Jordan Peterson: Sacrifice Your Present for the Future

[Music] I see that in resentful men all the time. They're very antipathetic towards women. And they blame their misery and resentment on the fact that women won't have anything to do with them. While the women are making themselves conscious for not being all they should be. Because the women think, "Why should I bother with you if you're not the embodiment of the Spirit that will move into the unknown and face the Leviathan?" Which is exactly what she should be saying. And you're thinking, "Well, I don't want to have anything to do with that, but I'd like women to like me anyway." It's just like, "Well, good luck with that." So that doesn't work out. And that's exactly what happens when God finds out that Adam and Eve have become self-conscious. One of the first things he says is, "Jigs up now, man. You're going to be working forever. Toiling forever. It's your destiny. There's no escaping from it." Well, human beings work. What does that mean? They sacrifice the present for the future. And that's partly, as soon as this happens, like the next story, which is Canaanable, you see the motif of sacrifice emerge. Right? That story circulates around the motif of sacrifice. Sacrifice the present for the future. Well, what's the price you pay? You don't get the present. That's a big price, right? Because what you do is what you're doing essentially is you're taking all the potential suffering of the future and putting it into the present all the time. Well, so what happens? Well, maybe you live longer and you live healthier, but you're not without the burden that that puts on you. There's very little difference between self-consciousness and shame. In fact, if you do psychometric analysis of the state of self-consciousness, it loads with neuroticism. So it loads with anxiety and emotional pain. So to become self-conscious, what does it mean to become self-conscious? It means you become aware of one way of thinking about it, is you become aware of your vulnerability, or another is that you become aware of your insufficiency. Okay, so let's say that you're standing up in front of a crowd talking and you become self-conscious. What happens? Well, first of all, you can't talk anymore. The second is he kind of fall inside. The third is you feel ashamed and the fourth is that you retreat and you look down. So it's a low status operation and it's associated with heightened anxiety. And so then you might say, "Well, why would you become self-conscious before a crowd?" Well, the answer is they can see you, right? And they can judge you. And you can make an error in front of them and you can make a fool of yourself. So they put you down that you can display yourself in a manner that ratchets you down the dominance hierarchy. That's to become self-conscious. And so, well, at least you have the advantage of being covered up in front of the crowd. But let's say all of a sudden you're stripped of your clothes. So what's the problem with that? Well, all of your insufficiencies, let's say, are on painful display. You can be evaluated by everyone. But even more importantly than that, if possible, is that clothes actually protect the most vulnerable parts of you. Human beings are upright animals, right? We're very strange animals. You take a cat or a dog. They're basically armored. The part of them that you see, their back is heavily armored, heavily protected. Human beings stretched upright. And so the softest parts of us are there for display. Well, what would you want to be king? You could say, king of the world or king of your own soul. What do you want to subordinate yourself to? How about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that with people? There's no nobler vision than that. And I don't see that it's merely arbitrary. And so, and it's not merely arbitrary too, because if you do that, to the degree that you do that. Assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt, you will be successful. It will actually aid you practically. You'll rise up above men. You'll be selected by women. You'll be admirable. You'll be valued. And you know that, because if you look at the people that you admire and value, again, unless you've taken a detour into dark places, and are possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for destruction, you just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what's common across them and draw your own conclusions. And you can ask yourself too, when you're torturing yourself with your conscience, because you're not doing what you should be and you know it, what is it that you're torturing yourself in relationship to? You have a vision of your own ideal. And you torment yourself if you're not matching it. What's the ideal? Well, you don't know, right? It's kind of in coherent and poorly articulated, but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to manifest itself and make itself known to you. Who's more self-conscious? Women are men. And the answer to that is, women are more self-conscious than men. And even further, you might say that women taught men to be self-conscious. And I believe that to be the case, maybe babies taught women to be self-conscious, but women taught men to be self-conscious. And they still teach them that all the time. Because there's nothing that makes a man more self-conscious than to be rejected by a woman that he desires. So the woman is always offering self-consciousness to men. And it isn't necessarily a gift that they exactly appreciate. And that motif, of course, runs through the Adam and Eve story centrally. Because Eve is damned forever in some sense for making out himself conscious. Well, he didn't want to be self-conscious. Things were pretty good when his eyes were closed and he was wandering around, not worrying about whether he was naked or not. Well, the women became self-conscious. Why? Because of snakes. Well, maybe, right? Maybe that's exactly what happened, you know? So you imagine we're being preyed upon for millions of years by predatory reptiles, and we become more and more alert to threat, and more and more alert to threat. And then one day, we get so alert to threat that we can see threat lurking in the future. And then all of a sudden, we become aware of the future, and then we become aware of death, and then we're really self-conscious. But it's pretty good if you want to keep the snakes down, which we've been doing quite successfully ever since then. But it's a big price to pay. We got so damn sensitive to threat that we were finally able to conceive the ultimate threat, not proximal threats, but the fact of threat itself and the fact of mortality itself, and the fact of finitude itself. And maybe women learned that because they become painfully aware of the mortal limitations of their infants first, right? This small thing could die, could end, and it'll certainly as an object of predation. And the problem again for men with being allied with women and infants is that it also heightens their self-consciousness because you're a lot tougher and more indomitable, say, if there's just you, but as soon as you have a wife, say, and then you also have an infant, well, all the burden of their self-consciousness and their vulnerability is placed upon you. Well, it's a hell of a bargain. Well, why did men accept the bargain? Well, it's partly because women stood in front of them offering them fruit, right? Well, part of the price that the men paid for that was to wake the hell up. Well, who the hell wants that? It's a lot more calming to remain asleep with no knowledge of the sort of burden of mortality that you would bear if you became self-conscious. So fine. So now they're done with it. They are the snake and the fruit woke them up and they can see and the scales drop from their eyes. And so we can really see, well, so what does that mean? Half our brain is visual, is devoted to visual processing. So as long as our eyes got better, our brain got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, what happens when it gets big enough? Well, not only can you see, you can met a sea as you can start to see into the future. Well, that's exactly what happened to us. Not only could we see with our eyes, we could see with our imagination. And our imagination is, you can see with your eyes closed, right? Close your eyes, bring up a vision. You can imagine the future. Well, what do you see? You're seeing a potential future with your eyes closed. The circuitry is there. Once it's developed, you can use it to imagine. You can project your vision into places that don't even exist. And you can start to conceptualize the future. What happens when you conceptualize the future? Well, this is a, I'm spoiling the punch line. You have to work because you can see the future coming. You think, oh, the future's coming. It isn't just the present anymore. I don't have to just worry about whether or not I'm hungry right now. I'm going to have to worry about whether I'm hungry tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and for me, and for my wife, and for my child, and for the community. It's like you can forget about your day-to-day existence and paradise at that point. There's no evidence that people in industrialized societies are happier than people in non-industrialized societies. In fact, quite the contrary. We're less happy. Why? Well, because we fully and constantly bear the burden of the future. Well, that's good because we don't die and we live maybe 30 years longer, and we have fewer horrible diseases and all of that. But that doesn't mean it's any picnic. You have to carry that along with you wherever you go. That's the burden of self-consciousness. Every social animal, and even many animals who aren't social, are embedded in a dominant hierarchy. The dominant hierarchy has a structure. We couldn't call it a dominant hierarchy. Dominant's hierarchy A, B, C, D, E, thousands of them across thousands of years. You extract out from all of them what's central to all of them. That's the pyramid of value. What's the question do you need answered about the pyramid of value? What's at the top? Because that's the ideal. That's the eye at the top of the pyramid or the golden booty in the lotus. It's the same thing. It's the same thing as the crucifix paradoxically enough. And that has to do. It has to do with something like the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcending. of suffering. It's something like that. These are not arbitrary ideas. They're deeply, that's my case. Anyways, they're deeply, deeply, deeply rooted in biology and culture. They're as deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology. And we already know the answer to that. The dominance hierarchy has been around for 350 million years. It's a long time. You don't get to just brush that off and say, "Well, morality is some sort of second order cognitive problem." It's like, "No, it's not." I can tell you something about its instantiation in your nervous system. You have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where you are in terms of your status. And it bloody well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions. So if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy, barely clinging on to the world, everything overwhelms you. And that's because you're damn near dead. And so everything should overwhelm you. You've got no extra resources. Any more threat, you're a sunk. So you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe also impulsive so that you grab well the grabbing is good. And if you're near the top in the dominance hierarchy, your counter tells you that, then your serotonin levels go up, you're less sensitive to negative emotion, you're less impulsive, you live longer, like everything works in your favor. Your immune system functions better and you're oriented at least to some degree towards the medium and long term future. And you can afford that because all hell isn't breaking loose around you all the time. And so then the question is, is there a way of being that increases the probability that you're going to move up dominance hierarchies? Well, that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition unless you think that it's completely arbitrary and random and that you can think that if you want, but I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever. I mean, we certainly have even for sexual selection, we impose criteria. They're not random and arbitrary. This is the dominance hierarchy idea. Domines hierarchy set themselves up as a matter of course. They're the standard way that animals organize themselves in a territory. Well, okay, human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies since we became self-aware thinking, what the hell are we up to? What the hell are we up to? What's, and there's a question that lurks in there, what constitutes acceptable power? What constitutes acceptable sovereignty? Who should lead? Who should rule? What should be at the top? Well, we talked about that. The Mesopotamian's figured that out. Speech and vision, that's Marduk. Speech, vision and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown. That's what should rule. Well, what's that an arbitrary idea or is that a great idea? How could it be any other way? Well, that's what human beings are like. And I don't think that you can read the Mesopotamian story and understand the reference, which isn't an easy thing to do, and fail to draw that conclusion. Marduk has eyes all the way around his head. He speaks magic words. He goes off to fight time out, the dragon of chaos. Well, what's that? That's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown. Well, is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you would presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective? Were prey animals, were predators? We'd be threatened by reptiles forever. Why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in the dark forest or the water as a representative of the unknown? Why wouldn't we harness that circuitry? We already have it at hand, and even more to the point, how could we do anything else? It makes perfect sense. There is evidence that more disagreeable people are more likely to be successful as managers. Now, why? Well, Bodro, who wrote a paper called "Effects of Personality on Executive Career Success," said the following. "Agreobleness associates with being trusting, submissive, and compliant, which could be perceived as naivete, docility, and attendancy to follow rather than lead." All right, so that's his opinion. But then, here's what he measured. So these are "Effects of big five traits on career success." Now, career success can obviously be defined a number of ways. Could be career satisfaction, or could be like external markers of career success, and they did both. So we're going to look at direct, because that's the external sort of objective markers. What you see is that if you're high in neuroticism, that's not so good for how much money you make. There's a negative correlation of 0.3, which by the way, that's a big correlation. So, you'll hear people say that 0.5 is a large correlation, and 0.3 is moderate, and 0.2 is small, and that's wrong. That was clarified four or five years ago. I'll get the paper for you. I can't remember. It was an American psychologist, but the guy who wrote the paper, what he did was he looked at a whole bunch of social science studies and then calculated how frequently different effect sizes showed up, and what he found was that 0.5 was unbelievably large. That 5% of social science studies ever got a correlation of 0.5. It's like if you get a correlation of 0.5 in your study, you've either made a dramatic error, or you've replicated something that's already well-known, or you're in science, because it never happens. 0.3, that's a pretty good correlation. So, so the fact that neuroticism is negatively correlated with how much money you make, how likely you are to ascend, and then how close you are to being CEO, obviously the effect size decrease. So, neuroticism is also sorry, extraversion is a reasonable predictor only of how much you're ascending, and it's pretty small. Openness has a correlation with how much money you make, but that's probably because openness is highly associated with intelligence. So, openness is not a good marker for intelligence, IQ tests are much better markers. So, that's an attenuated relationship, but then you look at a greal-ness. It's negative 0.32 in total, negative 0.24 for direct in terms of how much money you make. So, you know, that's an interesting thing because one of the things that determines how much money you make is how willing you are to say no, right? Because if you're negotiating with someone, then the only thing you have at your back is your ability to say no and to push it or even to ask for a raise. And you know, pushing people are much more likely to ask for a raise, and of course those who ask for a raise are much more likely to get it. So, the guys who are hard to get along with, because most of the people who are hard to get along with are guys, are more likely to be paid more. They're more likely to ascend the corporate ladder. They're more likely to be close to the CEO in terms of proximity. And they're even more likely to be rated as employable. It's funny, because you'd think that, you know, if you're agreeable and easy to get along with and all that, that people would be more likely to rate you as a suitable employee, but that isn't right. That's the opposite seems to happen. So, disagreeable extroverts are narcissists, and there's some evidence that you can derive from this data, you know, because there's always this talk about disagreeable extroverts are narcissists being more likely to rise up to CEO level. And, you know, there is some evidence for that, at least in so far as agreeableness is a negative predictor of doing such. All right, so one of the things we've just found is that one of the predictors for ascendancy and proximity to a high status position is low agreeableness. Now, the next thing you might think about is, well, what role does that play in terms of the factors that men and women find attractive at each other? So, you might say, well, what do you want to mate if you're a woman, you might say, well, you know, you want someone who's kind and loving and forgiving and empathic, and those are all good things, but it isn't necessarily the case that the empirical studies show that that's what drives mate selection. So, we could look, this is the interesting study. So, it's a few years old, thousand French Canadian respondents, 433 males and 700 females. And so, here are the variables. One is possession of resources, it's a composite index composed of occupational prestige, income and education. And then the other variables acquisition of partners, sexual partners, that is, number of lifetime and proceeding year sexual partners, lifetime occurrence of simultaneous partners, which is yes or no variable, and lifetime frequency of simultaneous partners, one to five, with five being very often. Here's the assumption, you can, you know, decide for yourself, if you think this is a warranted assumption. The number of partners, a member of sex A, acquires, is taken as an index of how often this individual is chosen by sex B. So, that's an indication of reproductive fitness, desirability, at least as assessed by members of the opposite sex, who you would think would be the logical judges for that sort of thing. Male criteria, 166 unattached women ages 25 to 50. Correlation between fertility rates and number of partners in previous year equals point 9-4. Males choose fertility, indicators, beauty, waste to hip ratio, youthful appearance, and neautinous facial features. Neautinous means there's a tendency among animals as they evolve. to increasingly look more in their adult stages like their juvenile forms. So here's an example. If you look at the skull of a baby chimpanzee, it looks almost exactly like the skull of an adult human. So what's happened is we've, as adults, we're more like baby chimpanzees than the adult chimpanzees are. We've maintained a lot of our juvenile characteristics, playfulness, the ability to continue to learn, plasticity, all those things. There's a preference in objective beauty analysis, say, facial features for men to prefer more neotenous female faces. So, and you can tell that if you look at pictures of models, they generally have relatively small noses, relatively big eyes. The sort of things that are associated with cute and cute actually is a pretty identifiable category. Most of the things that people find cute have large eyes, and relatively, the rest of their facial features are relatively small. There's other things that are associated with cute, that aren't necessarily associated with sexual attractiveness because cute things also have sort of random movements like baby-like movements. And so the things that people, and relatively short arms and just think of a teddy bear. So anyways, those are the male criteria. Agreeableness is one of the five dimensions of the big five. We all know that. And it can be broken down into these two aspects, compassion and politeness. And so you can kind of figure out how agreeable you are by looking at these items. They're all positively scored for the sake of simplicity. So if you intensely feel others' emotions, if you're always inquiring about how others are doing, and you actually care, rather than doing it for the sake of show, if you're capable of sympathizing with other people, if you respect authority, if you don't like to seem or be pushy and you don't like to impose your will on others, then you're an agreeable person. And a disagreeable person or antagonistic person, obviously, is the opposite of that. So they don't feel people's emotions very profoundly. They're not really all that concerned automatically about how other people are feeling. And they're not that sympathetic. It's funny because in my clinical practice, I can tell the difference between the agreeable people and the non-agreable people, because when the agreeable people come and they have a cup of coffee, they always bring me one. But when the disagreeable people show up and have a cup of coffee, they only bring a cup of coffee for themselves. So it's quite comical, actually. So now you might think that-- because what would you say? Our society is, at the moment, tilted towards regarding agreeableness as a virtue, because you should be kind of a virtue, and you should be empathetic, and you should be compassionate, and all those sorts of things. But our research-- this isn't published yet, because it's complicated to communicate. And we haven't figured out how to do it yet. But what we've found is that if you push any of the traits too far, they fall off a cliff, fundamentally. So if you get too agreeable, then you're dependent, and you can't make decisions and so on. And maybe you're kind of a Freudian-eat-a-poel mother, too, so concerned with your child's well-being that you can't-- you're not harsh enough to send them outside, or make them do anything they don't want to do, because it might upset them. And so that's not so good. And then if you're too disagreeable, while I already said what that was like, if you take anti-social people who are in prison, they're aggressive and violent. And the criminal types and their predatory are low in agreeableness. So you can see how that's a bad thing. But then in the middle range, it gets more complicated, because then agreeableness, where you're located on the normal distribution, how good that is depends to some degree on what it is that you are going to do. So one of the ways to think about how to maximize your success in life is to attempt to match your personality to the environment. You might think that if how you raised your children mattered, then children who were raised well would be more similar than children who were raised badly, because that would reflect the effect of your parenting. So you've done a good job as a parent, so your children are more similar, whereas someone who just ignored them, those children are different. But that's actually the opposite of what happens, is that the children that are neglected are more similar, and the children who are attended to well are more different. And the reason for that, I think, is the same reason that we see more pronounced differences in egalitarian societies, which is if you care for your children, it means that you make a very individual relationship with each of them. So you're not necessarily using the same strategies for each child, unless you think of them as meta-strategies, and like a meta-strategie might be, well, I get to know you, and I get to know you, and because you're different people, I react differently to you. And what constitutes my philosophy of parenting would be act differently towards the children's differences. And so maybe if you're particularly good at that, your children turn out maximally different from one another. And that's because you're allowing their genetic differences to manifest themselves, you're not oppressing them, and trying to cram them into the little box that you think that they should fit in. Now, the downside of that is that you're going to get differences, and some of them might be quite surprising to you. [BLANK_AUDIO]