Jordan Peterson: preference

Transcript context

…Most of the classical liberals I know — they draw their inspiration from Milton Friedman or Friedrich A. Hayek. The major influence on you seems to be Carl Jung. When you have Jungian foundations for classical liberalism, in what way — for you — does that make liberalism stronger? Well, I am fundamentally a psychologist rather than a political theorist. I’ve been very interested in how people build their models of the world. You look at the world through a framework. You can’t help it because the world is unbelievably complicated. It’s so complicated that, technically, you shouldn’t even be able to perceive it. Perception is an unbelievably deep mystery. So you interpose a very deep structure between you and the world, and that structure has — what would you call it? You can differentiate it into its subcomponents. And what appears to me to be at the base of that structure, conceptually, is something approximating a narrative. There’s various ways of looking at it. You can think about it as a shared game. But narrative, I think, is the best way of thinking about it. And I never came across anybody who had a deeper understanding of narrative than Carl Jung. So his work was unbelievably influential for me, partly because it was through Jung that I started to understand the metaphysics of the idea of the sovereignty of the individual, which I think is the great Western idea, that the fundamental perceptual — what would you say? — that the most appropriate perceptual framework for a social interaction at the familial and the community level is to view each individual as unique and sovereign. When I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning, I was very curious about whether the tension between the communist viewpoint and the Western viewpoint, roughly speaking, was merely a matter of opinion, which is something you might think if you were a moral relativist, or perhaps even a postmodernist — that there’s a multitude of ways that you can set up a society and they’re each equally, arbitrarily valuable. And there’s an infinite set of methods by which a society might be generated. That’s one hypothesis. As I got deeper and deeper into the analysis of both systems, I thought, “No, that’s just wrong.” There’s some things that the West got. What we designed in the West is a playable game, technically speaking, and what was designed by the communists was a nonplayable game. It was destined to degenerate across time because it couldn’t function in a real-world environment. It was an abstraction that couldn’t maintain itself if it was iterated. You’ve done clinical work with patients for many years, right? From that clinical work, what have you learned about politics and also myth? This is the shaping of Jordan Peterson narrative we’re building here, right?…

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