved psychoanalytic theory.

  • And the great clinicians, the behaviorists as well.

  • Mean Freud, Yung Adler, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow.

  • That behavior is like Skinner and and the cognitive behaviorist.

  • I mean, I've learned a tremendous amount from reading the clinicians.

  • And so if any of you are interested in psychology, I would really recommend reading the great clinicians because they know they learned so much about life.

  • It's crazy by reading them, so that's been fun.

  • But then, on the entirely other end of the spectrum, where I've learned most about psychology is from the really low are what would you call them?

  • The really science oriented animal behaviors?

  • That's where they were, who they turned into the neuroscientists, right?

  • They were the animal behaviors, first of all, and then they turned into the neuroscientists.

  • I've learned a tremendous amount from them.

  • There's such clear thinkers, the best of the bunch.

  • I think there's two of them.

  • One name.

  • Jeffrey Gray, who wrote a book called The Neuro Psychology of Anxiety, which is just a deadly book.

  • It's impossible to read.

  • It takes like six months to read it, because I think he read like 1800 papers to write it or something like that, and he actually read them.

  • That's the cool thing.

  • And he understood them, which is really something.

  • Then there's another guy named Jack Pancks F.

  • Who wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which outlines his studies, for example, of rats.

  • He was the guy who learned that rats laugh if you tickle them with the end of a pencil eraser.

  • But they laugh ultrasonic, li like bats.

  • So you have to.

  • You have to slow down the ultrasonic vocalization before you can hear the giggle.

  • And you think, Why the hell would you spend your time tickling rats with a pencil and making them laugh?

  • See what he demonstrated there was that that there was a place circuit in mammals, that there's an actual There's a cycle biological basis for rough and tumble play, for example, It's a bloody big deal, you know, discovering a whole new circuit in the brain that's like discovering a continent.

  • It's Nobel Prize winning stuff and accepts affective neuroscience.

  • I would highly recommend that.

  • So there's this other book I know about two, which is 12 rules for life, which you could also look into if you want.

  • Anyways, I was reading these these articles on lobsters and I I came across this this finding that lobsters, lobsters governed their pasta reflection with serotonin.

  • And I thought, God, that's so interesting.

  • It's so in.

  • Deflection is this is to stand up straight.

  • Wow, that's so interesting because, you know, depressed people crouch over.

  • I wonder if there's any link between those two things.

  • And then I went and read a whole pile of papers on lobster and lobster neurochemistry.

  • Lobster neurochemistry is actually quite well understood because they have a fairly simple nervous system, right?

  • And so if you want to understand the complex nervous system, it's a good idea.

  • Understand?

  • A simple one first and then sort of elaborate upwards.

  • And it turns out that, um, serotonin governs status, uh, governs status, emotional regulation and posture in lobsters just like it does in human beings, and so that would just blew me away.

  • So 111 thing that Chapter one is about is the fact that if a lobster is defeated in a dominance battle, you can give it essentially anti depressants and it will fight again.

  • Another just blew me away.

  • You know, it's so it's so remarkable because one of the things that tells you is that so, if you're imagine that you could be lobster, top dog or bottom dog.

  • Imagine there's 10 strata in the lobster hiring, and so you could be number one right Top law.

  • Mr Number 10 Bottom Lobster If your bottom lobster You have low serotonin levels in high arc top of me levels.

  • That's a neurochemical that human beings don't produce.

  • And if you're a top lost or you have high serotonin levels and lower top of mean levels, you can move a lobster in its dominance hierarchy by moderating its levels of serotonin.

  • And I thought that's so interesting because what it means is that the counter that keeps track of our status we have a counter in the sense in our minds that keeps track of our status is 1/3 of a 1,000,000,000 years old.

  • And what that also means is that the idea of the hierarchy let's call it a dominant Starkey, because within lobsters it's It's kind of like a physical prowess, hierarchy, something like that.

  • The idea of the hierarchy is at least 350 million years old.

  • And so I read that.

  • And I think, well, so much for the idea that human hierarchies are associate cultural construct.

  • It's like, No, that's wrong.

  • It's not just a little bit wrong.

  • It's unbelievably wrong.

  • It's mind bogglingly wrong, right, and it's right and so so hierarchies, hierarchies of being around for 1/3 of a 1,000,000,000 years, and and we have a neurochemical system that modulates are our understanding of those hierarchies.

  • And then also.

  • And this is the interesting thing, too.

  • And this is why people's reputations are so important to them.

  • Among there's lots of reasons, but this is one of them is the where this counter that you share with lobsters rates you in terms of your hierarchical position, determines the ratio of negative emotion to positive emotion that you feel, and that's also an absolutely mind boggling idea for two reasons.

  • One is it tells you why it's so hard on people to be put down because it doesn't just upset them in the moment it changes the way their entire system responds to the world so that they now experience more positive emotion in less than eight less negative emotion.

  • So that's really rough.

  • And then there's a corollary to that to which is like There's a very tight relationship between your belief system and your dominance hierarchy position.

  • It's complicated, but it's worth going through like let's say that.

  • So I have a certain amount of status as a professor and and I have the Let's call it the What would you say?

  • I've been granted the entitlement to a certain position in a social hierarchy.

  • Now the question is, why do I have a valid claim to that position?

  • And the answer, hypothetically, is because I know enough so that my claim to the position is valid.

  • So then, if you stand up in the audience and challenge my beliefs and show that I'm wrong, you might say, Well, I get upset because I'm wrong.

  • But the more accurate reason that I get upset is because you're indicating to the crowd that my my position in the hierarchy of authority is invalid.

  • And by doing that, you lower me in the hierarchy and you mess around with the neurochemical systems that are regulating my emotions.

  • And so if you're interested at least in part, in why people are so prone to defend themselves and their beliefs in the service of their position, then that's why.

  • And so that's a great example of how you can learn these unbelievable things by stumbling across a rather obscure biological fact.

  • It just it just what would you say?

  • It It's like it's like a series of dominoes.

  • And that's also why biological facts were so useful.

  • It's like we don't have to argue about whether or not social hierarchy says.

  • I said.

  • There are hierarchies are social constructs a given hierarchies influenced in its structure by socio cultural conditioning?

  • Let's say, but the fact of the hierarchy so like the part of your brain that detects and regulates your response to hierarchies, is older than the part of your brain that recognizes trees like it's old.

  • It's really, really fundamental, and so and almost all social animals organize themselves and social in hierarchies because now the other thing that Chapter one is is a bit of a meditation on what might constitute a hierarchy.

  • One of my business colleagues, a former student of mine from Harvard, very, very smart guy.

  • It's got out graduate degree in engineering from M.

  • I.

  • T.

  • And a PhD in psychology from Harvard.

  • So there's like one of him in the whole world.

  • He's a very smart guy, and he helped me design the self authoring sweet, by the way.

  • And he's been working for about 20 years on that, Um, that's a suite of programs that helps people write about their lives and straighten him out.

  • He told me to stop using the word dominance hierarchy, and he said the reason for that was that it was infested with Marxist presuppositions and really bothered me when he first said that because I've been using the word for years, dominance, hierarchy, he said, We had a discussion about that.

  • He said, While it's predicated on the idea that you climb up the hierarchy human hierarchy as a consequence of the expression of power, it's like that's wrong.

  • You climb up valid hierarchies as a consequence of the expression of competence, and that's actually technically right.

  • He was exactly the right person to tell me that because he had done his PhD on what predicts success in Western hierarchies.

  • And the answer is quite clear.

  • General cognitive ability, some prefrontal ability as well, which was what he's specifically tested.

  • So intelligence, Roughly speaking, it's a little bit more elaborate than intelligence.

  • But that's close enough.

  • And trade conscientiousness accounts for about 50% of the variance in long term success.

  • And you think, Well, hey, how do you want your society be structured?

  • It seems pretty good to me that smart, hard working people are the ones most likely to succeed.

  • That's not about empirical test of the validity of a structure, no, especially given how much vagary there isn't life.

  • Lots of random things happen to people, but it's better to be born three standard deviations above the mean in intelligence in the West than it is to be born.

  • Three standard deviations above the mean in wealth in relationship to where you'll end up when you're 40.

  • So, he said, to use the word competence hierarchy, or we decided that I think that's much better.

  • So Chapter one as a bit of a meditation on the nature of hierarchies in the biochemistry of hierarchy.

  • But it's also an injunction about how to present yourself, because you don't you want to present yourself to the world in a manner that that doesn't disgrace you in some sense that that might be a good way to think about it.

  • And I don't want to disgrace yourself, because the consequence of disgraces is emotional dis regulation, more pain, less positive emotion.

  • And so the best way to present yourself is to stand up forthrightly and to stretch out, you know, and to occupy some space.

  • And 2 to 2.

  • You make yourself sort of vulnerable by doing that, because you open up the front of your body right.

  • But it's a sign of confidence, and that way people are most likely to give you the benefit of the doubt, and that's a good way to start regulating your move.

  • But not only does it directly regulate your mood to stand up because it's so tightly associate ID like pasta Reflection is associate with serotonin and emotional regulation, but also because if you straighten up and you present yourself in that matter than other people are more likely to take you seriously.

  • And that means they'll start treating you is if you're a number one lobster instead of a number 10 lobster.

  • And that's another way that you can at least give yourself the bloody benefit of the doubt right and and and and and and confront the world in a courageous manner.

  • And that's a really good way of also of figuring out how to establish yourself in multiple competence.

  • Hark is because one of the general rules of thumb about how to be successful is to confront things that frighten you forthrightly and with courage.

  • And that's kind of a universal strategy for success.

  • And so that's what the first chapters about.

  • So that's quite fun.

  • My graduate students, I told them, these lobster stories, eh?

  • My graduate students, when we used to go out for breakfast.

  • They're a very competitive bunch, very fractious and witty, and they're always trying to get one over on each other, 100 making some witty put down or something like that, and it got to the point in the restaurants where they put their claws in the air in click like this when they got one over on one of their colleagues, which was very peculiar and strange and very funny as well.

  • So So that's rule number one, and Rule number two is Treat yourself like you're someone that you care about, and that's a deeper chapter.

  • I would say, like Chapter one is kind of comical, but it's also got this serious scientific end, for example, and it's practical, like most of the rules are.

  • Chapter two is a bit of a meditation on why.

  • See, I read this.

  • I read this this piece of work by Young a long while back, and it was a meditation on, um, the injunction to treat your neighbor as as you would like to be treated something like that.

  • And what Young pointed out, which I really liked, was that that wasn't an injunction to be nice to other people.

  • It was an invitation to reciprocity.

  • It was something like this is like you should figure out how you would like to be treated like you were taking care of yourself, not how you would like people to respond to you.

  • It's It's more important than that It's like Imagine you had a child that you really cared for and someone said, No, people will treat this child exactly like you want them to, but you have to figure out what that is.

  • And so then you'd have to sit down for like, a month.

  • And you think, OK, well, how do you want your child to be treated?

  • You don't want everyone just to be nice to him.

  • You know you want people to challenge him and you want people to discipline him, and you want people to tell him when he's wrong.

  • It's like you don't just want everyone to be nice.

  • That's that's pathetic.

  • It's pathetic, isn't there's no challenge in that.

  • And so well, you want to treat other people like you would like to be treated well, then you have to figure out How would you like to be treated well, you'd like people to falling all over you and just lay everything at your feet.

  • It's like, No, that's not something you'd wish for for someone that you were taking care of.

  • And then then there's an additional problem, which is it's often the case that people will treat other people better than they treat themselves.

  • That happens extremely frequently.

  • So one of the things I pointed out, Chapter two was the If you have a dog and you take him to a vet and the vet gives you your prescription medicine, you'll go buy the medicine and you will give it to the dog, and you will do it properly.

  • But if you go yourself to a doctor and you get prescription, there's one.

  • There's a 30% chance you won't even pick up the medication.

  • And if you do, there's a 50% chance that you won't administer to yourself properly.

  • And so I really thought about when I first came across that statistic.

  • It really it was another one of those little facts.

  • I thought.

  • What the hell's up with that?

  • It's like you'll do it for your dog.

  • So obviously you'll do it for something you care about, and you're conscientious enough so you'll actually do it.

  • So like, why wouldn't you do it for you?

  • Your dog likes you.

  • You know, even your dog would rather that you did.

  • But you don't you don't.

  • And it's actually one of the reasons that modern medicine doesn't work nearly as well as it could, because people just don't take their medication.

  • And it's not only because they don't take care of themselves.

  • There's some skepticism about doctors, but you could be just a skeptical about the vet.

  • So it's a deep meditation.

  • I would say it's what I've done with these rules is they're very simple rules, and they're kind of comical and tongue in cheek in some ways.

  • But what I've tried to do is, like, pull them apart and show what's underneath the men to go down as deep as I possibly can and in rule to It's a bit of a meditation on why people don't like themselves very much, and I think there's two reasons, really.

  • And one is that we're were fragile and damage a ble and in perfect in multiple dimensions all the time, and that often just gets worse.

  • It gets lots of things get worse as you get old, for example, so it's not necessarily that easy for a self conscious being who is extraordinarily aware of his or her own fragility and but not just fragility, foolishness and errors.

  • You know yourself better than anyone else knows you and you know, you might have a certain amount of dislike for someone you know, because of something they did.

  • But you know, everything you did, Jesus.

  • That's a drag, man.

  • You know, you have to carry that along behind.

  • Like, really, I did that, you know?

  • And then so there's that.

  • It's like you're you're weak and kind of useless and prone to temptation.

  • And you know those things, you know, that just shouldn't be that way.

  • And then you're also capable of pretty vicious acts of malevolence.

  • And so you also know that about yourself.

  • And so it's a real existential question for people's like, Why the hell should you take care of something is sorry and wretched as you are?

  • And that's really what the chapters about its because the answer in the chapter is, Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, you're first of all, yes, you're pretty useless and terrible, but so is everyone else.

  • And that's actually an existential problem, right?

  • And what I mean by that it's a problem that every human being has always had and always will.

  • So it's not just you, it's a universal problem, and that there's there's an answer to that and one of them is to what is to say love the sinner but hate the sin.

  • It's something like that Is that despite the fact that you're not all that you could be, the proper attitude to have towards yourself is the attitude that you would have towards someone that you genuinely cared for and that it's incumbent on you to act as if you genuinely care for yourself, just like you would act towards someone that you actually cared about some other person.

  • So it's a reversal in some sense of the golden rule, right, and it's a discussion of why that's necessary and also more than that.

  • It's a discussion of why, why you have a moral obligation to do that.

  • It's not just that you should, because it would be better for you.

  • You actually have a moral obligation to do that, I think because you make the world a much better place, a much worse place if you don't take care of yourself.

  • So you should bloody well take care of yourself, You know, because, well, that's what the chapters about.

  • It's partly because you have something valuable to bring into the world.

  • That's the thing about being an individual.

  • It's the thing that Western civilization has always recognized that as an individual you have a light that you have to bring into the world and that if you don't bring it into the world, the world is a dimmer place.

  • And that's a bad thing, because when the world is a dim place, it can get very, very, very dark.

  • And so it's necessary not just so that you feel better, not just so that you're a number one lobster, not none of those things.

  • You need to take care of yourself because you're in the best position to do that.

  • And it's necessary for you to take care of yourself, despite the fact that we're mortal and vulnerable and self conscious and capable, not only capable of doing terrible things, but actually do them.

  • Despite all that, you're still you still have that responsibility.

  • And so I wanted to, you know, hit the question as hard as I can to try to figure out why people are have our contemptuous of themselves and there's plenty of reason, that's for sure.

  • But the reasons do not justify the mistreatment of yourself.

  • It's a simple is that it's not a good strategy, and the next rule is make friends with people who want the best for you.

  • And that's a meditation on my own childhood and adolescence.

  • To some degree, I had friends who wanted the best for me and friends who didn't and, you know, they were friends who some of them were aiming up in, some of the more aiming down.

  • And if you have a friend that's aiming down and you do something that's aiming up, then they're generally not that happy about it.

  • You know, they try to talk your accomplishment with one of their own hypothetical riel, or put down what you're doing or offer you a cigarette if you're trying to quit and you've kind of done that successfully, or a drink, if you've been drinking too much and are it's trying to stop being an alcoholic, you know, or or the other cynical and bitter and and devoted towards no good.

  • And sometimes that's family members to Sometimes it's even part of you, you know.

  • But this chapter is injunction to people is like like you have an ethical responsibility to take care of yourself.

  • You have an ethical responsibility to surround yourself with people who have the courage and and faith and wisdom to wish you well.

  • When you've done something good and to stop you when you're doing something destructive.

  • And if your friends aren't like that, then they're not your friends.

  • And maintaining your friendships with them might not even be in their interest.

  • And so it's a tricky argument to make, because I'm not saying, you know, whenever anyone's in trouble, you should, you know, pushed them into addiction and give them a couple of kicks.

  • That's that's not the idea.

  • The idea is that what I had a couple of rules I didn't write about one was Be careful, uh, be careful about whom you share good news with and another was, Be careful about whom you share bad news with and everyone those rules ring in people's minds quite quickly.

  • A friend is someone you can share good news with, You know, you go to them and you say, Hey, look, this good thing happened to me and they say, Look, I'm so happy that that happened to you, like, way to be and they don't think, God damn it, why didn't that happen to me and like, you know, you didn't deserve it.

  • Here's a bunch of reasons you're stupid and why it won't work.

  • It's like that's not helpful.

  • And so I would say, like if people are you know what the other thing people are doing.

  • If they're trying to drag you down, let's say is they're trying to see if you'll put up with it because they have this idea that maybe life isn't worth living and things aren't good.

  • And then if they can be smirks, let's say to use an archaic term, something that's pristine and good.

  • Then they demonstrate to themselves that there is no true ideal and that there's no necessary reason to be responsible and to strive forward.

  • And so they using, which is a test case.

  • You know, I just push you down into the low lobster Ben and see how you respond.

  • And if you put up with it, then, yeah, my cynicism is fully justified.

  • So well, that's Chapter three, and it's a painful chapter because it also details the suicide of one of my friends, which occurred over a very long period of time, not the actual suicide, but all the pro drama to it so and it's gets it.

  • It's a contentious chapter.

  • Number four is.

  • Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not too who someone else is today, and the reason I wrote that was because I had this client.

  • 10 young clinical psychologist and I spent 20 hours a week for 25 years listening to people listening to people Tell me about their lives, you know, and and those people were people who were just barely hanging onto the bottom of the world up to people who were so successful you could hardly believe, like the entire gamut of people.

  • And that's been absolutely fascinating.

  • It's like it's like being a clinical psychologist.

  • If you really listen is like being immersed in a Dostoyevsky novel all the time, you know, because it's amazing what people will tell you if you listen to them.

  • They are People are so interesting if you actually listen to them because they're so peculiar, like they're like penguins or rhinoceroses and ostriches there Unlikely creatures.

  • Anyways, um, with regards to, um to, ah, comparing yourself to who you were yesterday and not who someone else is today, this old client of mine.

  • He was about 85 when he came to see me, and he was a financier in a kind of a mathematical genius.

  • He made these little pendants out of ah ah, mathematical symbol for the most beautiful mathematical equation that was ever written.

  • He made them out of gold and he would hand those out and he had studied psychology is a young man, and he introduced me to this concept that I didn't know about called the parade.

  • Oh, distribution, which see, I'd been taught him as a psychologist that most human characteristics more normally distributed right.

  • So most people were average and some people were extreme that that's a pretty or are normal distribution.

  • Intelligence is like that, and height there's more.

  • People of average height than very tall are very short.

  • Weight is like that, and lots of things are normally distributed, and psychologists tend to assume that everything is, but it isn't creative products are distributed in a parade.

  • Oh, distribution, and that's a whole different thing.

  • And it's really important to know this.

  • It's another fundamental fact, the knowledge of which consort of transform the way you conceptualize.

  • Let's say the political landscape.

  • So here's an example of the parade of distribution.

  • You know, there's a rule of thumb that if you run a company that 20% of your employees do 80% of the work or the 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your sales, or the 20% of them are responsible for 80% of the customer service calls.

  • Same thing.

  • But that's not exactly the rule.

  • The rule is worse than that.

  • The rule is in a given domain.

  • The square root of the number of people operating in that domain Do half the productive work.

  • So you think you have 10 employees.

  • Three of them do have to work like Yeah, okay, what if you have 100 employees than 10 of them?

  • Do half the work.

  • What if you have 1000 employees?

  • Then it's 30.

  • And if it's 10,000 employees, then it's 100.

  • And this actually turns out to be a rather ironclad rule if it applies across very, very many situations.

  • It applies, for example, to the massive stars and the size of cities, so you can see how universal it is as a law it's It's something like those that have mortgage Maur and those that have last get less.

  • That's the Matthew principle right to those who have everything.

  • More will be given from those who have nothing.

  • Everything will be taken away and the economist sometimes called at the Matthew principle.

  • And so what that lays out is a world that's rife with inequality.

  • So you know, you you hear this idea that I think it's the 85 richest people in the world have more money than the bottom two billion.

  • That's a parade, oh, distribution phenomena.

  • And you might say, uh to hell with capitalism for producing that it's like Sorry you got your diagnosis wrong.

  • It's a natural law.

  • It's no.

  • No matter what society you study, you get a parade, Oh, distribution of wealth to get a parade.

  • Oh, distribution of number of records recorded.

  • You get a Preto distribution of number of songs written or goals scored like any creative product has that characteristic.

  • And it's partly because as you start to become successful, let's say people offer you more and more opportunities, and as you start to fail, people move away from you and you plummet and so Okay, so that's rough.

  • So what it is, what it means is that there is always a landscape of inequality, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't do anything about it.

  • Although I am saying that we don't know what to do about, that's the thing.

  • You know, because you can modify the parade of distribution of wealth, Let's say, But if you but we don't know how to do it without may be disrupting the system so completely that it collapses, which is what happened in the Soviet Union, for example, andan Maoist, China.

  • They were trying, least in principle to adjust inequality, but the cure was far worse than the disease.

  • And the truth of the matter is, we actually don't know technically how much inequality there has to be to generate wealth.

  • Weaken guess, and you could say whether should be less.

  • And you might say, Well, there should be more to your left when you'd say less, and if they're, if you're right when you say well, we'll just let the inequality flourish.

  • But we do know that it's inevitable, and we also know that we don't know howto regulated.

  • So there is inequality What that means is there's always gonna be people around that are better at something than you are and the and that's a that's a problem because you can get jealous and you can get better and you can get resentful and worse.

  • You could get hopeless, you know, because you look like look, I have this his friend of mine, He told me something so funny he was He was decrying his his lack of success in the world.

  • And he compared himself to his roommate.

  • And, uh, he said, you know, his roommate is called Roommate was doing much better than he was, and his bloody roommate was Elon Musk.

  • It's like I really like.

  • It's like, Oh, you're not doing as well as the lone mosque.

  • Well, it's I mean, you can see it would take it rather personally because they were roommates and everything.

  • It wasn't like he was doing badly like he wasn't doing pretty damn well.

  • It's like I'm not as good as the Lord muskets like.

  • Yeah, well, you and seven billion other people, you know, But But I thought it was instructive because well, because you have to be careful who you compare yourself to now.

  • You can't just not compare yourself to others.

  • Too successful people, right?

  • Because then you don't have anything to aim at.

  • And one of the things I learned from you, this was a cool thing.

  • I'm gonna make a real lateral move here.

  • Young thought the Book of Revelation was appended to the Bible because of the Christ in the Gospels was too merciful.

  • He was too nice a guy.

  • Now he's an ideal right and young said, Wait a second.

  • An ideal is always a judge.

  • That's the thing about an ideal, because you're not as good as your ideal.

  • So your ideal is a judge.

  • Revelation has Christ coming back as a judge.

  • And that was Young's explanation at the level of the collective unconscious for the pasting of that remarkably strange and terrible book onto the end of the of the Bible.

  • So anyways, my point is is an ideal, is it?

  • You need an ideal because you have nothing to aim at.

  • But an ideal is a judge, and you always fall short of the ideal.

  • So how the hell can you have the benefits of having an ideal without having the crushing blow that goes along with having the judge that always regards.

  • He was insufficient.

  • So I was trying to work that out in the chapter, and this is something I've had to work out a lot as a clinical psychologist.

  • Well, let's say you need a goal, but we don't want to eat.

  • Let your distance from the goal crush you so you gotta set up a goal.

  • And then you gotta make the goal.

  • Break the gold down into parts so that you could move towards it.

  • You have a fairly high likelihood of doing so.

  • That's a bit bit of practical.

  • I wouldn't say advice.

  • It's it's because it's better than advice.

  • It's it's impractical knowledge about how to go about achieving a name set a high aim but differentiated down so you know what the next step is and then make the next step difficult enough.

  • So you have to push yourself past where you are, but but also provide yourself with a reasonable probability of success.

  • It's also what you do with Children, right?

  • You wanna push them because they need to grow up and be more than they are right.

  • But you don't want to crush them with constant failure.

  • So what you do is aim high and make the gold proxy difficult, but proximal so anyways, so that's 111 one way of looking at it.

  • But then the next thing is, you know, uh, I've had clients many clients in their thirties who are trying to This is more true with women.

  • I would say a lot of women who are very high achieving who established their career girls at 30 and then want a differentiator, differentiate out their life.

  • They want to have a husband, they won't have a family.

  • They're trying to figure out how to do that.

  • And one of the things I've noticed that around 30 you really have to stop comparing yourself in some ways to other people.

  • And the reason for that is that the particularities of your life are so idiosyncratic that there isn't anyone really all that much like you, you know, because the details of your life happened to matter.

  • And so maybe you compare yourself to some rock star something like that, and you know, the person's rich and famous and glamorous and all that.

  • But you know, they're alcoholic and they use too much cocaine and they've had three divorces.

  • And it's like, How the hell do you make sense out of that?

  • Is that someone that you should judge yourself harshly against or not?

  • Answer is you don't know because you don't know all the details of their lives.

  • And who do you know that you can compare yourself to?

  • That's easy you yesterday.

  • So here's a good goal.

  • It's something like, Well, aim high and I really mean that.

  • It's like and we'll talk about that a little bit to aim high, but use as your control yourself.

  • It's like So your goal is to make today some tiny increments better than yesterday, and you can use better.

  • You can define better yourself.

  • This doesn't have to be some imposition of external morality, you know.

  • You know where you're weak and insufficient where you could improve fake.

  • Okay, well, this is what I'm like yesterday.

  • If I did this little thing, things would be just increments better and well, that's a great thing because you get the ball rolling and incremental improvement is unstoppable.

  • You can actually implement it, and it starts to generate Paree.

  • Doe distribution like consequences.

  • It starts to compound, and I've seen that happen in people's lives over in all people, right all the time and tell me that they're doing that.

  • But I've seen that happen in people's lives.

  • Continually, they make a goal, a goal that the goal should be.

  • How could I conceive of my life so that if I had that life, it would clearly be worth living?

  • So I wouldn't have to be bitter, resentful, deceitful, arrogant and vengeful like That's sort of the bottom line, right?

  • Because that's what endless failure does to you.

  • It's not good, and and and that's what life without purpose and the gold does to you as well, because life is very hard.

  • So you think.

  • Okay, well, I need to adopt a motive being that would justify my suffering.

  • And you can ask yourself that question.

  • What would make this worthwhile need a quote?

  • Nietzsche.

  • I think in that chapter, he said.

  • He who has a why, conveyor, Almost.

  • Anyhow, that's a lovely lied man.

  • I mean, it's a lovely line, and it's really worth thinking about.

  • So you think Well, how do I manage all this misery and suffering and futility?

  • It's like, Well, I need to figure out what I would have to do in order to make that clearly worthwhile.

  • And so then you have your goal, and then you think, Well, I need to move towards that incrementally because I'm kind of useless and can only do so much and maybe not even that.

  • But all I have to do is be a little bit better than my my miserable self yesterday, and that will propel you forward very rapidly and and you can succeed at it.

  • Which is also really lovely, because why not set yourself up for success, you know, because otherwise you droop around like a number 10 lobster and you know, that's just not good.

  • You get whole pinch E.

  • When that happens, it's not a good thing.

  • So that was That was Chapter four, Chapter five.

  • Cheese were cruising along here.

  • Chapter five is the one that I thought I would get in the most trouble for writing.

  • You know, I figured people would be all over me for this, and so far they haven't seen, but they still might be.

  • So when it's called, do not let your Children do anything that makes you dislike them, and I thought that would be contentious.

  • First of all, because people would think, Well, I never just like my Children.

  • It's like, really, really, really you know, you're gonna really tell me that.

  • God, you know when there's a more.

  • There's a more horrifying element to that, too, because as a clinical psychologist, I've seen the full Freudian nightmare.

  • I can tell you that.

  • And you know, the I've seen families where it's like this is like the family members are standing in a circle, Let's say, and each of them has their hands around each other's neck, and they're squeezing hard enough to strangle the other person in 20 years.

  • And that's the family.

  • It's like, You know, if you if you haven't met a family like that or well, then you're not paying attention, and there's some reasonable possibility that you're actually in the family like that.

  • So the idea that parents count dislike their Children.

  • It's like God, how naive can you get?

  • It's just that's just if you think that man, you, I don't even know where you'd start to straighten yourself out.

  • I could never dislike my Children's like, yeah, Well, those are the people who produce the most monsters.

  • Children too, I can tell you that.

  • So So And then there's this idea that young had which I really love, which is the idea of the shadow and you know it.

  • It kind of got pop psychology and trendy, sort of among the new Age types too.

  • But one thing I can tell you about Carl Young is no matter what else someone might say about him, he is absolutely not New Agey.

  • If you read Karl Young and you understand him and you're not terrified, right to the depths of your soul, you haven't understood a damn thing you've read.

  • And one of the things that you said about the shadow, which is the dark side of humanity the dark side of each individual was that its roots reached all the way to hell.

  • And he meant something.

  • He meant something very specific, both metaphysical and practical.

  • By that, the metaphysical element was he meant hell, literally and metaphysically.

  • But he also meant the more proximal kinds of hell.

  • And so what he meant was that if you we're able to understand your dark side, then you would see in yourself a reflection of the behavior that was that was present at all Schwitz, for example, and that the reason that people don't take the dark side of themselves seriously at all, even confront the fact that it exists is because no one wants to see that reflected within them.

  • And no wonder, like it's it's out.

  • It's absolutely no wonder you will also believe that that confrontation with the Shadow was an inevitable barrier to enlightenment.

  • That there was no you know, Joseph Campbell, who is a popularizer of young to some degree, has become well known for saying, Follow your bliss and and and you know, Campbell learned virtually everything you knew from young but young.

  • That isn't what Young said.

  • That all, he said, pursue what's meaningful and you'll encounter that which you least want to encounter.

  • And that's well, that's the dragon, right?

  • That's the dragon that hoards gold, for example.

  • And the dragon is also something that lives inside you, and it's not something that you take the encounter with lightly.

  • They're very old stories about this Egyptian story about the God Horace, who was the Egyptian savior in some sense, and when he encountered evil even though he was a god.

  • He lost an eye in the battle.

  • And so that's That's the famous Egyptian eye you know that everyone still knows about.

  • That's the eye of Horace that was torn out by Seth, who's the precursor to Satan.

  • And so and so it's it's It's no joke that it's no joke back to Children.

  • See, I kind of knew this when I had my kids.

  • I had already undergone that to some degree and understood what it meant to be a bad person, a terrible person.

  • And one of the things I knew that was that that manifested itself in families all the time.

  • Tyrannical father, overprotective mother, more rarely overprotective.

  • Mother, tyrannical, overprotective father, tyrannical mother.

  • It's usually the other way around and the terrible, pathological familial drama that Freud made much of in the early 20th century.

  • I'd seen that in many, many situations, dismal, brutal, awful.

  • And I've seen parents punish their Children, and you can also take a page from nature if you really want to punish your Children or anyone else.

  • If you have someone you're interested in punishing, including yourself, you don't you know what ever punish someone you really want to punish for doing something wrong, because that's actually a bit of a relief to them.

  • You know, that's the theme of Dostoyevsky's crime and punishment.

  • The murderer gets away with it.

  • It's a relief to him when he gets caught.

  • It's like, No, If you really want to punish someone, you wait till they do something good.

  • Then you punish them because that'll teach them that's you.

  • Maximize the hurt that where you decrease the probability that they'll ever do anything good again.

  • And I'll tell you, man, if you want to have a good relationship with someone, that's one thing you don't do.

  • You open your bloody eyes, and if they do something that you would like them to do again than you tell them how much you appreciated the fact that that happened and you hope that it replicates, you know, you see, that's it.

  • If there's one thing you can take away from tonight's lecture, that's that's an extraordinarily useful thing to know watch.

  • And when people do something that they should doom or off, say, Look, I saw that you did this specific thing I saw that it took some effort.

  • Here's what it meant.

  • Here's Here's how I observed.

  • It's like keep that up and, man, if you love someone, you do that to them.

  • That's that's encouragement.

  • That's such a great thing.

  • So anyways, back to Children so already knew that I was pretty decent monster by the time I had kids and I thought, Well, my kid, my kid's little, you know, like a baby, your two year olds like I'm horrible monster and so that there's a nun Evil power problem here.

  • I better not let that child do anything.

  • That really makes me angry, you know?

  • Now you hear Now and then you hear about something horrible that happens.

  • When I was in Boston years ago, I read about a woman who plunged her two year old daughter's arms into boiling water.

  • You think, well, how in the world could not happen?

  • It's like, Well, you know, she's probably hung over.

  • It's probably just lost her job.

  • She's probably desperate in six different ways.

  • She probably didn't have any decent discipline at disciplinary strategies for Children.

  • She probably didn't have anyone helping her.

  • She was bitter and resentful and angry, and the child misbehaved at exactly the wrong moment and like you're gonna be around your Children a lot.

  • And so you might wanna have it so that they don't misbehave at exactly the wrong moment, because all it all hell could break loose if they can.

  • And I didn't want that to happen.

  • So and I knew that it was easy for people to hate their Children even though they mouth the words that they love the ball all the time.

  • I saw very little evidence of that many situations.

  • And so one of the things you know, you have a natural affinity for Children and even more maybe a more powerful natural affinity for your own Children.

  • So that's a good start.

  • But you don't want to set them up as an enemy against you.

  • You don't want to allow them to engage in the kind of hierarchical challenge that makes you irritable and resentful.

  • That's not a good idea.

  • And if the things they do make you dislike them, the probability that they will make other people dislike them is extraordinarily high.

  • And so you can consult your own irritability and you can say, Look, kid, I used to tell my kids this, you know, when they were three or four.

  • It's a look.

  • I'm not a very good mood and I'm likely to be unreasonable.

  • So it would be best if you go in your room and play for a while.

  • It's like I like you, man.

  • You're a great kid, But get the hell outta here for a while, you know?

  • And they were fine without we train them already at that point, to be able to go play by themselves in the room, you know, which is something that kids should be able to do anyways.

  • But But you need to know what sort of monster you are if you're gonna be a good parent.

  • And if you think Oh, I'm not a monster is like Oh, yes, you are.

  • You're just an unbelievably unconscious monster.

  • And that's actually the worst kind.

  • So and then the other thing about that chapter is there's an idea in it, and it's an idea that I thinks well supported by the relevant literature, which is that your fundamental job as a parent, especially if a child from 0 to 4 is to make that child eminently desirable socially.

  • So what?

  • You're you're a successful parent.

  • If when your child is four, all sorts of other Children want to play with him or her.

  • That's really the That's like If you want one marker of whether or not you've been successful, that's it.

  • Now some Children are a lot harder to get along with another's, and some Children have a harder time playing.

  • And so I'm not saying that every parent who has a child that isn't popular at four is at fault for that. 00:46:01.37

tonight's talk.

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12條生活規則。倫敦:如何學院 (12 Rules for Life: London: How To Academy)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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