Jordan Peterson: Inequality and hierarchy give life its purpose | Big Think

Jordan Peterson: Inequality and hierarchy give life its purpose
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Criticized by the left and claimed by the right, Jordan Peterson’s ideas are a defense of traditional morality and leading a purpose-driven life. The Canadian psychology professor has become a YouTube and IRL sensation, garnering tens of millions of views seemingly overnight. His claim that hierarchies help individuals create goals for themselves (and that goal-setting is a good life skill) seems to deprioritize equality—at least equality of outcome—as the primary goal of society. Such counterintuitive ideas run throughout his newest book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
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JORDAN PETERSON:

Jordan B. Peterson, raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, has flown a hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stunt-plane, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with astronauts, and built a Kwagu'l ceremonial bighouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home after being invited into and named by that Canadian First Nation. He's taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people, consulted for the UN Secretary General, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as an adviser to senior partners of major Canadian law firms, and lectured extensively in North America and Europe. With his students and colleagues at Harvard and the University of Toronto, Dr. Peterson has published over a hundred scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality, while his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief revolutionized the psychology of religion. His latest book is 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Jordan Peterson: If you don’t have anything to look up to, you don’t have anything to do, right? A lot of the meaning that people find in their lives is purpose driven. And in order to put effort into something, to work towards something, you have to assume axiomatically that what you’re working towards is better than what you have. Because why else would you do it?

And there’s a relationship, like, if it’s way better than what you have, it’s obviously proportionally difficult. So you try to balance difficulty with positivity, let’s say, something like that. But you’re always aiming up if you’re aiming. And if you’re not aiming then you don’t really have any purpose, and that deprives your life of meaning, and that’s not good because if your life is deprived of meaning then what you’re left with is the suffering. It’s not neutral, right, it’s negative.

So now the problem with having to aim up is that produces a hierarchy, because if you posit and aim then everyone arrays themselves along a hierarchy of “better at it” to “worse at it”.

And it doesn’t matter—if you create basketball as a game, 100 years later you create people who are hyperspecialized at basketball and they’re great at it, and virtually everyone else is bad. So it doesn’t matter. As soon as you produce a value proposition, you produce a hierarchy.

The problem with a hierarchy is it produces inequality. The problem with inequality is it produces resentment. Right, but you can’t get rid of the damn hierarchy just because they produce inequality and resentment, because then you don’t have anywhere to go. So that’s not an answer.

Okay, so let’s say you’re trying to deal with the fact that you have to put up with a hierarchy if you’re going to have any values. Well, how do you escape from the resentment trap? And the answer is you do an intelligent multidimensional analysis of your life.

It’s like, by the time you’re 30, I would say, you’re a pretty singular person. You’re unique and particular and your life has multiple dimensions. And you’re more or less successful—or not—along many of those dimensions.

But it’s a completely ridiculous game to pick someone else arbitrarily, who’s doing much better than you on one of those dimensions, to assume that you’re a failure because of that, or that the world is unfair because of that, without knowing in full detail all of the rest of the elements of their lives. I mean, look, we’re absolutely awash in stories of unhappy celebrities mired in interminable divorces or in affairs or in addictions. And that’s par for the course.

It’s not helpful. It’s helpful to have a goal. It’s necessary to have a hierarchy. It’s not particularly useful to compare yourself to other people...

[kravitzn]

The unstated but critical point is that the hierarchy needs to be traversable and legitimate. You need to be able to rise to the top or sink to the bottom. Slavery and monarchy are non-traversable hierarchies, for instance: a slave could never hope to become the master, so it's pretty futile for a slave to strive to become a master. It also leaves open the important question of what hierarchies are legitimate. Some hierarchies and dimensions of inequality may well be arbitrary or unjust or pathological and worth questioning or dismantling.

[KR-nvru]

His advice _really_ helped me: I'm 41 pounds lighter now, and I'm not actively suffering as much anymore... 🙌

[alexanderx]

That's something I noticed some time ago, that if I'm not progressing in some way I get depressed. Sometimes I worry about hitting a dead end, where their's nothing left to experience or improve. This happens all the time with video games because they are so much simpler than real life. But if you are imaginative enough it will never happen for real life in your lifetime, the more you learn the more you learn you don't know and that is the main thing that keeps you from reaching the depressing dead end of total mastery.

[Mcsqw]

I am very much on the left politically but can appreciate Peterson's arguments even if I don't necessarily agree with all of them. Also good on Big Think for getting people from across the political spectrum...everyone benefits from being pulled outside their ideological bubble!

[skaterdude]

The exact reason why i started to pick up my instrument. Only comparing myself to my future self and identifying areas of my playing that need improvement, looking to my superiors in my craft and seeing how i can be like them. (the answer everytime seems to be go to jazz school lol) Can't thank you enough JP, you've expanded my knowledge and awareness of my self so that i never stop improving.

[mattwalt]

Everyone here is confused. You're yelling past each other.

The commentary is split between those focused on systemic injustice and those focused on personal opportunity. Almost everyone speaks as if these are mutually exclusive positions, which is tragically incorrect.

Is there widespread systemic injustice? Does racism and sexism hold people back? Are your chances better if you're born in the right family? Are corporations and politicians desperately corrupt? Do the wealthy and powerful use every dirty trick at their disposal to cling to their wealth and power, indifferent to the resulting wake of destruction and suffering? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes! That is all absolutely true. These are real problems that call for real corrective action. Some of the response needs to be in the form of changes to government policy. But a lot of the response will have to be in the form of cultural shift. And cultural shift is slow.

As far as I can tell, most of our progress toward justice has been a result of evolving attitudes across generations. Virtually all of us are in a much better position than those living short, miserable, ignorant, impoverished lives with no freedom and no hope as slaves on a lord's manor. We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. Things were worse 100 years ago and far, far worse 1, 000 years ago. If it was worse then, that means it's better now. The culture of attitudes and expectations with regard to power, life, property and rights has changed radically over hundreds of generations. The problem is the rate of liberation has been (and continues to be) too gradual for any of us at any point to actually feel it happening. And it's obviously not happening for everyone at the same rate. Those of the wrong color or anatomical configuration still deal with more hurdles (although it has been worse in the past). Liberation is happening, but it ain't happening fast or equitably enough.

History's reformers didn't get to enjoy the fruit of their labor. We do. The story is the same for today's reformers; they have to have faith they're making a better world for their great-great-great-great grandchildren. Until someone comes up with an effective way to accelerate liberation, we're stuck with this frustratingly gradual trend. The pursuit of liberation and justice is the long arc of a 100 season TV series that is the story of civilization and our individual lives are merely a single scene of a single episode. That's where this Jordan Peterson talk is relevant. He's talking about YOUR single scene in the series. In your scene you can take stock of what's within your control and you can seize that opportunity to maximize your pursuit of happiness and satisfaction in this life. That's all he's saying. He's not addressing the long arc.

Yes the world is broken. But it's not completely broken. You still have some power. And most people don't come close to seizing the opportunity at their disposal. Anybody who has been in a position where they are held accountable for the behavior of multiple people (it doesn't matter if you're a VP of GloboCorp, the shift leader at the local greasy spoon, a teacher, or a parent) knows that people with the same opportunities have vastly different responses to them. It is this way all the time everywhere. Even if we eliminate all the injustice and unfairness, and we equalize opportunity for all, some will seize opportunity and others will squander it. JP is just telling you how to not be one of the squanderers.

At the same time, it's an error to believe that the only reason anybody can't get ahead is because they're not trying hard enough. Systemic injustice does leave people behind in holes too deep for them to ever climb out regardless of their effort. It denies them opportunities and makes them work harder than others to achieve the same outcomes. The personal opportunists here need to realize that.

We can (and should) focus on the long-term and the short-term simultaneously. The long-term focus means we need to address systemic oppression, discrimination, and corruption. The short-term focus means we recognize those problems won't get solved during our lifetimes and so we ascertain and seize the opportunity at our disposal. The short-term focus is all JP is talking about here.

[Jerh]

I really like Jordan Peterson but most people don't have an issue with inequality we just have an issue with extreme versions of it.

[jim]

He brings an interesting argument, but I'd like to know if he believes whether or not some of those high up in the "hierarchy" actually use their position to create more inequality as a way of maintaining their "status".

[salmongod]

... you don't have to treat life like it's an RPG where you're improving your numbers. You can also just appreciate the experiences, and derive meaning and a sense of wonder from contextualizing them. From exploration for its own sake. Or from relationships for their own sake.


And most of the people I know who are angry about inequality aren't angry that somebody else is doing better than them. It's because their life experiences are being dictated to them by enforced scarcity. Because somebody with far more than they need dictated the terms of life for those with less. So those with less have greatly diminished ability engage in appreciable experiences or relationships. They're stuck being automatons in someone else's corporate machine.


He's not wrong about much of what he says, but he's completely missing the point.

[flynnmanabrams]

Title is odd given JP was talking mostly about not comparing yourselves to others and comparing you to yourself. JP's self help stuff is pretty simple buts it's good and honestly doesn't need to be over complicated.

[thebattler]

"It's not particularly useful to compare yourself to other people" and "Life is brutal". Very true.

[annturi]

Much needed, rational and useful "defense" of hierarchy. Loved to hear it!

[dontneedyourlaws]

“I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.” Noam Chomsky

[MusicIan]

"It's helpful to have a goal, it's necessary to have a hierarchy. It's not particularly useful to compare yourself to other people, but it is useful to compare yourself to yourself."

But a hierarchy (within his reasoning) is skill and capability in comparison to others. Hierarchy REQUIRES comparison to other people in order to get the "meaning" out of it. Then he goes to say "it is useful to compare yourself to yourself" which doesn't in itself create a hierarchy yet still creates the goals and growth that his perspective of "meaning" comes from. I'm all for personal growth in comparison to yourself, but that has nothing to do with fitting into some hierarchical structure.

[rikachiu]

I just want a decent wage to pay off my bills and have a little left over to enjoy the things I love. Not everyone is an egomaniac who wants to own everything.

[DavidTitus_]

The purpose of life is to be happy.
When you are happy, you don't care about anything else than what is, meaning you are fully living life.
Life is also not inherently negative, but the unenlightened ego is negative, which thinks in terms of death/separation, when that is transcended, one is free of illusion of self, and therefor always happy and at peace.

[DahVoozel]

Ok... so, what if I choose to self actualize by fighting against the hierarchical gate keeping and valuation of the means of subsistance?

[AA-bntf]

Thanks for letting Jordan on, he is great.

[livingbeings]

Something about the context of Big Think makes me realize how many caveats, qualifications, and rhetorical question/answers JBP includes in his explanations. It really stands out as a unique style among prominent communicators.

[AdamShaiken]

Makes sense to me...I've always wondered why a small positive effort on my part brings about exponentially positive gains all around me !!! It's been really astounding for my whole life. I never understood why such a small impetus on my part could achieve, while not maximal gains, certainly tangible and more than expected results. Now, I think, it makes a little more sense as to the why of it all.