Jordan Peterson: commitment

Transcript context

…But it must have shaped how you now understand politics. It was such a formative experience in your career. Well, it shaped how I understand responsibility, I would say. I was trained as a behavioral psychologist, although I have familiarized myself with all sorts of other schools of psychotherapeutic endeavor, and I’ve used techniques from other schools substantially when that was necessary. But one of the things you do as a behavioral psychologist is you take problems, and you break them down into their smallest solvable units. That’s actually your job. It’s like, okay, you come to me and you have a problem. Well, we don’t know what the problem is, so the first thing we’re going to do is have a very long discussion about what the problem might be. And we’ll go through all sorts of blind alleys, but hopefully, we’ll end up with a description of what it is that’s wrong. Then we’ll have another discussion about how it is that it could conceivably be set right. And then we’ll have another discussion about how to strategize with regards to implementing how it might be set right at a level of resolution that’s sufficiently differentiated, so that you have a very high probability of succeeding when you implement it. I think that that’s useful with regards to understanding political problems. The first question is, “Well, what’s the problem?” And the second is, “Well, what’s the solution?” It’s a technique. So I suppose what’s happened to me from participating, from doing so much therapy is that I’ve learned how to take complex problems and decompose them down into solvable processes. In your talks and writings, you’ve explored many avenues of personality psychology. It feels to me, as an outside observer, that our politics is much higher in neuroticism than it was five or ten years ago. Do you agree? And if so, why has this happened?…

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