Jordan B. Peterson - The Psychology of Identity

so I'm gonna talk to you about identity whenever I talked to my son about what I should talk about whatever I'm nervous about giving a presentation and I was definitely nervous about this one I can tell you he always says just make sure you talk about what you know and that's great advice you know like everyone should follow that so I'm gonna try to talk about what I know and I know I know something about identity anyways and and I'm very interested in helping people understand what identity means and then also maybe strengthening their identity

because I can't really think of anything better than you could that you can possibly do than that and I think in some sense it's the answer to all the problems that plague us let's say so I'm gonna tell you a story about how I came to view the things that how I came to understand the things that that I have come to understand back in the late mid to late 1970s when the Cold War was raging and when the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union was arrayed in its full force against the equally dangerous nuclear

arsenal of the West I had a series of very apocalyptic nightmares and I don't really know why it was so obsessed with the Cold War I mean it's not like I was alone everybody was this obsessed with it to some degree it was a cold war after all and I couldn't understand when we would arm ourselves to the teeth and risk the destruction of everything just to buttress what we believed in it didn't seem that the potential sacrifice was worth was worth the gain so I started to study belief systems from a psychological perspective I

was curious about what function they played what role they served and I was also interested in something else which I didn't realize at the time was at the core of what I later understood as the postmodern conundrum the postmodern conundrum is roughly the fact that the world is a very complicated place and there are a very large number of ways to interpret it and the postmodern conclusion is because there are an indefinitely large number of ways to interpret the world that no one solution is in any real sense preferable to any other and that solutions

are imposed by power when I was thinking about the Cold War I was wondering about why it was occurring and then I was wondering at the same time about the fact that these two opposed belief systems had emerged and I thought well is this war this thing we're willing to put everything to the torch for is it merely a matter of opinion is it the fact that human nature is infinitely malleable and you can generate any number of axiomatic systems or any number of games that people are all capable of playing equally and that it's

merely a matter of arbitrary decision which one gets played or is there something deeper going on is there a war of is there a war of wrong against right and and the corollary I suppose of that is there is there such a thing as wrong or right and if there is such a thing as wrong or right and if the war is about that then who's wrong and why and who's right and why and so I started to dig into what I would regard as the metaphysical substrate of belief and I came to understand at

least in part that the belief systems that we inhabit are like stories story is a description of how a person went from one place to another place if it's a comedy it's a better place if it's a tragedy it's a worth worse place but in any case it's a story about how to go from one place to another place and one of the things that you begin to understand if you study stories is that there are worse stories and better stories they're certainly worse stories and better stories to live out so for example I would

say most people if they made a conscious choice would rather live in a comedy than a tragedy they might not feel the same way about other people they might condemn them to a tragedy but they would pick comedy perhaps so then I started to try to pick apart to tease apart the story that the West lived by and I came at it from I would say two very different perspectives one was essentially literary it was literary in the same way that site.the psychoanalysts were literary theorists the psychoanalysts Freud and Jung in particular were very interested

in the large-scale structures of the narratives of human life and Freud was particularly interested in the narrative of the family you know he thought that the primary narrative was the narrative of the family and that was in some sense the emergence of the autonomous individual from his or her initial dependent State and Freudian psychoanalytic theory is full of observations about how that can go terribly wrong particularly in those situations where families are let's say overprotective or rife with unresolved conflict and young for his part broadened his analysis of the stories that people lived by outside

the realm of the family into the realm of the literary and metaphysical Jung was a student of mythology religious and religion and mythology and from Jung I learned that that stories contained a certain kind of truth and that great stories contain great truths and they're not truths like scientific theories are true they're their truths like great literature is true their truths like Dostoyevsky is true or their truths like Tolstoy is true or their truths like the fundamental mythological stories that oriented culture are true they're true in ways that we know but don't understand at the

same time that I was studying this I was also reading Nietzsche and Nietzsche of course famously proclaimed in the late 1800s that God was dead and people who regard themselves as acolytes of Nietzsche or maybe as admirers of Nietzsche who'd never read him claimed or assumed that he said that in some triumphal and triumphalist tone because Nietzsche in some sense did style himself at least a severe critic of Christianity but nothing could be farther from the truth Nietzsche said that God was dead and that we had killed him and that we'd never find enough water

to wash away the blood and that's not a triumphalist Proclamation and he said at approximately the same time that the consequence of the death of God would be that European civilization would vacillate between the nihilism and totalitarianism and that a hundred million people would die as a consequence in the 20th century that's a hell of a prediction for someone back in basically the oak in the mid 1860s nature you didn't live very long was looking for a way out of that conundrum being neither a fan of nihilism nor a fan of totalitarianism and he thought

that human beings would have to metamorph metamorphosize into creatures that could determine their own values and that's where Carl Jung encountered Nietzsche essentially because Jung was also a student of Nietzsche and a deep student of Nietzsche but because Jung have been influenced by Freud who is the great Discoverer of unconscious mechanisms in the human mind he understood that it wasn't possible for human beings to create their own values and the reason for that was that we weren't neither our own masters nor our own slaves our nature was not infinitely malleable we could not simply tell

ourselves what to do and even if we did we would not simply listen that you have a nature that everyone has a nature every human being has a nature with which they must contend that's what took the Freudians into the study of the end and that's what took the Jung Eun's into the study of the collective unconscious and then into the study of literature and mythology but I found that very compelling and very interesting Jung believed that because the gods had disappeared from the outside world that they would have to read in the inside world

that's not an easy statement to understand but it's it's a statement that's true even though it's not easy to understand at the same time I was reading a lot of straight psychology especially the animal behavioral literature the neuroscience literature neuroscience of cognition neuroscience of emotion neuroscience of motivation and then I saw this alliance between the psychoanalytic Jungian worldview and the more strict scientific worldview because it turns out that if you carefully attend to biology and animal behavior you also find out that human beings have a nature and that the nature is very and that animals

have a nature and that the nature that that there's a nature that human beings share with animals as well there's a researcher in the Netherlands Fran's Duvall who's done great work with primates laying out the biological emergence of the idea of morality among chimpanzees brilliant work and this was very exciting to me because remember I was trying to determine whether or not the war between the west and the collectivists let's say was merely a matter of opinion or whether there was a something right somewhere that someone had well I started to learn from Jung and

the animal behaviorists in the neuroscientists that and also from one other source from Jean Piaget who was a developmental psychologist who studied the origin of morality and children and who in his way was attempting to sew up the gap between science and religion that was Piaget s the most famous developmental psychologist who ever lived the most famous child psychologist that was his self description of what of what he was doing he was trying to understand how to rectify the gap between science and religion and so there were these three sources that I could draw from

there was the developmental literature there was the psychoanalytic / literary literature and there was the straight biological literature and they're all pointing to the same direction they're saying that this human living creatures have a nature and human beings have a nature and then that nature finds its expression in stories and why is that well it's because we watch ourselves express our nature and then we map that expression in drama and so we capture ourselves in drama and we capture ourselves in drama before we understand who we are and that means that in drama there is

wisdom that we don't understand and then over centuries over thousands of years we start to articulate that wisdom and it becomes explicit and then we start to philosophize with what's become explicit and if we're fortunate then what we've philosophized and what we've made articulate and what we've dramatized and what we've acted out and what's at the base of our social and biological nature are all the same thing and then we've got it right and that's what we've done in the West you know one of the things I was thinking about was this idea that the

people there's two ideas that people talk about which I have a certain amount of sympathy for one is that you should have pride in your culture I understand the impetus for that I told you how I feel when I come to Europe like I can hardly stand it really I really mean that the aesthetic experience of being in the great cities of Europe is is overwhelming and I think it's because I do have a gift for perceiving the miraculous I think it's a miracle when the lights are on and the reason for that is that

it is a miracle when the lights are on because it is not the natural state of the lights to beyond right the natural state of things is to fall apart and not to work and yet they work and they work all the time and our great societies work and they work magnificently and that doesn't mean they're perfect but nothing is perfect and you don't throw away the wheat with the chaff I'm gonna tell you another story there's this psychologist named Jacques panksepp he just died about a year ago he wrote a book called affective neuroscience

it's a great book it's a book about emotion about the neurological basis of emotion and panksepp was kind of a romantic the scientists who involved themselves with the scientific study of emotion tend to be romantic types interestingly enough and he was a whimsical scientist in many ways he he discovered the play circuit he discovered the mammalian play circuit it turns out that we have a biological system that's that's that's independent neurologically predicated that does nothing but mediate play which I thought was very interesting because of my interest in Jean Piaget who believed that the morality

of children and the morality of adults emerged out of the games that we learned to play as children and banks have also discovered that you know if you if you take rat pups away from their mother and you feed them and you give them water and shelter they die human infants are the same by the way they have to be touched they have to be massaged they have to be cuddled they have to be interacted with or their gastrointestinal system shut down and they die and you can stop that from happening with rats if you

just tickle them with the end of a pencil eraser a little massage and then he found out that they giggled if they if you did that and no one knew that because they do it ultrasonically like that and so you have to record it and slow it down and so panksepp discovered that rat pups laugh and you might think who the hell cares about that but that's not the right way of looking at things like because he was looking at a continuity in our nature that was tremendously deep that went way back down into the

animal kingdom he also discovered this if you take to juvenile routes then you put them in a in a pen they will spontaneously wrestle they'll engage in rough-and-tumble play and if one of the routes is ten percent bigger than the other then the 10% bigger rat will pin the little route and then you think well that's a dominance challenge and the big rat wins end of story but it's not the end of the story and here's why it's because most games don't only occur once most games are played many many many many many times so

panksepp decided that he would pair the rats the same two rats multiple times in play contests and so the first thing he found out was that once the big rat had played pin the little rat the little rat had to ask the big route to play that was his role in the next encounter the little rat would look playful like a dog and then the big rat would pounce on him and they would tussle around and then he found that if the big rat didn't let the little rat win 30% of the time across repeated

encounters then the little rat would stop asking the big rat to play and I read that it just knocked me off my chair because what I realized was that panksepp had put his foot on his finger on the emergence of morality the same kind of morality that jean piaget had observed emerging in children Piaget emerged that observed that sophisticated children like to play games that other people like to play that's kind of what you tell your kids when they're playing a game like soccer or hockey you say it doesn't matter whether you win or lose

it matters how you play the game and really what you're telling your children is life isn't a game life is a series of games and the rules that govern playing the series of the game the series of games isn't the same as the rule that governs playing a single game and you don't want to be the winner of a single game you want to be the winner of the series of games and if you want to be the winner of the series of games then you have to conduct yourself in a certain manner and that's

not arbitrary it's so far from arbitrary that it even governs the behavior of rats it's not sociological it's not learned it's not whim it's not arbitrary it's not opinion it's an emergent property it emerged on morality is an emergent property that emerges across a sequence of iterated voluntary games now then you might ask yourself how do you have to conduct yourself if you're going to be the person that emerges victorious across an indefinite sequence of games and the answer to that is well like the big rat you have to play fair and then you might

ask yourself well if you watch people trying to play fair over a hundred and fifty thousand years and tried to infer what it looked like to play fair what would your descriptions be and the answer to that is you would describe the hero the individual hero who's positive actions are constantly represented in drama and literature and mythology in the West I believe that we have fortunately managed to articulate the principles of fair iterated play better than any society has ever managed in the past I don't believe that that's because there's anything particularly special about us

because I believe that the prince of Fairplay as I said even govern the behavior of rats but knowing this or even appreciating as a possibility puts a new twist on two ideas one is that you should be proud of your culture it's like no you shouldn't be proud of your culture you should bloody well recognize that it got some things right and that all of your good fortune is dependent on that and then you should take the utmost responsibility for continuing to play the damn game properly and you should have enough sense [Applause] and you

should have enough sense to be grateful for all the sacrifice that was made by all those people that came before you so that you could end up being the beneficiary of this eminently playable game and so and so I could say well what are the rules of the game there's an idea Genesis this is the foundational story of Western culture that being emerged from something like potential from chaos as a consequence of God's use of language the logos logos is the deepest idea of the West and it means something like clear competent truthful communicative endeavor

so there's an idea in Genesis that that's the spirit that God used to bring forth order from chaos at the beginning of time with God employed the logos to extract order out of being he 'extra out of chaos he extracted habitable order and then pronounced that it was good and at the same time when God made human beings he pronounced them made in the image of God which means that which means that human beings have the capacity that logos light capacity to speak habitable order into being out of chaotic potential and the deep idea is

that if you do that truthfully then what you bring forth is good that's a lied very tightly with the principle of fair play it's easy to fare it's easy to play fair with someone who tells you the truth you can communicate with them you can trust them you can take risks with them you can cooperate with them you can negotiate with them and you can jointly engage in the endeavor to bring forth the habitable order that is good from the chaos of potential when we insist that the immigrants who come to our countries to become

beneficiaries of the game that we're playing follow the rules we are not merely saying we have a culture you have a culture you're in our culture so you should follow our rules what we're saying instead is we have inherited a culture and it seems to work and it works well enough so that we're happy to be here and many people would like to be and if you want to come to our culture and be a beneficiary of the game then you have to abide by the rules that produce the game we're not saying that you

have to do it because it's ours or because we're proud of it or because in some sense we're right as individuals or even as a culture we're saying it because we've been fortunate to enough to observe what the rules that make a functional society actually are and sensible enough thank God most of the time to follow them well enough so that there are a few countries on the planet that aren't absolute pits of catastrophe now I didn't know what to say about immigration when I decided to do this talk but I don't think it matters

because there are many complex things that can be said about immigration about many of the problems that face us but there's a Medic question which is not how do you solve a difficult question but how do you solve the set of all possible difficult questions and the answer to that is quite straightforward speak the truth and play fair and that works and so I've been communicating that as diligently as I can for the last three decades predicated on my observation that we got some things right that we should do better with it even and that

if we transformed ourselves each and every one into better people predicated on the observation of that core identity that we would then become collectively the sort of people who could probably solve any problem that was put to them no matter what its magnitude and so what I was hoping to do today to set off this discussion about identity and immigration in Europe in the 21st century is to say be the sort of people that can generate the proper solutions and then perhaps the solutions will arise of their own accord thank you [Applause]