In the future authoring program, which is the one we've done the most research on, so if people do this for 90 minutes badly before they go to college, it'll decrease the probability they'll drop out in the first year by 50%. That's amazing. And it works particularly well for people who are most likely to drop out. So a lot of psychological interventions help the good performers do even better and don't help the bad performers that much. And why do you think it helps them?
Well, I think the good performers already have a bit of a vision and a plan. Whereas the bad performers, they're really ambivalent about what they're doing, because they don't have a plan. And we'll talk more about why this is so important. So, if you don't have a reason to do something, and then a reason not to do it comes up, well then you'll just not do it, because not doing things is real easy. You can just sit there and not do things all day.
Doing things takes effort, and so any resistance is likely to... It pushes back against you. And so going to college, it's like, well, why is that difficult? Well, you have to get up, you have to go to your classes, you have to do the assignments, you have to do the reading, you have to write the tests, you have to believe that this path is somehow better than any other path you could be on, and there's innumerable other paths, and that it's better in some fundamental sense than just doing nothing or playing games or... or being purely hedonic.
So there's a lot of, because it's difficult, there's a lot of obstacles. And if you don't have a reason, well, why would you overcome the obstacles? And so what happens when you do the Future Authoring Program is two things.
First of all, you construe yourself as the sort of person who could have a reason, right? Who could make a vision and impose it on the world. And how do you do that?
Well, and then second, you actually develop a vision. Okay, so the first thing the program asks you to do, and it's got a biblical element to it in some fundamental sense, although that wasn't so explicit when we first developed it, but I came to realize that later. There's a statement in the Gospels.
Christ says to his followers, Ask and you'll receive. Knock and the door will open. Seek and you'll find. And you listen to that and you think, no, no way, man, it can't be that easy. Well, it's not that easy.
Because let's think about what wanting means. You want something. You want to find, so you'll seek. How hard are you going to seek? You know, maybe you're after the Holy Grail, right?
You're after the gold in the dragon's lair, or the jewel in the toad's head. You're after something that's guarded by some monstrous figure. You're going to seek? How committed to that are you? And there's a total commitment in that in a fundamental way.
It's like you should be humble enough to be open to learning, to radical transformation, to the probability that you're really wrong if you're not finding what you're seeking, and the willingness to sacrifice virtually everything of lesser value for that goal. Otherwise, you do not want it. You did not ask. You are not seeking. You did not knock on it.
This is the development of a vision. Now, you can construe consciousness as the implementer of the vision, in the broadest sense. So, what we really confront as human beings isn't a deterministic world that runs like clockwork, that the past pushes forward in an algorithmic or deterministic manner. That isn't how the world works.
The way the world works is that We confront a horizon of possibility that's not predictable. It's somewhat predictable the way a musical piece is predictable. So it's rule-governed, but it's not predictable in a deterministic way. And it's full of possibility and potential. That's actually its nature.
It's potential in its nature. And to maximize the quality of our interaction with that potential, we have to impose a vision on it and then pursue the vision. And so... When you do the future authoring program, well that's what you're trying to do is develop a vision.
So here's the first exercise. It's like okay here's the deal. All right you get to have what you need and what you want.
Maybe even better you get to have what you need and want if you were treating yourself properly. So imagine first of all that you were treating yourself properly because you actually cared for yourself. Okay and say you don't. Yeah well you don't.
How do you help somebody? Well, you at least asked them to open the door to the possibility that maybe they could. So just imagine that you did.
Not that you are, that you could, but that you tried. Think, okay, I'm a valuable person, maybe, and if I was treating myself like I had intrinsic value, like if you were treating yourself like you were someone you loved, so you could imagine doing this for someone you actually cared about. Because most people care about someone that isn't them. So do you identify someone you care about? Well, you can, yes, you can.
Because it does tell you. Well, if you're not so good at caring for yourself, imagine someone you love and then pretend that you're bringing that attitude to bear on you with all your faults and inadequacies. I'm not being casual about this. It's hard for people to do this, right? Because we know our own flaws so deeply.
It's hard for us to take care of ourselves. But imagine that you should take care of yourself and that you could and that you did. Just imagine that. So that's opening up at least the door, right? Yeah.
And then you say, well, five years down the road. you get to have what you want and need. What is it?
And so this is a deep question. So because the question is this, your life is going to be difficult and it's going to be marked by suffering and tragedy in all sorts of different ways. Disappointment and obstacle and betrayal and the whole panoply of human catastrophe, that's absolutely 100% definitely coming your way.
Okay, so Given that and given that you want to live a life free of resentment and bitterness and premature aging and excess suffering and that you don't want to be a burden to everyone around you, what would you have to have to make carrying that weight worthwhile? That's a hard question, you know, it's like, what justifies your suffering? That isn't how am I going to be happy?
It's what justifies your suffering? Well, ask yourself. You get to have what you want if you're taking care of yourself.
What would it be? Okay, and so you write for 15 minutes about what your life might be like five years down the road if you got to have what you needed and wanted. And then we concretize it. You know, I had lots of clients and students said, well, I don't know what to do with my life.
What should I do with my life? And the first answer to that question is, that's not a very good question. Because it's like, what do you want a one line answer to what you should do with your life? Like life is everything.
And You want a one-line answer to everything. No. Bad question.
You can imagine a desirable future, but it helps to particularize it. So one of the things you might ask is, where do people find meaning? And the answer is, well, in multiple places.
Here's some places people typically find meaning. So if clients came to me and they were depressed, first of all, I'd try to find out, are you depressed? Or do you just have a terrible life or some combination of those? those two. You might ask, what's the difference?
That's a really good question. If you're depressed, you have a good life, but you're suffering. And so what would it mean that you have a good life?
Well, it means somewhat different things to different people, but you can kind of triangulate on it. Probably you have an intimate relationship, or at least you have the prospects of one. So at least you want one, and you believe that maybe you could have one if you don't have one.
And probably if you have a good life, you have one. You have some friends. They're real friends.
You have some family members, children perhaps, if not children, parents and siblings, or perhaps both, grandchildren. You're nested inside a family and your relationships with your family are desirable. You have a job or a career and so if it's a job, well then it's hard and maybe you wouldn't have picked it as a vocation.
But at least maybe you have good relationships with your co-workers and you're doing something difficult but that's actually socially productive and useful and generates an income. So that's not nothing. You're educated to the level of your intellectual capability or you have plans to do so.
You're taking care of yourself mentally and physically and you have a strategy for dealing with the realm of signal temptation, drug and alcohol abuse and sexual misbehavior and that sort of thing. And then we've added one more recently, at least conceptually, that you've adopted a certain degree of civic responsibility. You're participating in the broader community in some manner. And if you're doing none of those, my life is meaningless. Are you doing any of these?
No. Well, that's why it's meaningless. Those are the domains of meaning.
And so, if you're miserable, and you have none of those things, the first thing to do... If you're a cognitive behavioral therapist with someone, it's to say, well, how about we work on like one of these things to begin with? You know, you need some friends.
You need to get out in the dating market. You need a job or a better job. You need an educational plan.
Like, you don't have a life, so you're, of course, you're miserable because without sustaining life, without sustaining meaning, life is just tragedy. And so the lot, your lot is misery. And so anyways, we ask people to go through these eight different domains and say, okay. You can have what you want, but you have to aim at it.
Sin means to miss the mark, by the way. It means to miss the target. That's what takes you away from God, is to miss the target.
What target? Yeah! Right!
What target? Right! You gotta at least know there's a target, then you gotta try to hit it.
You know, and maybe you don't even know where the target is, but your aim isn't good. But at least you've set up a target now, and you can practice. And so, well, if you add an intimate relationship...
What would it look like? If you had some friends, how would you like those friendships to be conducted? If you had a job or a career, what could it be if you had what you wanted?
So now you're moving towards the promised land, let's say. So that's inspiring, and that produces positive emotion, because you experience positive emotion when you see yourself moving towards a valued goal. No valued goal, no positive emotion.
That's how your systems are set up psychophysiologically. On the negative front, well maybe anger and bitterness and fear stop you. Okay, so what do you do with them?
Take good stock of your sinful nature, let's say. You know what temptations you're prone to and what knock you off the beaten track and maybe you feel guilty about it You know where your weaknesses are and you probably have some idea of just what kind of hell you could inhabit if you let those Weaknesses get the upper hand. So why don't you just write about that for 15 minutes? So let's say this isn't what you could have in five years It's the pit you could dig for yourself if you decided to you know, just sit there or dig Everyone has a sense of that, you know, for some people. My temptation probably would have been alcohol.
It calmed me in social situations. It made me feel a closer kinship to people. And it was pretty good stimulant.
And so it was a really good drug for me. And I enjoyed it quite a lot. Too much. But I learned that I had better things to do. I wouldn't have stopped without better things to do.
And that's generally... And what did you mean by better things to do? Well, I was writing my book, Maps of Meaning. When I was still carousing as a graduate student, I'd started to put my life together by that point quite a bit, but I was still a party animal and very social, but I found that I couldn't think hungover.
And not only that, I couldn't handle the emotional tension of what I was dealing with intellectually. It was too... because, you know, if you're hungover, your emotions are more sensitive, especially your anxiety.
And the work I was doing was way too demanding emotionally because I was dealing with... historical atrocity and the motivations for that was just too damn dark to be dealing with hung over plus once i had written a fair bit and was editing once you've edited your work to a substantial degree you have to use finer and finer gradations of judgment to continue to improve it if you're fuzzy-minded at all if you've impaired your judgment when you edit you can make it worse not better and then i also realized that the only times I really regretted my actions was when I was drinking because it disinhibits you and that's fun that can be really fun but I'd wake up the next day and think yeah I was a little too provocative I was a little too aggressive I was a little too mean-spirited in my wit a little too egotistical or maybe more than little on all of those fronts a little careless in my choice of partner um A little uncontrolled in my social behavior in places I shouldn't have been because you know I was starting to, well I was a graduate student and a teacher by that point and I was interacting with professors. As the social milieu grew. Yeah, well it wasn't time to be drunk. That just wasn't good.
That worked in Northern Alberta to some degree in some subcultures but in those situations it just made me look like a fool. Well, it made me into a fool, not just look like one. And then when you and I got married, I didn't and we were gonna have kids I thought well I'm not drinking when I have kids. Yeah I wanted children. Yeah and you know you want to grow up at that point besides I was ready to dispense with all of that by then.
In any case so you can imagine the hell you could inhabit and then the advantage to that is people are often afraid of moving forward and no wonder but you should be way more afraid of not moving forward. And so if you get that hell behind you, it's like, well, do I want to go there? Well, I don't have the effort or the energy.
I'm not even sure that it's the right thing. It's like, well, do I want to go back there? It's like, no, definitely not that. And if you don't feel that, if you don't feel that hell, then you're not nearly as motivated as you could be. Because if you have any sense of just exactly how...
bloody dismal and dark things could get then and that's right there for you and that was one thing that i thought it was helpful i thought it was helpful when i did the future authoring to think about where i would go if i went to the wrong place why well it's just good to know how you will fall apart yeah well then you possible well and you can also ask yourself and and studying historical atrocity also Help me with that. It's like, well, do you want to be? Be a, what would you call it, a sadist.
You're bitter and resentful. You want to hurt other people? Is that where you want to end up?
You want to lie and deceive? Because that's where you end up if you lie and deceive. You want to be resentful and bitter? Because that's where you end up if you're resentful and bitter. Yeah, but sometimes, you know, people, they just don't know what to do about it.
So your program helps them to make a plan. Yeah, well, and the plan is really, look, we're visionaries, man. Human beings are visionaries, really. Well, I found when I did the self-authoring, the 15 minutes of writing that I did, the dreaming I did, when I wrote about my future and just dreamed of what it could be like if it was just what I wanted, and then outlined the goals, because you outline goals after that in the future authoring. Those things that I had identified.
...appeared in my life. Those... Yeah, well... And that was quite shocking to me.
Well, the thing is, you look at the world through a goal-directed framework. And so when you switch your goals, what appears to you in the world switches. It's mystical in a sense, but in another sense, it's just understandable. It's like, well, if I look that way, I see the TV and the couch.
And if I look this way, I see you in the chair. Well... That's not that mysterious, but what I've done is I've changed the reality that manifests itself to me just by changing the direction of my orientation. Well, we do that metaphysically as well. And so, for example, if you decide that you're going to be courageously trusting towards people when they offer you an opportunity, even though you're skeptical and timid, but you decide, no, I'm going to have some faith in people, so I'm going to be courageous and trusting, then when they open a door to you that's an opportunity, You'll think, oh, that's a door I could walk through, instead of thinking I'm moving into a trap.
And that's, it's the same reality in some sense, but the degree, the way that you're interacting with it changes, well, it can change, it can invert, it can change so radically that it barely looks like you're living in the same world. There are a lot of potential interpretations that you can validly lay on the world, and some of them are extremely positive, and they still work. And wouldn't that be lovely if you could lay an incredibly positive vision on the world in a calculating and strategic manner, not an instrumental manner, right?
Because you're aiming at something genuinely good, and that would work. And that is how the world works. One of the things I loved about my clinical practice, I loved this.
It was so good, and I miss it. We were always working, always working the best parts of me and my clients. were working together to make everything about their lives better.
And it worked. You know, like, I had lots of female clients who tripled their income in four years. They didn't even think that was possible. It's like, well, I don't make enough money. I'm barely making ends meet, single mothers.
I have no idea what to do. I don't like my job. It's like, well, let's make a plan here. You know, what do you want?
Well, I'd like to make this much money. Why don't we double that? And just because you're going to aim at something.
Some people do make more money than that, so maybe it could be you. Well, is that even possible? It's not even possible.
It's like, well, let's just assume that maybe it's possible and see what you'd have to do. Well, you've got to get your CV together. Well, it's full of holes. Okay, well, let's fix the holes. Okay, now you've got to get a plan.
Well, I'm not very good at interviews. Okay, let's practice interviewing until you're not just good at it, you're, man, you're looking forward. You know, I had clients who were in such dire situations that all I could do was really help buffer them against that.
But they were a minority. I wouldn't say more than 5% of my practice fell into that category. Everyone else, it was like just rapid improvement on all fronts, you know.
And that's such fun. And it's, there isn't anything more practical. This is the thing too, there is nothing more practical than developing a vision. It's not some pie-in-the-sky exercise.
It's without a vision you're chaotic and fragmented and hopeless and disappointed and someone can stop you just by putting up a single obstacle. You're a house divided amongst itself. You have no forward movement. You're not enthusiastic and that's to be filled with the Spirit of God, by the way. And your life is a sequence of disappointments and frustrations and tragedies and you're a leaf blowing in the wind.
And that is not what you're called to be. That's not what you're called to be. You're called to be a visionary constructor of the paradisal vision. Really, really, that's who you are. Terrible as that is to apprehend and so...
Well what do we have to lose? We already will lose everything we have to lose. Yeah. Right, we're all in in this game man so...
There's whether you want it to be this way or not, you are betting everything on your life. I don't know if you can be less afraid of death exactly, but I think that here's a hypothesis, and this is a Socratic hypothesis. I write about this in my book too, by the way. Maybe if you live your life thoroughly, thoroughly, right? You take use of the advantages, make use of the advantages that are put in front of you, make use of your talents, say yes to things, tell the truth, like stand up and get at it.
Assuming that you can do that, you know, because some people are very ill and hurt, but assuming you can do that, I think the only way to combat fear of death is to live fully. And I think that that might actually work. I kind of wonder, I've talked about this with my father too, who's getting pretty old. You know, I've asked him if, for example, if he could be transformed back into an 18-year-old, knowing what he knows now, would he do it?
And he was ambivalent about that. You know, he didn't say no, but he didn't say yes. And we talked about this idea that if you lived your life fully, you know, maybe that would be good enough.
Because, you know, I loved having kids, but I don't feel that I would have kids again, you know, because in some sense I've already done that. And so maybe there's a set number of adventures that you have to go on in your life. Let's say you have to be married, you have to have kids, you have to have a... career, you have to have friends, you have to have something useful to do with your time outside of work. Those are all things that are covered in the Future Authoring Program, by the way.
Maybe if you do all those, it's like, that's good enough. You've had your life and that's enough. I mean, I don't know.
10 years ago, I thought, you know, if I could extend my life radically, then I would. And I'm not so sure about that now that I'm... 55, you know, I'm getting older.
I kind of have a suspicion that you might come to an end, you know, that's what it looks like. I mean, I don't want that to be soon. But maybe you exhaust yourself in your life, you know, maybe you can so that there's nothing left of you really. Do you worry that your fame traps you into the person that you were before? Yeah, well, Elvis became an Elvis impersonator by the time he died.
Yeah, do you fear that you have become a Jordan Peterson impersonator? Do you fear of, in some part, becoming the famous, suit-wearing, brilliant Jordan Peterson? The certainty in the pursuit of truth, always right.
I think I worry about it more than anything else. I hope. I hope I do. I better. Has fame to some degree.
When you look at yourself in the mirror, in the quiet of your mind, has it corrupted you? No doubt, in some regard. I mean, it's a very difficult thing to avoid, you know, because things change around you. People are much more likely to do what you ask, for example, right? And so that's a danger, because one of the things that keeps you dying properly is that people push back against you optimally.
This is why so many celebrities spiral out of control, especially the tyrannical types that, say, run countries. Everyone around them stops saying, yeah, you're deviating a little bit there. They laugh at all their jokes.
They open all their doors. They always want something from them. The red carpet's always rolled out.
It's like, well, you think, wouldn't that be lovely? It's, well, not if the red carpet is rolled out to you while you're on your way to perdition. That's not a good deal. you just get there more efficiently and so one of the things that i've tried to learn to manage is to get have people around me all the time who are critics who are saying yeah i could have done that better and you're a little too harsh there and you're alienating people unnecessarily there and you should have done some more background work there and and i think the responsibility attendant upon that increases as your influence increases and that's that's a you As your influence increases, then that becomes a lot of responsibility. You know, and then maybe you have an off day.
And well, here's an example. I've been writing some columns lately about things that perturb me, like the forthcoming famine, for example. And it's hard to take those problems on.
It's difficult to take those problems on. in a serious manner and it's frightening. And it would be easier just to... to go up to the cottage with my wife and go out on the lake and watch the sunset. And so I'm tempted to draw on anger as a motivating energy to help me overcome the resistance to doing this.
But then that makes me more harsh and judgmental in my tone when I'm reading such things, for example, on YouTube, than might be optimal. Now, I've had debates about with people about that because I have friends who say, no, if you're calling out the environmentalist globalists who are harassing the Dutch farmers, then a little anger is just the ticket. But then others say, well, you know, you don't want to be too harsh because you alienate people who would otherwise listen to you.
It's like, that's a hard balance to get right. But also maybe anger hardens your mind to where you don't notice the subtle, quiet beauty of the world, the quiet love that's always there that permeates everything. sometimes you can become deeply cynical about the world if it's the Nietzsche thing yeah battle not with monsters lest you become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you right but I would say bring it on right because well I also say knowing that he's absolutely right but if you gaze into the abyss long enough you see the light not the darkness you Are you sure about that? I'm betting my life on it. Yeah, that's a heck of a bet.
Well, that's... Because it might distort your mind to where all you see... Is abyss.
Is abyss, is the evil in this world. Well, then I would say you haven't looked long enough. You know, that's back to the... You're just the limited... The swords, the flaming swords.
It's like, so I said the whole story of Christ was prefigured in that image. It's like the story of Christ psychologically. is radical acceptance of the worst possible tragedy. That's what it means.
That's what the crucifix means. Psychologically, it's like gaze upon that which you are most afraid of. But that story doesn't end there. Because in the story, Christ goes through death into hell. So death isn't enough.
The abyss of innocent death is not sufficient to produce redemption. It has to be a voluntary journey to hell. And maybe that's true for everyone.
There is no more terrifying idea than that, by definition. And so then, well, do you gaze upon that? Well, who knows? Who knows? How often do you gaze upon death, your own?
How often do you remember, remind yourself that this ride ends? Personally? Personally.
All the time. Because you, as a deep thinker and philosopher, it's easy to start philosophizing. And forgetting that you might die today. The angel of death sits on every word.
How's that? How often do you actually consciously... All the time....notice the angel? All the time.
I think it's one of the things that made me peculiar. When I was in graduate school, you know, I thought about... I had the thought of death in my mind all the time. And I noticed that many of the people that I was with, these were people I admired fine.
That wasn't part of their character, but it was definitely part of mine. I'd wake up every morning. This happened for years. Think, time's short, get at it.
Time's short, get at it. There's things to do. And so that was always, it's still there.
And it's still there with, I would say, and it's unbearable in some sense. Are you afraid of it? Like what's your relationship? Yeah. You know, I was ready to die a year ago and not casually.
I had people I loved, you know. So no, I'm not very worried about me, but I'm very worried about making a mistake. Yeah.
I heard Elon Musk talk about that a couple of months ago. It was really a striking moment. Someone asked him about death and he said just offhand and then went on with the conversation.
He said, I'd be relieved. And then he went on with the conversation. And I thought, well, you know, he's got a lot of weight on his shoulders. I'm sure that part of him thinks I'd be easier just if this wasn't here at all. Now, he said it offhand, but it was a telling moment in my estimation.
So for him, that's a why live question. exhaustion of life. If you call it life is suffering, but the hardship. I'm more afraid of hell than death.
You're afraid of the thing that follows. I don't know if it follows or if it's always here. I think we're going to find out.
What's the connection between death and hell? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Is there something that needs to be done before you arrive?
You're more likely to die terribly if you live in a manner that brings you to hell. You know, if you don't know what you should do with your life, you don't know who you should be, sometimes you think about that as what career you should pursue. But here's another way of thinking about it.
It's kind of a SEALs ethos that Congressman Crenshaw detailed out. Here's some things you could be. Those are my words.
These are his. You'll be someone who's never late. You will be someone who takes care of his men, gets to know them. and puts their needs before yours. You will be someone who does not quit in the face of adversity.
You will be someone who takes charge and leads when no one else will. You will be detail-oriented, which you discuss a lot in later sections of the book. Always vigilant, attentive. You will be aggressive in your actions, but never lose your cool. You will have a sense of humor, because sometimes that is all that can get you through the darkest hours.
You will work hard and perform even when no one is watching. You'll be creative and think outside the box, even if it gets you in trouble. You're a rebel, but not a mutineer. You are a jack of all trades and master of none.
And then you follow that a little later with this paragraph, these paragraphs. Be aggressive enough to kill the enemy. but immediately calm enough not to scare the little old lady.
You'll be that man who's mentally tough enough to operate in horrific chaos, then immediately transition to tranquility, all without mentally breaking. You will effectively transition from hyper-masculine aggressor to gentle caretaker. You'll be both a warrior and a gentleman.
The qualities that made SEAL leaders great were rarely... Physical in nature, they listened. They empowered their team to be successful, carefully entrusting individuals with additional responsibility.
It's a real conservative ethos there. They highlighted good performance publicly and criticized bad performance privately. And so, well, you know, those are lists of virtues and maybe they're not the only list of possible virtues.
Probably not, but if you're lost and you don't know where to start practicing, you know, you also talk about this idea that, this is an Aristotelian idea, you know, that we are our habits, we become what we practice. And imagine if you're lost and you're listening, you think, well, you find some things admirable. Well, you could practice those things and you can practice them locally and minimally in your own relationships and you can start to get good at them.
And as you get good at them, Well, you get better at them, right? And then you can broaden out the scope of your action into a wider purview. So you said here too, let's go for another quote here. Throughout your life, this is very practical advice too, and I think it's very wise from a therapeutic perspective.
Throughout your life, you have people you look up to. Okay, so let's think about that. You look up.
What does that mean? Why up? Well, up is something that beckons from a distance.
It's like a light on a hill, and we automatically assume that those who we admire are people we look up to. So that specifies a distance and a direction, and it's uphill. It's up toward a higher vista, let's say. So there are automatically people who elicit that spirit in you.
You have noticed the way... It might also imply that there's some sense of struggle required to get to that point, because it's easier to go downhill than it is uphill. Yes, definitely.
That's right. It's an uphill trek. And it also implies judgment, because if someone's above you, then they also serve as a judge, or you serve as a judge in relationship to them, because you compare yourself unfavorably with them.
And that can also inspire you to tear them down. That's really the story of Cain and Abel, and that's a major story. You have noticed the way a teacher, parent, co-worker, mentor, or friend interacts with others. And you come away thinking, hmm, that behavior simply works better.
They are respected, admired, and successful. And you find yourself wondering why that is. You do if you're a little bit humble instead of being envious, right?
Because otherwise you think, well, that damn crook, he just stole his position, and that's why he's got it. But if you're a bit humble, you might think, well, no, that guy looks successful. Maybe he knows something I don't.
You are noticing attributes and character traits that are good and worth aspiring to. You are noticing attributes that make certain people more successful than others. You are noticing what a hero looks like. And in the process, you are discovering a path made up of desirable personality traits that helps you ascend in social hierarchies. That's Jacob's ladder, by the way.
That ladder that is the hierarchy to the good. That's the vision Jacob has of the pathway to God, is that it's a hierarchical structure with the thing that's ultimately good at the pinnacle, by definition, right? The best of all possible goods, and then there are intermediary structures all the way up, and beings inhabiting those structures. And this isn't metaphysical. It's like, if you find someone you admire, the reason you admire them is because they're higher up in that heavenly hierarchy, so to speak, than you are.
And your whole nervous system tells you that. You're compelled to listen, you're compelled to pay attention by your own, by the action of your own unconscious mind. You know, what's interesting about this point of identifying these heroes or at least role models, you can call them either one, I just thought heroes was a more compelling word to use for the sake of writing it. But what's interesting about it too is how pop culture actually plays a pretty important part of this because like there's plenty of people who simply don't have these good role models in their lives and you have to acknowledge that. And so where are they supposed to turn?
And it's maybe one of the reasons that it's so important to fight these cultural wars that you and I engage in on a fairly regular basis, that they've become a serious part of our politics, which at the same time is necessary, but also deeply, deeply unfortunate. I do think the attack on pop culture from this progressive victimhood left has reached a ceiling. I think there's a serious backlash.
You know, you look at movies like Top Gun, the recent one, Top Gun, maybe like the highest grossing of all time. Absolutely phenomenal movie. Really fun to watch.
Why? Because it just had all of these classical virtues infused within it about relationships and about how you treat people and what the consequences are for treating people as such that these things speak to people in a deeper way. They can't necessarily articulate them, but they understand it when they see it.
And there's these sort of radical minorities that are very loud that want that changed. You know, they want something else to be on that hill. But people react against it because it's not true.
There's no truth to that. Yeah, well, yeah, and something cries out from inside of them then, and that can be appealed to by a storyteller. I saw the same thing in the Marvel Avengers series, is that there is a return to any wide range of classical virtue, certainly brotherhood.
A kind of a military ethos, sacrifice, a striving upward, certainly masculine virtues, the combination of the Hulk and Iron Man, for example, that's a, that's a, that's a, there's a monstrous element to the Hulk, but he's a hero in a strange sense. And he's also the revitalizing force for Iron Man when he just about dies. And, and that's all the reason those movies were so necessary and so attractive is because they are in fact addressing a radical conceptual void. In the culture, and it's a void that, well, that you're addressing in your book, especially with your appeal, well, trifold appeal, let's say, to duty, responsibility, and humor at the same time, right, which is a kind of stoicism in the face of catastrophe.
So, because this is a big problem in life, imagine you're aiming for something, and then something happens to make it impossible, or you find out that it's the wrong thing, because you're aiming in the wrong direction. Well, so then what do you have to rely on to set you right? It's not your aim, obviously, but it might be your capacity to take new aim, and that's bloody well dependent on your character, that's for sure.
And so I don't think there is a more fundamental aim than what you should be, and there's no better way of characterizing what you should be than that you should fortify your character. That's that willingness to gaze into the abyss, which is obviously what you were doing when you went to Ukraine. It's like, it's gazing into the abyss that makes you better. The thing is, and this is maybe where Nietzsche's idea is not as differentiated as it became, sometimes your gaze can be forcefully directed towards the abyss, and then you're traumatized.
If it's involuntary and accidental, it can kill you. The more it's voluntary, the more transformative it is. And that's part of that idea about facing death and hell.
It's like, can you tolerate death and hell? And the answer is, this terrible answer is, yes, to the degree that you're willing to do it. voluntarily. And then you might ask, well, why should I have to subject myself to death and hell?
I'm innocent. And then the answer to that is, even the innocent must be voluntarily sacrificed to the highest. That's such an interesting distinction. Voluntary suffering. Voluntary, yeah.
Well, that's why the central Christian doctrine is pick up your cross and follow me. And I'm speaking not in religious terms saying that. I'm just speaking as a psychologist.
It's like one of the things we've learned in the last hundred years is voluntary exposure to that which freezes and terrifies you in measured proportions is curative. The first thing I do as a clinician, if someone comes to me and says they're depressed, is ask myself a question. Well, what does this person mean by that?
So I have to find out, like, because maybe they're not depressed, maybe they're hyper-anxious, or maybe they're obsessional. Like, there's various forms of powerful negative emotion, so they need to be differentiated. But then the next question you have to ask is, well, are you depressed, or do you have a terrible life? Or is it some combination of the two? So if you're depressed, as far as I can tell, you don't have a terrible life.
You have friends, you have family, you have an intimate relationship, you have a job or a career. You're about as educated as you should be, given your intelligence. Use your time outside of work wisely.
You're not beholden to alcohol or other temptations. You're engaged in the community in some fundamental sense, and all that's working. Now, if you have all that and you're feeling really awful, you're either ill or you're depressed. And so then sometimes there's a biochemical route to that, treatment of that.
My experience has been as a clinician is if you're depressed, but you have a life and you take an antidepressant, it will probably help you a lot. Now, maybe you're not depressed. Exactly. You just have a terrible life. What does that look like?
You have no relationship, your family's a mess, you've got no friends, you've got no plan, you've got no job, you use your time outside of work not only badly but destructively, you have a drug or alcohol habit or some other vice, pornography addiction, you are completely unengaged in the surrounding community, you have no scaffolding whatsoever to support you in your current mode of being or you move forward. And then As a therapist, well, you do two things. Well, if it's depression per se, well, like I said, there's sometimes a biochemical route, a nutritional route.
There's ways that can be addressed. It's probably physiological if you're, at least in part, if you're depressed but you have an okay life. Sometimes it's conceptual.
You can turn to dreams sometimes to help people because dreams contain the seeds of the potential future. And if your person is a real good dreamer and you can analyze dreams, that can be really helpful. But that seems to be only true for more creative people. And for the people who just have a terrible life, it's like, okay, you have a terrible life.
Well, let's pick a front. How about you need a friend? Like one sort of friend. Do you know how to shake hands and introduce yourself?
I'll have the person show me. So let's do it for a sec. So like this.
Hi, I'm Jordan. And people don't know how to do that. And then they can't even get the ball rolling. For the listener, George...
gave me a firm handshake yeah as opposed to a dead fish you know and there's these elementary social skills that hypothetically if you were well cared for you learned when you were like three and sometimes people have i had lots of clients to whom no one ever paid any attention and they needed like 10 000 hours of attention and some of that was just listening because they had 10 000 hours of conversations they never had with anyone you And they were all tangled up in their head. And they had to just... One client in particular, I worked with this person for 15 years. And what she wanted from me was for me just to shut the hell up for 50 minutes, which was very hard for me, and to just tell me what had happened to her. And then what happened at the end of the conversation, then I could discuss a bit with her.
And then as we... we progressed through the years, the amount of time that we spent in discussion increased in proportion in the sessions until by the time we stopped seeing each other, when my clinical practice collapsed, we were talking about 80% of the time. But she literally, she'd never been attended to properly, ever.
And so she was an uncarved block in the Taoist sense, right? She hadn't been subjected to those flaming swords that separated the wheat from the chaff. And so you can do that in therapy.
If you're listening and you're depressed, I would say if you can't find a therapist, and that's getting harder and harder because it's actually become illegal to be a therapist now because you have to agree with your clients, which is a terrible thing to do with them, just like it's terrible just to arbitrarily oppose them. You could do the self-authoring program online because it helps you write an autobiography. So if you have memories that are more than 18 months old that bother you when you think them up, part of you is locked inside that.
An undeveloped part of you is still trapped in that. That's a metaphorical way of thinking about it. That's why it still has emotional significance.
So you can write about your past experiences, but I would say wait for at least 18 months if something bad has happened to you, because otherwise you just hurt yourself again by encountering it. You can bring yourself up to date with an autobag. There's an analysis of faults and virtues, that's the present authoring, and then there's a guided writing exercise that helps you make a future plan.
That's young men who do that, could go to college, young men who do that, 90 minutes, just the future authoring, 90 minutes. They're 50% less likely to drop out. That's all it takes. I had clients who were so depressed they literally couldn't get out of bed.
So what's their first step? It's like, can you sit up once today? No.
Can you prop yourself up on your elbows once today? Like you just, you scale back the dragon till you find one that's conquerable that moves you forward. There's a, there's a rubric for life.
Scale back the dragons till you find one conquerable and it'll give you a little bit of goal commensurate with the struggle. But the plus side of that, Because you think, God, that's depressing. You mean I have to start by sitting up?
Well, you do if you can't sit up. But the plus side of that is, it's the Pareto distribution issue, is that aggregates exponentially increase. And failures do too, by the way. But aggregates exponentially increase. So once you start the ball rolling, it can get zipping along pretty good.
This person that I talked about was incapable of sitting with me. In a cafe, when we first met, just talking, even though I was her therapist, but by the end, she was doing stand-up comedy. So, you know, it took years, but still, most people won't do stand-up comedy. That's quite the bloody achievement.
She would read her poetry on stage, too. So, for someone who was petrified into paralysis by social anxiety, and who had to start very small, It was a hell of an accomplishment. We should make a very clear distinction here that often when people are embittered and resentful and feel like they're victims, it's because really awful things have happened to them.
Now, not always, but often. And so then the question is, well, if you're in a situation and something really awful is happened to you or has happened to you, then, well, why shouldn't you feel like a victim? Is there a better alternative?
And part of what you were trying to lay out in this part of the book is what those better alternatives are. So part of looking for that hero is to find out from someone else's example. In your case, it was your mother, but these other sources that you described of people who were in a sort of hell in an undeniable sense, but who chose in a very real way. to make it as good as it could possibly be given the circumstances.
And so they had to turn to sources of power, let's say, and strength and fortitude and resilience that weren't in some sense obviously associated with the catastrophe. I mean, in your mother's case, it's a pretty tragic situation. She's a young mother.
She has young kids. Now she has breast cancer and she fights a losing battle over a period of five years. That's pretty...
bad. And then you have to ask yourself, given that that's obviously pretty bad, how is it even possible that someone could handle that with not only grace and courage, but the kind of grace and courage that leaves their children with an un, what would you call it, an immovable sense of the ability to prevail in the face of the deepest adversity. I mean, that's really something.
You said here, thousands have come before you. And they did just fine. So quit your complaining. And it's not because you have nothing to complain about. That's not the case.
It's that that's not the right approach. The fact is, and this is such an optimistic fact, as well as a judgment in some sense, the fact is that if someone else can do it, so can you. And that's something, right, if you're reading about the great heroes in history, people who are in these terrible situations, and you see someone...
Rise to the occasion. And then you can say, well, that was a person who did that, and I'm a person, and so maybe I have that capacity too, even though I don't know how to approach it. And then some of the rest of your book, much of the rest of your book, I would say, in some sense, is a guide to help people figure out how they could approach that.
One of the things you point out first is, well, notice who you admire, and then maybe try consciously practicing. Becoming like that. It's known from multiple dimensions simultaneously that the system that produces happiness, let's say in the founder's sense, produces that emotion in relationship to the observation of movement towards a valued goal.
And so you can derive some conclusions from that. The first is that without a goal, there's no happiness. by definition, because happiness marks movement towards a valued goal. The next is, well, the higher the goal, the more value there is in the observation of movement towards it. And so out of that, you might ask, well, then what's the highest goal?
Because why don't we go for that? Well, then you could say, well, you should do your best for the best. You might say, well, that's just to make me hedonically happy. It's like, well, wait a second, you know, cocaine will work for that, because it actually even activates this system.
But what about tomorrow and next week and next month? And so the problem with hedonism as a goal is, first of all, it vanishes when you're suffering. But even failing that, if you're serving yourself hedonically in the narrow sense, It's just about me and my pleasure.
It's like, okay, which you? Today's you, tomorrow's you, next week's you, next month's you. What about next year, five years from now, 10 years from now? You're going to lead a hedonic and dissolute life, and what are you going to be, a burnt-out shell and a wreck, a dismal wreck in 10 years? Because that's what'll happen.
And so if you don't construe yourself as a community stretched out across time, then you're not even serving yourself. And if you do construe yourself as a community stretched across time, then serving other people and serving yourself turn out to be exactly the same thing. I just did a course on the Sermon on the Mount, and Christ, in one of the sections of that sermon, He says to people that You shouldn't lose your saltiness, you shouldn't lose your savor.
And you're the salt of the earth, and without that salt, everything loses its flavor. And salt is a preservative, and it's a spice, and that's often conceptualized, that phrase, as referring to the salt of the earth, you know, the solid, reliable types who bear all burdens. But that is not what it means. I looked at a lot of different translations, I talked to a lot of people about that verse, and really what it means is...
Well, there should be some spiciness and unpredictability and humor about you. And there should be some play in the system, right? Because that's what stops you from just being the narrow, dead, past, letter of the law with no spirit.
There should be some snake inside the tree, right? There should be some fire inside the bush. Those are all ways of construing that that are symbolically equivalent.
There should be some dynamism in you. A fair bit of that's associated with, well, enthusiasm. That's fun, but enthusiasm means to be imbued with the spirit of God.
That's why people like comedians so much, too, because that's what they do. And so you have to leave in the duty with humor. And your book does a lovely job of that, too, because your book, which is a very conservative book in the best possible way, and is a call to duty and responsibility.
But you constantly return to themes of... Both stoicism and humor, which are tied together in some sense, you know. I was just in Newfoundland for the last week doing a documentary there. Newfoundland's a rough rock and it's beautiful and harsh. And the people there are tough and resilient, man, because they had to be.
And Newfies have a great sense of humor and they're always making fun. And that's a necessary leaven, right? That ability to deal with serious matters in a light touch, in a light, with a light touch, and it's something I'm trying to learn to do more and more, even in the most serious of conversations, you know, because if you're a master, you've got both.
You've got that light touch and that sense of humor. You really see that in military people who've been through rough situations. When you see someone in the depths of genuine suffering, hopefully what you're trying to do is to throw a lifeline, and one possible lifeline is compassion. And that's probably the right lifeline to throw an infant, you know, who's suffering, that sort of overwhelming compassion. But for someone who is an adult, or making progress towards being an adult, the lifeline that might be thrown is, there's something within you that would let you be more than you are.
and much more and maybe enough more so that you could actually deal with this suffering so it didn't turn into hell and take everything along with it. And that's, there isn't anything more optimistic than that. You say something here, which I think is extremely, I'm going to read something from your book here. It is true that character is to some extent innate. I would say what that does is that it provides each of us with a range of talents and a range of temptations.
And it's something like that. So it's the hand we're dealt and there's certainly a genetic element to that. Our genetic makeup imbues in us certain proclivities. But it is as true that character is mostly a consequence of choices. Strangely enough, we all make them and we should make them deliberately with the knowledge that these choices are part of our responsibility toward a purpose other than our own selfish aims.
That responsibility is to your family, friends, community, and country. That's something that conservatives put forward as a pathway to virtue. You know, and what's so interesting about that, as far as I'm concerned, as an antidote to atomistic liberalism, let's say, that hyper-privileges the individual, is that it's definitely been my observation as a clinical psychologist that in the depths of misery, the capability that you have to be of service to other people, Your family, your friends, your community, your country, that's actually a saving grace under such circumstances.
You know, and that people really find a deep and abiding meaning in that service. So it's not just finger wagging and the pointing towards duty. It's like, no, no, you don't understand that if you're in desperate straits, if your life has fallen apart, if you're nihilistic and miserable, and maybe you have your bloody reasons, because maybe you do.
That's still the case that if you step outside yourself and you try to make the lives of other people better, that's the best possible thing that you can do for yourself.