Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning

You have given a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy, and the lectures were powerful. There's some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way you like, lock in on an idea, but then are struggling with that idea, all of that, that feels like it's a Nietzschean. Well, he's a big influence on me stylistically and in terms of the way I approached writing, and also many of the people that were other influences of mine were very influenced by him. So I was blown away when I first came across his writings. They're so intellectually dense that I don't know if there's anything that approximates that. Dostoevsky maybe, although he's much more wordy. Nietzsche is very succinct partly he was so ill because he would think all day he couldn't spend a lot of time writing. And he condenses writings into very short while this Aphoristic style he had, and it's really something to strive for. And then he's also an exciting writer like Dostoevsky and dynamic and romantic in that emotional way. And so it's really something, and I really enjoyed doing that. I did that lecture that you described, that lecture series is on the first half of Beyond Good and Evil, which is a stunning book. And that was really fun to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean and how they've echoed across the decades since he wrote them. And yeah, it's been great.

What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver a powerful idea, for example, utopian ideas of Marx or utopian ideas, you could say dystopian ideas of Hitler? Those ideas are powerful and they can saturate all your perception with values and they focus you in a way where there's only a certain set of actions. Yeah, right. Even a certain set of emotions as well.

If we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche's thought, the idea he first introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the Übermensch. That's another one that's very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot like it's about power. For example, in the 20th century, it was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to advocate for the extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races. And the dominion of the superior Aryans. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was partly because Nietzsche's work also was misrepresented by his sister after his death. But I also think that there's a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization. So Nietzsche of course, famously announced the death of God, but he did that in a manner that was accompanied by dire warnings like Nietzsche said, because people tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement. But Nietzsche actually said that he really said something like the unifying ethos under which we've organized ourselves psychologically and socially has now been fatally undermined by, well, by the rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist proclivity. There's a variety of reasons. Mostly it was conflict between the enlightenment view, let's say, and the classic religious view, and that there will be dire consequences for that. And Nietzsche knew like Dostoevsky knew that, see, there's a proclivity for the human psyche and for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity because the cost of disunity is high.

Okay. But if we lay on the table, religion, communism, Nazism, they are all unifying ethos. They're unifying ideas, but they're also horribly dividing ideas. They both unify and divide. Religion has also divided people because in the nuances of how the different peoples wrestle with God, they have come to different conclusions, and then they use those conclusions that perhaps the people in power use those conclusions to then start wars, to start hatred, to divide. Yeah. Well, it's one of the key sub-themes in the gospels is the sub-theme of the Pharisees. And so the fundamental enemies of Christ in the gospels are the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers. So what does that mean? The Pharisees are religious hypocrites. The scribes are academics who worship their own intellect, and the lawyers are the legal minds who use the law as a weapon. And so they're the enemy of the Redeemer. That's a subplot in the gospel stories, and that actually all means something. The Pharisaic problem is that the best of all possible ideas can be used by the worst actors in the worst possible way. And maybe this is an existential conundrum, is that the most evil people use the best possible ideas to the worst possible ends. And then you have the conundrum of how do you separate out, let's say, the genuine religious people from those who use the religious enterprise only for their own machinations.

The reason I like talking about communism because it has clearly been shown as a set of ideas to be destructive to humanity. But I would like to understand from an engineering perspective the characteristics of communism versus religion where you could identify religious thought is going to lead to a better human being, a better society and communist Marxist thought does not. Because there's ambiguity, there's room for play in communism and Marxism, because they had a utopian sense of where everybody's headed, don't know how it's going to happen. Maybe revolution is required. But after the revolution is done, we'll figure it out. And there's an underlying assumption that maybe human beings are good and they'll figure it out once you remove the oppressor.

So Bilbo the Hobbit, he's kind of an ordinary every man. He lives in a very constrained and orderly and secure world. And then the quest call comes and he goes out and he expands his personality and develops his wisdom. And that's reflected in human neuropsychological architecture at a very low level, way below cognition. So one of the most fundamental elements of the mammalian brain, and even in lower animal forms, is the hypothalamus. It's the root of primary motivation. So it governs lust, and it regulates your breathing, and it regulates your hunger, and it regulates your thirst, and it regulates your temperature. Like really low level biological necessities are regulated by the hypothalamus. When you get hungry, it's the hypothalamus. When you're activated in a defensively aggressive manner, that's the hypothalamus.

What is the believe in God, how does that fit in? What does it mean to believe in God? Okay, so in one of the stories that I cover in We Who Wrestle with God, which I only recently begun to take apart say in the last two years, is the story of Abraham. It's a very cool story, and it's also related, by the way, to your question about what makes communism wrong. And Dostoevsky knew this. Not precisely the Abraham story, but the same reason. In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky made a very telling observation.

If there's a young man in their 20s listening to this, how do they escape the pull of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground? With the eyes open to the world, how do they select the adventure? So there's other characterizations of the divine say in the Old Testament story. So one pattern of characterization that I think is really relevant to that question is the conception of God as calling and conscience. Okay, so what does it mean? It's a description of the manner in which your destiny announces itself to you. I'm using that terminology, and it's distinguishable say from Nietzsche's notion that you create your own values.

It may be when you said Abraham was being fed by naked ladies- That's an interpolation, obviously, but would've been out of keeping for the times.

Quick pause, bathroom break. If we can descend from the realm of ideas down to history and reality. I would say the time between World War I and World War II was one of history's biggest testing of ideas, and really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that helped us understand the nature of good and evil. I just want to ask you a question about good and evil. Churchill, in many ways, was not a good man. Stalin, as you've documented extensively, was a horrible man. But you can make the case that both were necessary for stopping an even worse human being in Hitler. So to what degree do you need monsters to fight monsters? Do you need bad men to be able to fight off greater evils?

Well, okay, this is fascinating because again, you're a great interviewer. I would love it if you interviewed somebody like Putin. So this idea that you are a fool in the face of psychopathy just doesn't jive with me. I'm an agreeable guy. That's the problem. I'll give people the benefit of the doubt.

It's hard. You have been through some dark places in your mind, over your life. What have been some of your darker hours, and how did you find the light? Well, I would say I started contending with the problem of evil very young, 13 or 14. And that was my main motivation of study for 30 years, I guess, something like that. At the end of that 30 years, I became more and more interested in fleshing out the alternative. Once I became convinced that evil existed, and that was very young, I always believed that if you could understand something well enough that you could formulate a solution to it. But it turns out that seeing evil and understanding that it exists is less complicated than a technical description of its opposite, what is good. You can say, well, it's not that for sure. It's not Auschwitz. How about we start there? It's as far from Auschwitz as you can get. It's as far from enjoying being an Auschwitz camp guard as you can get.

Do you have regrets when you look back at your life in the full analysis of it? Well, as I said, I was very ill for about three years, and it was seriously brutal. This is no lie. Every single minute of that three years was worse than any single time I'd ever experienced in my entire life up to that. So that was rough.

Boy, this life, something else. So we've been talking about some heavy, difficult topics, and you've talked about truth in your Nietzsche lectures and elsewhere. When you think, when you write, when you speak, how do you find what is true? Hemingway said, "All you have to do is write one true sentence." How do you do that? Well, I would say first that you practice that. It's like that question is something. And Hemingway knew this at least to some degree, and he certainly wrote about it, is that you have to orient your life upward as completely as you can, because otherwise you can't distinguish between truth and falsehood. It has to be a practice. Now and for me, I started to become serious about that practice when I realized that it was the immorality of the individual, the resentful, craven, deceitful immorality of the individual that led to the terrible atrocities that humans engage in that make us doubt even our own worth. I became completely convinced of that. That the fundamental root cause of evil, let's say, wasn't economic or sociological, that it was spiritual, just psychological, and that if that was the case, you had an existential responsibility to aim upward and to tell the truth, and that everything depends on that. And I became convinced of that. And so then... Look, you set your path with your orientation. That's how your perceptions work. As soon as you have a goal, a pathway opens up to you and you can see it. And the world divides itself into obstacles and things that move you forward. And so the pathway that's in front of you depends on your aim. The things you perceive are concretizations of your aim. If your aim is untrue, then you won't be able to tell the difference between truth and falsehood. And you might say, "Well, how do you know your aim is true?" It's like, well, you course correct continually, and you can aim towards the ultimate. Are you ever sure that your aim is the right direction? You become increasingly accurate in your apprehension.