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[Music] hey just in case you're not aware i did launch a new second actualized channel recently called actualizedclips if you're not aware that go check it out there's a link down below subscribe all right now let's get into the serious topic of making sense of jordan peterson this is going to be an advanced very nuanced analysis of jordan peterson why are we talking about him and who is he well jordan peterson is a very well-known public intellectual uh psychologist professor academic he has a lot of content on youtube he has a very big following he's made a lot of waves in the cultural zeitgeist in the last four or five years or so and he has a lot of influence on young people he teaches psychology personal development type stuff self-help stuff some religious and spiritual topics and he has some political takes which are probably the most controversial part of his work so we're going to be covering the full gamut here of all of these and i think it's important because he has such a big following a lot of people listen to him trust him rely on on his ideas and opinions and there are important traps that i want to point out about that now this analysis here is going to be nonpartisan it's going to be non-ideological i'm being very deliberate to set aside all of my biases and prejudices and to be very accurate in the analysis so i will be as even-handed as possible i'm not just going to be coming at it from a sort of a bashing of jordan peterson and that's a lot of what the critiques of jordan peterson are there's a lot of critiques of him on youtube he's been critiqued to death and in some way i feel sorry for him because it's hard to take all these slings and arrows um it's not easy to be him um but i mean he's compensated well for it he's makes millions of dollars and he has a big audience lots of clicks so there's pros and cons to that lots of fame but uh but anyways what i see and i actually have i must admit i fell into this trap a bit myself is that i see a lot of critiques of jordan peterson's work coming from the left especially progressives and socialist types of people because they object to some of his conservative political positions and in that sense i too object to some of his political positions i think that his political part of his work is the weakest of his work and you might be wondering well like leo in the past you've said negative things about him yeah i have mostly related to his political takes and to his misunderstanding of progressivism so we'll be talking about all this in a lot of detail i'm just kind of setting this up for you um don't worry there's going to be a lot of explanation and logic and evidence that i will provide so so the problem though is that jordan peterson's work is predominantly psychology and spirituality and philosophy and self-help type stuff and i mean actually it's not a problem it's a great thing and recently to do this episode properly i went and i watched some of his non-political stuff and i was actually quite surprised at how good it is so if i was just looking at his political i mean his philosophy and his psychology there's a lot of good useful stuff there and i can see why people love it and people get value from it i've gotten value from it for example he talks a lot about the big five personality profile you know psychological test and i learned that from him some years ago and that was that's very useful and valuable to know he has a lot of this kind of like technical psychological understanding um and actually a lot of the stuff he teaches is very much what i teach psychology philosophy even delving a bit into metaphysics and epistemology spirituality that's what i teach that's my passion i just come at it from a different perspective and a different angle so if you're a jordan peterson fan and you're following his work uh don't be threatened by by this this is not going to be some sort of partisan critique of him uh i will help you to understand why jordan peterson's work resonates with you why it's resonating in the cultural zeitgeist why he's so popular and then i will also talk about various shadows within his work limitations and how you can go beyond those and really things that he is not able to teach you because he doesn't fully understand yet and and i'll explain that to you so this is not to bash jordan peterson that's not the point here the point is simply to give you a very big picture context of what's really going on why people are so into jordan peterson and also things they get wrong about jordan peterson bo i'll be talking about things that conservatives get wrong about jordan peterson and i'll be talking about things jordan peterson gets wrong about himself and i'll also be talking about what progressives get wrong about jordan peterson and i'll also be talking about what jordan peterson gets wrong about progressives so we're going to cover this from all angles here all right but to do that we need to introduce the model called spiral dynamics fans of mine should be already very familiar with that but if you're new and you've never heard of spill dynamics i have like a 10 hour series on spiral dynamics search for it you'll find it watch it but i'll give a little brief recap of it here because it's going to be central for being able to make sense of the big picture of what's going on politically culturally and intellectually in our society and how jordan peterson fits into that so what spiral dynamics is is a it's a psychological model coming from the field of developmental psychology and jordan peterson himself talks about certain aspects of developmental psychology such as uh um various stages of childhood development piaget and things like that maybe you've heard us of those things um but he from what i understand he doesn't understand sprawl that makes he's not even aware that it exists um so these stages i'll be using to describe him these are this is something i'm introducing to the situation to help us make sense of it all right so spiral dynamics is a model that was developed by claire graves and by don beck and christopher cohen and this model maps the psychological development and evolution of the human psyche and it doesn't just do that at an individual level it also does it at a collective level for entire cultures and societies across the last let's say 2 000 years of human history and so what's interesting about this model is that it tells us that there's a very predictable set of stages that a psyche goes through and these stages are defined by one's values at each stage your values are different and they evolve and they expand they become more complex and nuanced with each stage think of each stage as kind of moving upwards but also these stages are not mutually exclusive in the sense that you move out of one stage and you leave it behind into another they build on top of each other so really think of it like a building a skyscraper each floor builds on top of the next so what are these stages they're color coded to make them easier to remember i'm not going to mention all of them spotlight is a very complex model it can take you 20 30 hours to start to understand it's very nuanced this is just a summary here a basic summary this is all you need stage red we'll start there that's the lowest one we'll be talking about here stage red next stage blue stage orange stage green stage yellow and stage turquoise so that's like six stages so stage red is you might think of it as the warlord stage this is back during the ancient roman times when city-states were attacking each other conquering and pillaging and enslaving each other it's that kind of mentality a lot of that exists for example today with drug cartels in mexico they tend to be very violent and they tend to resolve their differences with physical violence and domination it's a very egocentric stage we might call it egocentric red once society has had enough of that it transcends that stage and moves into the next one which is stage blue stage blue is very easy to understand it's the religious stage these are the religious ideologues not exclusively religious ideologues but that is a good stereotype of it think of it as the uh the mike pence's of the world or the ned flanders's of the world so think of ned flanders i don't know do you zoomers even watch the simpsons anymore do you even are my are my references outdated hopefully you know who ned flanders is so i mean what is netflix ed flanders is the sort of stereotypical stage blue he is this sort of good samaritan he's a good christian he follows all the proper christian christian protocols and rules and he he obeys all the laws he's he's very conscientious he's very dutiful he's very disciplined and very religious and he's all about family values and following the proper norms etiquette personal responsibility part of a community like a church community that he goes to this is prototypical stage blue now of course stage blue is not limited to christianity it can also include islam or any religion it doesn't matter that's just sort of like a flavor difference of what religion you happen to subscribe to but generally stage blue are theistic people who are god-fearing people who believe in an afterlife and are worried about upsetting their god whatever god they pray to and they take that stuff seriously it's not a joke to them that grounds their life then once you exhaust the limits of that stage you evolve the next stage which is stage orange stage orange is the materialistic scientific rationalist logical success-oriented stage think of as the sort of prototypical example of this think of the wolf of wall street or just wall street in general people who are only after material success money fame personal achievement they're not constrained by religious morals because they think religious morality is just some sort of superstition from our ancestors it's unscientific it's irrational these are people who pride themselves on their rationality and their scientific understanding of the world and they subscribe to a materialist worldview they look at the world as a mechanical system like a clockwork that can be manipulated to one's own personal advantage and so they do that now what's important to understand is that each of these stages you have to be careful not to judge it as good or bad they're not good or bad each stage can have healthy and unhealthy manifestations of it each stage has a whole value set and this value set is like a world view and it really shapes how you see reality each stage is like being in a different reality a bit it's like having different colored glasses on with each stage and then you upgrade those glasses and you see the world differently and it colors everything that you do it colors what you think is worthwhile to pursue what you think is meaningful what you think isn't meaningful what you think is true what you think is false and so on and these chain these things change quite radically as you move up the stages but it's important to understand that you can go overboard with any stage for example you can have religious fanaticism that goes into terrorism or into racism and nationalistic like nazism at stage blue if it gets out of hand that doesn't mean stage blue is evil just because nazis are evil or whatever you might think likewise with stage orange stage orange can be a healthy stage and it's all these stages are necessary but it can also become toxic sort of like you see in wolf of wall street and some of the abuses on wall street and various kinds of predatory capitalism where drug companies are exploiting you and other companies are exploiting you and forming monopolies and these sorts of things and where in general our whole society becomes about just the pursuit of money and success and that becomes very shallow and hollow and then once that stage is exhausted you can move up into stage green now stage green is the stage that jordan peterson has the most problem with and i think his followers have the most problem with which which is the social justice warrior stage this is the stage of hippies people who smoke pot people who are more loose people who are maybe quasi spiritual maybe a bit new agey people who are concerned about equality and fairness in the world stage green is very much worried about all the oppression that is happening and all the inequality in the world it's worried about the poor people it's worried about the animals sage green has an expanded sense of compassion there's an opening of the heart when you get to stage green and you start to realize how selfish you were your whole life only worried about you or your little tribe and so stage green expands its circle of concern to include not just oneself or one fit one's family or one's church or one's religion or one's nation but the entire globe stage green cares about not just one's own culture but all cultures that's why it's very multicultural it cares about not just one's own race but all races not just one's own ethnicity all ethnicity not just one language all languages that's a very significant shift in perspective and orientation in the world stage green includes a lot of the socialists a lot of the social democrats a lot of the progressives uh some liberals it includes um the post-modernists the cultural marxists that jordan peterson rails against that's all stage green and then there's yellow and other stages we'll get to that as we keep talking so let's just work with these stages why did i just spend 10 minutes explaining this to you you might think because if you understand this you're going to understand everything that's going on with jordan peterson and with yourself and with the culture wars and the entire political situation that's been happening over the last five or ten years it's very very helpful for making sense of reality so why is jordan peterson's work so popular and why does it resonate with people so much because especially in western developed countries in america in canada northern europe the center of gravity of our culture and our society is roughly stage orange some people skew a bit from orange to blue and some skew a bit from orange up to green and so what we have in our culture is we have a culture war between these two factions people have segregated themselves into these two factions the ones that lean a little bit more green are fighting against the ones that lean a little bit more blue and the ones a little bit more blue are fighting against the ones that are a little bit more green so what's characteristic of all these stages is that when you're in this stage you're not aware that you're in this stage and therefore when you look from your stage to another stage especially if you're looking multiple stages across or even just one stage across the world view of that person seems so radically different from yours that you tend to think of those people as stupid crazy criminal or insane because it doesn't make sense within your worldview for example when a stage blew religious ideologue looks at a social justice warrior gay trans whatever person socialist they look at that and they think that person is insane and then when a when this socialist person looks back at the stage blue religious ideologue he thinks that religious ideologue is very regressive and outdated and traditional in his worldview and so both of them misunderstand each other and then this is what creates conflict it's simply a lack of misunderstanding and refusal to move up the stages and to integrate all of the stages into yourself remember it's not that blue is worse or green is better it's all a matter of perspective and all of them are necessary so to have a healthy green you have to actually build it on top of a healthy orange and a healthy blue you can't just reject orange and blue and that's a mistake sometimes green people make so back to the point here society's center of gravity let's say in the developed world is around stage orange maybe even skewing a bit more green and where jordan peterson comes in is that he talks a lot about the values that are latent within religion and within ancient traditions the bible and other spiritual texts he talks about that a lot why because what's happened is that a lot of especially youngsters these days zoomers who are in university and especially in academia academia is a stronghold for stage green that's the postmodernism stuff that's the gender rights stuff that's the anti-racism stuff that's the antifa stuff all that socialism marxism all of that and jordan peterson worked and grew up sort of in that environment he's made his career in that environment teaching in that environment teaching to kids to youngsters in that environment and what he's noticed is that those youngsters at stage green they lacked a foundation in stage orange and stage blue because they were reacting against it these stages is actually very easy because these stages are sort of a cultural milieu in which you are born and into which you are indoctrinated like a fish into water and so if you grow up in a very liberal part of the country progressive part of the country a big city or you go to a big university then you're just gonna you're gonna be fed the sort of ideology of progressivism and stage green that value system but you're going to probably miss out on valuable and important lessons from the orange and blue and lower lower value system and then because of that your life will be lopsided and you will not be able to find a sense of direction in your life you might get lost in moral relativism not knowing what's good what's bad anymore you might get lost in the confusion of gender binary non-binary gender fluidity where you're not even sure you're if you're male or female this confuses confuses you as a kid when you're young and then you're trying to make sense of all this and it's difficult and then because of this you're not getting the kind of personal success that you want in your life and then you might get depressed you might get anxiety you might um have relationship problems you might not be able to do well in a in a marriage you might not be able to raise your kids properly and all these sorts of things that jordan peterson rightly points out and this is a legitimate concern and in this sense he's doing good and he's serving an important function because a lot of people in society these days are missing out on those traditional values think of stage blue traditional values as what your grandparents were educated into and maybe even your parents things like family values fear of god being a good person being loyal being dedicated and hard working waking up on time doing your chores on time being dutiful being responsible being honest being polite basically ned flanders now you might say to yourself well i don't want to be like ned flanders that's ridiculous yeah it's a caricature ned flanders is a caricature you don't have to be ned flanders that's not what i'm suggesting but what you should see is that there's value to some of the qualities of ned flanders now he takes it too far every one of these stages can take it too far but what jordan peterson is actually pointing out to you if you're stage green or even uh above that or even below whatever but what he's pointing out is that you've probably missed out on important lessons from stage blue and then when you actually hear that from him because you don't get it anywhere else in the culture because the culture has moved on from blue and has sort of neglected blue and so what jordan peterson's whole function is in in society as a public intellectual is to just remind us like hey guys don't forget about stage blue there's important stuff there don't just throw it out throw the baby out with the bath water sure you might you might think that god doesn't exist or you might think that some of the stuff in stage blue isn't very good or superstitious but it's not just pure superstition it's not just old hokey ideas there was actually something important there for example the ability to discipline yourself and to have work ethic this is important and if you don't develop that you're not going to have a healthy stage green after all how can you become this effective socialist and marxist and fight against racism and other things when you can't even discipline yourself to wake up on time in the morning or to go to work or to handle your finances this is where jordan peterson gives you advice such as clean your room and of course that's correct that's correct advice you need to be able to clean your room but there's more to it we'll discuss that as we go there's more to just being a good human than cleaning your room and taking care of your own personal stuff but since you are sort of the atom of your life everything in your life hinges upon you if you don't get this thing right here if you can't discipline yourself you can't wake up in the morning you can't feed yourself properly you can't be dutiful then you can't really grow beyond that and it's going to lead to dysfunctions within your personal life and also in your family life and in your society if everybody's doing that and that's what jordan peterson is really trying to point out to you and that is valid and that is important the mistake that stage green and orange people have made is that they have dismissed the importance of stage blue they've demonized it and made a shadow out of it and what i mean by that is that there are certain aspects of stage blue that they don't they don't like and it's easy to make a straw man out of any of these stages so the straw man that we can make out of stage blue is that they're fascists they're racists they're nationalists they're nazis they are intolerant they're hateful this is the typical straw man that progressives make of stage blue conservatives and it's easy to make that straw man because when you look through human history you can see a lot of the excesses of stage blue which were very nasty and murderous and oppressive you see things like slavery and racism and nationalism and xenophobia and genocide ethic cleansing these all stem from stage blue you see holy wars wage from stage blue because at stage blue a society is theocratic it tends to believe that its religion is the only true one and all the other ones are satan worship and so naturally then it was to defeat them and have a monopoly on religion so what happens with these stages is that the stage is played out to the hilt until it becomes so extreme and so excessive that all of us collectively recognize that you know it's gone too far and that happened for example with stage blue over the last couple hundred years we've had so many holy wars we've had so many genocides we've had world war ii effectively started by stage blue nazis um and many other examples like this that could be cited we've had all these examples and we've seen that it's it's too limited it produces too much suffering and so america itself was actually founded on sort of a radical stage orange idea of religious tolerance america is not founded on the idea that america is exclusively christian it's founded on the idea that we've we've had societies in the past where they were theocratic and it led to suffering and evil and so now what we're going to do is we're going to stop we're just going to stop like right from the beginning we're going to stop this at its root this idea that you should kill people for differences in religion and so now today very few people in america and in the developed world get killed for differences of religion we expect religious tolerance that's actually written into the constitution because the framers of the constitution were actually pretty advanced cutting edge stage orange thinkers and back then stage orange was not a very common stage the constitution is not a stage blue document but anyways so um so we've evolved beyond that but now we're living in a sort of materialistic stage orange world view and that's great there are some great aspects to that because it's more scientific it's more rational and it's true that there were certain superstitions and irrational aspects that were unscientific and even untrue in the stage blue world view that's correct and the stage blue worldview tends to be very dogmatic and intolerant at its extreme and that becomes a problem so you transcend that with stage orange you have a more global mindset a more scientific mindset and that's good and you might think well great that's it we we're done but we're not done because and here's where jordan peterson comes in is he would say now all you're living for is you're living for materialism you're living this never-ending rat race of acquiring more and more fame sex money and success and while some of that is good it becomes a problem because your life then becomes hollow your life is not about anything deeply meaningful or spiritual at stage orange you've de-spirited your life and reality you've demystified everything to death to the point where now life is purely utilitarian and even though you might think that's a good thing it actually comes back to bite you in the ass because your life loses meaning and depth which is why jordan peterson talks a lot about values and meaning and depth and a spiritual component to life because what he's really hearkening back to is that old-timey traditional stage blue and what he wants to tell the orange and green people is that look you guys are overlooking something it's not as simple as that our ancestors lived with these original uh religious ideas for thousands of years because they were idiots and just superstitious and unscientific and irrational there was some of that there was plenty of that but also there were deep truths contained within these religious traditions that gave meaning and purpose to life beyond merely material existence and if you ignore that that will create a dysfunctional life and a dysfunctional society it will lead to things like the the breakdown of the family unit it will lead to sort of hollow political activity that isn't grounded in anything deeper and it will just leave you like a leaf blowing in the wind going back and forth not knowing which way to go not being able to discipline yourself in your life and and order your life towards some sort of higher vision and see if you're someone who didn't have that in their life and jordan peterson comes along and tells you about this for you that's a big aha moment you say ah aha that's what i've been missing i grew up in this stage green culture in this stage orange culture i didn't even really know or think deeply about stage blue or that it was valuable or important and i've been just floating around i haven't been able to make anything in my life and then because of this i was depressed and anxious and nihilistic and uh i wasn't able to have proper intimate relationships and i wasn't able to build a proper career and these sorts of things and then and now that jordan peterson has shared these insights with me now i can move in some direction and that's very good and very useful so what's the problem well the there are multiple problems here we're going to discuss this in layers the first problem is that even though he's teaching you these things jordan peterson himself has a stage green shadow as i would say he himself is a very nuanced and sophisticated thinker unlike many progressives smear him as he is not a racist he's not a sexist he's not a homophobe he's not a transphobe he's not a fascist he's not a crypto fascist he's not a nationalist and he's not a religious fanatic even though he says he believes in god effectively and he sort of comes from the judeo-christian worldview that he was raised into i believe so um i would put jordan peterson somewhere around uh orange slash yellow he actually has some very sophisticated tier 2 stage yellow thinking abilities but he can't fully go into stage yellow because he's stuck with a shadow a very significant shadow of stage green and that's holding him back obviously he's he's very much mastered stage blue as well um the healthy aspects of stage blue and that's that's one of the things you can admire about jordan peterson is that he is a good role model of healthy stage blue he doesn't take it too far he doesn't take stage blue into nationalism or fascism or racism or sexism or these sorts of things if you think he does as a progressive and you disagree with me consider the possibility that you yourself have a stage blue shadow and you're not looking at the situation objectively you have biases that are clouding your vision but let's wait about those biases let's talk about jordan peterson's shadow so what is this shadow what is a shadow well he talks about shadows the shadow is basically any aspect of consciousness or reality which you disown and deny as being part of yourself it it's something you call other to you and something you despise and hate and you refuse to integrate into yourself so for example if you think hitler is an evil monster then hitler is your shadow by making him your shadow you refuse to integrate him and to really fully understand where he was coming from now don't get me wrong i'm being very nuanced here i'm not saying that hitler is an angel and that there aren't serious problems with hitler there are very serious problems with hitler but if you think he's just pure evil and a monster you've turned him into your shadow you can turn anything in reality into your shadow so what jordan peterson has done is he's turned stage green into his shadow the social justice warrior types and the problem fundamentally is that those of you who are following jordan peterson precisely because perhaps 80 to 90 of his psychological material non-political lectures and things are very good psychology and you should learn that the other 10 to 20 percent is coming from his shadow he can't really help but to exude his own the shadow comes through in his work in his talk and the way he carries himself in his attitude in his world view he can't help you can't help it nobody can your shadow will come through if you speak long enough and so his shadow comes through but most of his audience are not subtle enough to understand they don't make these fine distinctions between stages and shadows and things they don't understand and so they get indoctrinated with his shadow they get corrupted by his shadow he kind of sneaks it in there he's doing this unconsciously i'm not saying he's doing this deliberately and um and that's a disservice to the people following him because then you are infected with his shadow and that becomes your shadow and this is especially problematic if you lean conservative because jordan peterson has certain conservative leanings and biases it's especially problematic if you lean conservative because it's just going to reinforce his shadow against this stage green is just going to be reinforced it's going to turn into a confirmation bias into your own mind in your own mind and then you're just going to buy the whole thing hook line and sinker and you yourself will get stuck at stage blue and orange and can't advance further the point of this whole conversation is to unleash your mind from all of the obstacles so that you can get to the higher stages beyond green to yellow and turquoise so where does jordan peterson's shadow come from and what is it exactly well jordan peterson understand i mean he's he's fairly old so he grew up during the cold war era he talks a lot about totalitarian regimes in soviet russia and in china maoism um marxism the old school marxism soviet communism stalinism and all of the evils of this and you know a common framing by conservatives is that you know communism has killed 100 million people in the last century and so he's coming from this perspective and when you're coming from this perspective and you see college kids talking about socialism you see he makes a conflation between the two and he thinks that what's going on in universities today on university campuses with gender fluidity and gender equality and sort of anti-racism and antifa movements and and mark cultural marxism this course stuff that this is just a rehash of what happened in soviet russia during the the the red revolution there and this is a very big mistake from this he creates a shadow out of green because he misunderstands green anything you misunderstand about reality becomes your shadow if you don't like it and so this is a very common conflation that's made deliberately by many conservatives especially on fox news oan and all the the talk radio and even on youtube conservative youtube they keep making this conflation between stage green socialism or social democracy versus the old school style venezuelan or um uh sort of russian soviet or maoist communism when actually that sort of maoist stalinist communism that wasn't staged green that was stage blue that's the crucial mistake that conservatives make and they make that mistake because they're paranoid the way they frame in their mind what stage green is they're so scared of it because they conflate it with the evils of the last century that in their mind that justifies opposing it and demonizing it at any cost they're not looking at it objectively so what stage green actually is is it's not the the communism of old of your granddaddy what it is is it's more like the social democracy of the northern scandinavian countries yes it could be socialism but it doesn't even have to be socialism the scandinavian countries are not truly socialist they're social democracies they still have free markets and so on and really they're good places to live the happiness index in northern europe is the highest in the world the level of corruption in northern european countries is the highest or i'm sorry the the index for the level of corruption which means that the higher the indexes the lower the corruption in the country is actually higher than in the us that means the us is more corrupt than nordic countries and levels of social equality and fairness are better in nordic countries than they are in the united states the nordic countries are under no threat of turning into a stalinist dictatorship and to frame them in that way is a deep misunderstanding of human psychology not just politics human psychology and cultural psychology that's the power of this spiral dynamics model that i shared with you so you have to be very careful about straw manning these different stages it's very easy it's very easy if i wanted to straw man stage green i could say oh they're all communists and they're all like antifa and they're all going to turn violent and they're all going to go crazy and they're going to tax us to death and then that's going to lead to the destruction of of america yeah if you frame it that way in your mind then yeah it seems stupid but that's not what stage green really is you're misunderstanding it see i could also straw man stage blue i could say that if we follow jordan peterson's advice of stage blue and we go back and we start to study the religious texts and so forth we're all going to become irrational superstitious we're going to bring back the witch trials we're going to start burning wishes at the stake and we're going to uh turn into nazis because of nationalism we're all going to turn racism and then we're going to bring back slavery see that would be what it's like if i was very paranoid stage green and i made a shadow out of sage blue even though conservatives like to say that 100 million people were killed by communism again you have to be very careful with how your mind is cherry-picking the data and the facts maybe that's true but you also have to weigh it against how many people have been killed in the last century by capitalism how many wars were started by capitalism how many trillions of dollars have been lost how many people have been exploited in sweatshops all around the world how many people have had their incomes siphoned off how many people have suffered under opiate and died from opioid addiction which is pushed by by giant capitalistic corporations with predatory marketing and so forth how many people have been scammed of their life savings how many people have lost their retirement savings in wall street crashes and and ponzi schemes how many democratically elected foreign governments were deposed and undermined into totalitarian dictatorships and theocracies by u.s intelligence agencies for the purposes of advancing capitalist interests of giant multinational corporations you see so this idea that capitalism is innocent it's not millions many tens of millions of people have been exploited and deeply pained and even killed by capitalism so it's not so obvious how to weigh these things properly so don't just my point here is not that capitalism is is evil or that socialism is great my point is that these things are much more nuanced and complex than you think and they're more nuanced than jordan peterson portrays them to be and that concern that conservatives portray them to be and that it's very easy to make straw men out of these different stages so you have to be very careful and this is not just a mistake jordan peterson makes it's a mistake his followers make it's a mistake conservatives make it's a mistake progressives and liberals make too because most of the critiques of jordan peterson that you will find on youtube are going to be reactionary critiques coming from stage green which has developed a shadow out of stage blue and stage orange and therefore they're not able to properly understand jordan peterson and the value that he brings therefore they discount any of his value and that is incorrect and that's why we're having this conversation so that we can make these distinctions in your mind so that you have a clearer picture and you don't fall into these simplistic traps and shadows and then you're free to move up and grow yourself more which is ultimately what we all want jordan peterson wants that i want that we all want that it's just a matter of how do you do it and it's trickier to do than than most people think so jordan peterson talks a lot about for example that stage green is bad because it wants equality of outcome and equality of outcome is something like we need to have an equal number of men and women bricklayers we'd have equal salaries for men and women regardless of how hard they work or how qualified they are and of course that's ridiculous but that's a straw man of stage green that is not really what stage green wants what stage green is about if you really want to understand stage green stage green before we actually get into that let me let me bring in another point that jordan peters talks about a lot which is hierarchies he rails against stage green for wanting to level all hierarchies and he says that there are natural hierarchies and hierarchies are important and he criticizes stage green for demonizing all hierarchies as being oppressive and just all about power and he counters that by saying that the majority of hierarchies are not corrupt they're not oppressive they're not about power they're about competence so what he means is that if you go to work and you have a boss chances are your boss is not your boss because he's some sort of power-hungry tyrant who domineered everyone in the workplace and put himself at the top and crowd himself king but rather he got promoted from within because he was the most hardworking the most loyal to the company and has the most experience and takes on the most responsibility and therefore he's your boss because he knows more than you he's willing to take on more responsibility than you he's willing to work longer hours than you and therefore he should get paid more than you that's only fair that's how he would portray the situation and that's generally true i would say but the way that a stage green person would counter that is by saying yes that's generally true but that's only true maybe in 80 of the cases let's say 80 of hierarchies are actually valid and genuine based on competence and merit and they don't need to be destroyed but that still leaves 20 which are corrupt 20 percent in which the person holding the position of power is only holding that position not because he's the most creative or the most selfless or the best qualified but because he's an [ __ ] and he's entitled based upon inheriting it from his family or something like that or just by playing manipulative political games and honestly there's a lot of truth to that there is maybe 10 or 20 percent of people in positions of power who only got there because they are sociopaths and sociopathy is actually a very effective strategy for gaining lots of power and wealth and sex and fame and the epitome of this is of course donald trump what is donald trump if you look at him objectively he is not qualified to do almost anything the only thing he's good at is spin [ __ ] and con artistry that's his skill but that is not a legitimate skill that's a corrupting skill he's not actually competent at anything he does every single one of his businesses fails including his presidency he's not competent at governing he's not competent managing people he's not confident of hiring people he's not competent at finding loyal people who have a high integrity because he has none himself and so because of this um and yet look and yet in our society the way our society is structured he was still able to rise so high and achieve so much and and get hundreds of millions of dollars well i mean he inherited 450 million dollars from his daddy is that truly competence that's what the progressives would say and here jordan peterson has a problem because he doesn't sufficiently acknowledge that a significant number a significant percentage up maybe up to 20 or even more of our hierarchies and our social systems are corrupt in this way and that this hurts a lot of people down below jordan peterson portrays it as stage green wants to destroy all hierarchies and maybe a few radical and dumb stage green people do want that but the majority of stage green people do not want that if you look at the way that the scandinavian countries are structured there's still plenty of hierarchy you're not getting rid of hierarchy anytime soon that's not something you need to be paranoid about but we do want to level some of the bad corrupt parts of hierarchies we did that in the past for example there used to exist monarchies now they're almost all gone what happened well we recognized that that was a corrupt hierarchy it was oppressing lots of people hurting lots of people and we rebelled against it collectively as a society and we we said no and today we're happier for it right do you want to live under a monarchy do you have a problem with the monarchy then you got a problem with hierarchy and this isn't just about government it's also about institutions it's also about academia um a lot of academia is corrupt like the professors and the administrators of many universities they're not there because they're the most intelligent and competent people they're there because they're the best at bringing in business at doing marketing at using shady manipulative tactics through corruption through just family lineage through their wealth that they inherited through the last name that they have a lot of the ivy league schools are all about that it's all about the sort of legacy model it's not about truly which students are the most intelligent it's really like getting into harvard you'll have a better chance getting into harvard not if you're more intelligent but rather if your daddy went to harvard that's how it works and if he can give them a million dollar donation that's how it works so is that a competence hierarchy no [ __ ] no that's really corrupt and it's not healthy for our society that's what stage green is concerned about and stage green is also concerned about the influence of materialism in our culture especially money and politics the way money corrupts everything the way that you can just buy anything you want with money including power and crush people underneath you see stage green to understand it you have to radically expand your sense of empathy and compassion for other people and even animals for that matter which is why veganism is is very prominent stage green because you expand your compassion you start to empathize with the suffering of others the suffering of the poor the downtrodden the marginalized the minorities the third world countries you start to care about these things you want to help all of these uh people and and beings um and so you become more open and you become more sensitive to how the capitalist system is rigging the game in such a way that it becomes very difficult to succeed or advance yourself as an individual for example stage green person looks at the health care system in america sees tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily not because they can't afford health care but because our health care costs are so much more than they need to be compared to other countries like in europe like our prescription drug costs uh you know a drug that costs in europe ten dollars might cost a thousand dollars in the u.s and the only reason that is is because of the health care cartel or mafia that has been entrenched and established in america purely for profit now we ask ourselves is that a healthy way to structure society is that a fair way to structure society where just because some giant multinational pharmaceutical company has billions of dollars in the bank it can exploit it can buy politicians bribe them to change the laws change the tax system such that everything advantages that company that company becomes a giant monopoly buys up all the smaller companies jacks up the prices on all the drugs and then your mother who has cancer can't even afford to pay for her cancer medication and then she dies is that a society you want to live in of course the answer is no do you want to live in a society where for example a giant chemical company has so much wealth and has monopolized so much of the market it has so much power that it can buy its own senators it can pay those senators to deregulate chemist chemical regulations it can then it's then allowed to dump metric tons of mercury and lead and arsenic from its chemical production facilities directly into streams and lakes and ponds and oceans from which your fish and your food and your water comes from and then your kids drink the water supply into which was dumped arsenic and radioactive materials you know upstream they dumped it then it went downstream into your water supply and then your children drink this and then your child develops a mental disorder like adhd or autism or some sort of retardation or autoimmune conditions and disorders or cancer and then your child has to live with that and then you have to care for that child for the rest of your life is that a society you want to live in the answer is obviously no but the problem with jordan peterson's politics and with conservative politics is that they don't acknowledge this problem because in their world view everyone should be just responsible for themselves this is the sort of libertarian worldview it's the idea that well we're all just individuals man i'm gonna do what's good for me and you do what's good for you and then uh everything will be fine but it won't be fine because if i'm just an individual and i'm just behaving selfishly as though i'm not part of a community of 8 billion people then i can amass billions of dollars and i can dump radioactive material and poison into your water supply and you won't be able to do anything about it because you're just an average person you can't sue me i've got a hundred lawyers that i can afford you can't even afford one and what good is suing me gonna do once your kid already has cancer and dies are you gonna get satisfaction from winning a suit against me and even if you do i'll pay you 50 million dollars but you know how much i earned from dumping that poison into the water supply i earned a billion dollars so to me to pay you 50 to get a billion no problem that's effectively what libertarianism leads to so what stage green wants if we're going to steal man stage green what stage green wants is it wants a more fair society it does not want equality of outcome what it wants is actually it wants equality of opportunity so jordan peterson here misunderstands and mischaracterizes stage green because he doesn't integrate it properly he says that sage green only wants equality of outcome no what stage green is doing in stage green is looking at equality of outcome in order to judge whether there is truly equality of opportunity you see because how do you measure whether equality of opportunity exists how do you measure whether our society and our social system our police system and our military and so forth are academic systems how do you measure that these systems are actually fair and honest and uncorrupted well one way to do it is to actually look at the outcomes you can't completely ignore outcomes now that doesn't mean that everything has to be split down the middle that doesn't mean in the way jordan peterson says that we need to have an equal number of of bricklayers men and women that's a ridiculous straw man no reasonable intelligent stage green person is asking for that if they are they're being stupid but they aren't asking for that what they're asking for is a redress of the corruptions of the past it was true that there was slavery in the past it's still true that even though slavery is gone and official segregation is gone there are still racial problems within these various systems we can debate about to what degree it exists there and what kind of remedies need to be taken to correct it but the stage green person generally errors on the side of giving benefit of the doubt to the marginalized and to the downtrodden the stage green person wants to rectify some of the inequities of the past the conservative stage blue and orange person says now we don't need to do that that's stupid and the reason they feel that way is because they lack the empathy that comes online at stage green see if you had a child who was gay or trans or had cancer or was poisoned by a by a pharmaceutical company or was addicted to opioids because of the predatory marketing that these giant companies like purdue pharma did um now they're out of business uh if that happened to you you would suddenly develop a lot of empathy but if you live a comfy life with a decent amount of money where you're not bothered by these things these things haven't personally touched you yet then you can you can act as though these things are not important so hierarchies are not bad we will not be flattening all of them that's not going to happen stop fear-mongering about that but some hierarchies do need to be questioned because they are oppressive is everything oppressive no the majority things are not oppressive in society but some things are and those things are worthwhile to to question and to change and that's what progressives ultimately want see when you see it in this light all of a sudden progressivism and social democracy doesn't seem so radical so the problem is when you start to portray people like bernie sanders and aoc as though they are antifa thugs who want to take over the country through a revolution maoist style and then you know execute all the capitalists and then put in a totalitarian regime i think that jordan peterson honestly has that kind of fantasy in his mind about what the excesses of stage green are and that is precisely incorrect and i think the danger is that if you watch too much of his political talk he will sneak that sort of paranoia into your mind one of the mistakes that jordan peterson makes is that because he worked his whole life in this stage green bubble of academia he was overly exposed to the excesses of stage green through academia and he overestimates how much of that is a problem globally and specifically even in in canada or in america the majority of the world is below stage blue in their development stage blue or below and the majority even in america is stage orange stage blue it's not even at green yet so the idea that green is the dangerous stage this is a misguided idea yes there can be dangers to green i'm not dismissing that yes sometimes green can even be violent for example with antifa sometimes they'll throw a brick through a window sometimes they maybe even kill somebody but you have to understand that every stage kills people and in general the higher your stage the less people you kill so if we're going to be comparing numbers of how many people killed who then and the dangers based upon that then i could easily make a straw man out of stage blue and i could say well the things that jordan peterson is teaching is going to lead to white nationalism and fascism and it's going to lead to many people getting killed and that is actually the greater danger the danger jordan peterson misunderstands the danger the danger is not that we're going to go to hog wild on stage green and then totalitarianism will be installed in america the danger is actually that we're not going to go green fast enough and that many people will suffer and die needlessly from that and also that there's going to be a backlash from stage blue and then if you enable stage blue too much that actually turns into what we see with trumpism and the kind of stuff with the with the riots of um um you know of the capital the insurrection of the capital now if you're concerned you'll say oh leo but uh but what about antifa yeah antifa is creating problems for stage green and i wish it didn't exist because it makes stage green way too easy to demonize into straw man if antifa didn't exist that image problem would be gone but it does exist so there are excesses but the excesses of antifa pale in comparison to the excesses of stage orange and stage blue a lot more people die of stage orange and blue than a stage green this is what's being missed also what's being missed is that every stage comes in a certain sequence and you cannot skip stages and you must go through all the stages if you want to get to the higher stages and that this entire process is inevitable therefore this idea that if america right now is center of gravity orange leaning a little bit green already evolved out of stage blue what does that mean based on this model it means that in the next 50 years the country is moving in this direction so what you need to come to accept as a conservative is that no matter how much you whine and [ __ ] and moan and kick and scream no matter what excuses you make no matter how you vote no matter how much you resist you can even start a civil war if you want but none of that will prevent the country from moving towards green over the next 50 years it's going to happen you can't change that you can only resist it and slow it down and if you do you're going to create more suffering and more people will die and be harmed as a result of that we are facing genuine and real problems in the world that cannot be solved at stage orange the limitations of orange are becoming abundantly clear with climate change with pollution with giant corporate monopolies with wall street with crashes of the economy these things are not sustainable and this will not persist into the future society must find solutions beyond that if you can't see and acknowledge that you're stuck and this is a big problem with jordan peterson's politics and with some of the some of his fans who follow him for that reason now not all of his fans follow him for the political stuff i think a lot of a lot of his fans just like him for the psychology stuff they might not even know his political opinions very much if they only watch his psychology lectures i've i've personally met people like that who don't even know jordan peterson's politics the problem is that if you keep listening to him long enough you will eventually imbibe his politics you'll absorb it through osmosis without even consciously realizing what happened because he rails against stage green quite a bit he sneaks it into to almost all of his talks in one form or another whether he's talking about equality opportunity or hierarchies or lobsters or whatever he sneaks it in there or he talks about feminism or he talks about gender fluidity and he sneaks it in there so what's not being acknowledged is that if we're at stage orange the next stage is green and we have not realized or actualized green yet so this idea that well i don't like green therefore let's just skip green to yellow it's not gonna fly that means you created a shadow that's gonna create dysfunction suffering death and evil if you do that instead what needs to happen you need to recognize that you have certain biases and prejudices you have certain fears of stage green you need to set those aside you need to work on really understanding green integrate it and then we can move on to yellow but that's not going to happen collectively for another 100 years we've been facing over the last 10 or 20 years as society is starting to inch towards green we've been encountering so much backlash and resistance from sage blue and orange that's effectively what happened for example um with the whole maga movement all the alt-right movements and we have many movements around the world now towards authoritarianism why is that because as the whole world is shifting more and more towards green people are scared of it they don't understand it the media is fear-mongering to them about it and therefore the way they vote is they vote regressively and then this leads to some of these sorts of regressive nationalistic movements we see around the world we see it in russia we see it in germany we see some of it in in poland in brazil in in in china and elsewhere this is not only an american problem now am i really worried that we're going to go into fascism no not in the developed world in america in canada and so forth there's never going to be fascism it's not a legitimate concern because what you have to understand is that human psyches are all evolving together there it's not a legitimate concern that we're gonna go back to soviet communism because we've we've already exhausted that and seen its limitations and grown beyond it the socialism of today what conservatives call socialism is really more like social democracy it's more like scandinavia and scandinavia is a pretty good place to live now it's got its problems i'm not saying it doesn't have its excesses you can you can cite me some articles and examples of excess in scandinavia sure but i can cite you a lot more of the excess of stage orange in america and if you were the average person you would rather live in scandinavia than you would in america see america is really great to live in if you are like in the top five percent then it's awesome you're so free just to do anything you can buy politicians you can buy corporate jets you pay low taxes you can avoid taxes you can do tax shelters you can do capital gains and like it's just it's a it's a it's a wonderland for the rich but if you're not in that top five percent then it's not so great so if you if you were randomly rolling the dice like before you were born you're gonna choose where to incarnate should i incarnate into america or into scandinavia you would you would be stupid to pick america because the chances that you're gonna roll that dice you're not gonna get snake eyes you're gonna get something else and uh you're not gonna be in the top five percent and in that case better to live in scandinavia so this is something to keep in mind now um see the reason that the country will inevitably move towards green is because orange is unsustainable what we're doing with co2 emissions what we're doing with the markets the wealth gap inequality that's happening between the rich and the poor all of these things are unsustainable they can only continue maybe for another 30 years maybe for the next 30 years we can still keep pushing orange but the more we push it the more it's going to break down and eventually it will become so unsustainable that everyone will start to acknowledge that we got to go green and it's already happening but there's also backlash because many people don't understand what's really going on they're clueless about this model they're scared people in the media are feeding them paranoia uh and and these fantasies of evil socialism and communism from the cold war era these are biases and holdovers from the cold war era and and this is making people so confused that they don't know how to vote properly or think properly about these issues so green is going to happen the only question is will you resist it or not why resist why not open yourself to it understand it and then whatever limits and problems there are we'll deal with them why don't you trust that we can deal with them why are you paranoid about it that would be my question jordan peterson why do you have so little faith in mankind and of course he would say well because 100 million people were killed in last century yeah exactly 100 million people were killed in the last century based on stage blue and orange and actually way more were killed because we didn't even count orange fully into that stage don't be so preoccupied about the the boogeyman of green that you overlook the evils of the current system the current system truly does have plenty of evils in it now here's another problem with uh with jordan peterson's take on things is that he talks a lot about individualism versus collectivism and he frames it as though collectivism is is dangerous whereas individualism is the most important one and this is a this is a very deep misunderstanding of of this dynamic of this duality and i want to help you to correct that misunderstanding so today conservatives generally lean more towards the individualistic sort of libertarian worldview where they think that well don't blame society for your problems you're just being lazy take responsibility get disciplined clean your room get your house in order bootstrap yourself make something of yourself earn the money and then you'll have it and stop whining and complaining that's the sort of conservative worldview it's about taking personal responsibility for things now the collectivist more green world view is more like we're not just individuals we're a society we're a community and not just as an america or as canada or as europe but as the world when one country pollutes the oceans it pollutes the oceans for everybody when japan dumps radioactive waste from fukushima into the ocean it goes everywhere in the ocean not just around japan everything is interconnected we're living in a globalized world with internet where cultures are all intermingling where people are speaking different languages to each other just like like never before where you can call a friend in in africa from america in seconds and it costs you nothing where the internet has interconnected everything where cheap air air travel around the world is easy and fast and convenient where viruses travel from one country to the next and no no borders in this kind of world you have to acknowledge that we are a collective we are not just individuals if you treat the world as though everyone just an individual a little atom you are missing the crucial emergent properties that result from social networks and i'm not just talking about the internet i'm talking about the entire planet our economies are not distinct economies they're all interconnected together and so this libertarian fantasy this conservative fantasy that i'm just an individual and as long as i get my own house in order then everything else will be okay as jordan peterson tends to to feed you that idea this is there is some truth to that it is very important to work on your own life and that's what i teach the most i teach so much about turning inwards and taking responsibility for your life i teach all these things because of course they're extremely important but what i also recognize is that it's not about individual versus collective it's both it's the yin yang relationship the two serve each other here is why here's the example that will explain this for you let's say i'm struggling in school i'm like 18 years old i'm struggling in school to to make something of myself to succeed to get good grades to get into a good university i'm struggling with that i have maybe adhd i'm depressed i'm anxious i'm having these problems i come to jordan peterson and he says put your life in order mister you got to clean your room you got to get disciplined you got to maybe start going to church you got to read some books and you got to watch some of my lectures and you got to you got to know find some meaning in your life and stop wasting your time worrying about these collective issues about capitalism and socialism and racism and and gender rights or you know corporate greed and predatory capitalists not worried about this stuff because that's not your problem you can worry about that after you fix yourself okay that sounds good in theory but what if the reason i'm having problems is because i have adhd i can't focus i can't meditate i can't even sit down to read a book for 10 minutes because my mind is just going crazy and the reason that is is because of the lead and the mercury in the water that i've been drinking in my public water supply for my entire life for 18 years is that something i can fix is that an individual problem or is that a collective problem and are we just supposed to allow that to keep happening and be quiet about it i'm just supposed to ignore that no that's a that's a systemic collective problem and if you think that this is something exaggerated example it's not at all autism adhd depression even criminality autoimmune disorders these are all directly linked to heavy metals that you consume in your food and in your water where these heavy metals come from they come from a lack of regulations for giant corporations and pollution you know in the 1970s or so before regulation was passed by the us government all gasoline was leaded gasoline today when you go to the gas station you see it says unleaded gasoline everywhere why does it say unleaded because you can't have leaded gasoline anymore why not because regulation was passed in the 1970s or so i don't remember the exact date roughly that time because research was done which found that there's a direct correlation between the amount of lead in a child's brain tissue and his propensity to become a criminal later in life the correlation is so strong that it's like a factor of 10 or 20. that means that if you have a certain level of lead or mercury in your brain your propensity to become a criminal a violent criminal is going to increase by 20 times think about that think about how significant that is is that a problem you can solve as an individual as a kid as a teenager no this is a problem that's happening to you you don't you're not even aware that it's happening to you maybe this is the first time in your life you're hearing about it and it's already been happening to you for the last 10 20 years you're just hearing it from me this is just one example there are hundreds of examples like this another example might be that let's say you're trying to bootstrap yourself in life you're working hard and so forth but you're not even able to find affordable housing you're not able to buy a house you're not even able to rent a house because in your area all of the real estate has been bought up by wealthy hedge funds who are just looking to speculate and make profit off of real estate such that the rent is sky high you can't afford it and then you're forced to move to a worse part of the country to a cheaper part of the country or maybe even go homeless is this your own personal problem well to a certain extent you are responsible for keeping a job and paying rent and so forth so it is a personal problem um maybe if you worked a little smarter and harder you would be able to pay your rent but even if you did that you would still be getting screwed and exploited and predated upon by these giant capitalistic hedge funds because these billionaires acquire so much money they want to invest that money to earn even more money and this keeps widening the the wealth gap in the country eroding the middle class this is not good for the country it's not good for real estate prices it's not good in many different ways and then on top of that these rich people they avoid paying any tax upon these profits because they just funnel it into various offshore accounts so acknowledge that these are serious legitimate problems and that individualism and collectivism they fit together like yin and yang black and white you need them both and the way that these spiral sages work is that they alternate between individualist and collective stages so for example stage red is individualist stage blue is collectivist stage orange is individualist again stage green is collectivist and stage yellow is individuals again so don't get stuck on any one you're going to be jumping between them as you grow and develop yourself in your life you can't just say that because collectivism was tried back in soviet russia or maoist china that collectivism is now evil this is this is a preposterous straw man and a deep misunderstanding of human and cultural psychology jordan peterson does make some valid points about for example problems with gender fluidity and the breaking down of certain traditional structures for example he would say that it's a problem when you start playing with gender identities because it can make you confused and then it can break down the family unit such that it's hard to raise children it's hard to even keep a marriage because it's hard for you to even like that traditional role of male and female which is very strong in stage blue that starts to break down as we evolve and it starts to create maybe problems people are confused about their sexuality or they're sexually dysfunctional they don't have sex as often or as soon as they should they they don't have children that creates problems perhaps because family and children and a marriage actually is a deep source of fulfillment in most people's lives and if you're missing that component you're missing out on an important part of life he would say and that's generally correct even though you can play with gender identities and come up with new ones and such things the problem is is that that's not necessarily going to be very functional and it may not even make you fulfilled as fulfilled as you think exercising freedom willy-nilly is does not in and of itself make you fulfilled and it might actually start to erode important building blocks of society which is the family a cohesive family is important when you don't have a solid family structure then every individual that's born is sort of born crippled and dysfunctional but even though that's true the reality is is that that family that sort of classical traditional family unit of your grandparents and maybe your parents it didn't just break down simply because of stage green it broke down because of its own inherent limitations it started breaking down maybe in the 1960s people became more sexually promiscuous homosexuality was more acceptable people started experimenting partying drinking doing drugs having more sex because part of stage blue is a repression of sex it represses the sexual instinct tries to control it very rigidly that has its prose it has its cons you can't keep a thing repressed forever so eventually pandora's box was opened with stage orange sex became this material thing whereas in stage blue sex was more of a sort of a traditional family thing and in fact you know the best example of stage blue people is that these are people who believe that you should not have sex with anyone unless you're married to them stage orange says oh [ __ ] all that that's stupid i'm gonna i'm gonna have sex with as many people as i want the more the better stage green is is also very open with sex and it starts to experiment with different kinds of sex and so forth but the problem is that that was going to happen anyway you can't just constrain the old traditions and keep them in place forever it was going to break apart anyways so what i would say to counter jordan peterson is i would say again don't get too paranoid we will figure out new structures for how to raise kids how to maintain families it's not going away man mankind's not going to have stop having sex any time soon and it's not going to stop having babies anytime soon and yes there will be a period of adjustment where we're not sure you know maybe how to do it as well as our ancestors did it or whatever but there was also benefits because we're not as sexually repressed as we were in the victorian era like i heard stories in the victorian era where a woman would have some sort of gynecological problem um like a cancer or something and uh or a pain and ordinarily like today we would just she would just go to a doctor to a gynecologist and she would get it fixed but she couldn't she couldn't do that in the victorian era because all doctors back then were men they weren't women you can't have a woman doctor back then and it was part of the patriarchy um and then um so so that was that and but but then also you say well so what well so what people were so sexually repressed back then especially women they were supposed to be ladies proper ladies that she couldn't go to a male doctor and open her legs to her and in fact she would there was a quote that i read where the doctor said you know come on over i'll take a look and the woman you know said you know i'm a proper lady i would rather die before you know i show my my privates to you see that's a real problem that's that's stage blue gone too far too restrictive too unreasonable so now you understand the the shadow now you understand a little bit more about the political stuff uh in general what i would say is that jordan peterson makes good points but oftentimes he over exaggerates them and he puts that fear into it and that's in in general the the problem with the conservative mindset is that it's too fearful it's too paranoid it's too closed to new ideas it's too attached to the old traditions and that's part of part of the reason for that is because there's actually differences between the conservative brain and the the liberal brain the conservative brain is more wired towards fear it's more closed jordan peterson himself talks about this and that's correct there's truth to that now does that mean that all fear is legitimate no some fear is legitimate but be careful not to turn it into paranoia all right now it's time to get into the real juice of this conversation that was all the political stuff that's not what's most important now this is what's really really most important and it is how to get you from green and even higher and this now goes to we're setting aside all the political stuff and we're going to be just talking about the psychology and the philosophy and the epistemology and the metaphysics of jordan peterson's teachings and what is lacking there there's so much to say it's hard to know where to begin so a big thing that jordan peterson talks about is values he talks about the importance of meaning in life and he frames it as a hierarchy and he talks about god when asked does he believe in god he says well i act as though god were real which is a complex and clever way of saying that he does but you see jordan peterson is sort of stuck in a bind the bind is that on the one hand he deeply intuits that there's something more to life and to reality than just pure materialism he intuits that and it's obvious to me there is a spiritual dimension to life he knows it he knows it's very important he's trying to guide his audience to that realization but he himself does not know how to put his finger on it and how to explicitly tell you what it is he alludes to it and that's why he uses a lot of references from movies and old pinocchio cartoons and myths and allegories from the past from the bible and from elsewhere because his argument is that basically what you need in life is you need an overarching hierarchy that gives structure and meaning to your whole existence and for that you need some sort of top value at your hierarchy he would say that traditionally in traditional cultures that top value was god but the problem jordan peace and has is that even though intuitively he thinks god exists he can't really say that god exists because he has this identity and career he's built up as a scientist professor academic public intellectual and it has gone out of vogue to say that god exists in intellectual circles in universities as an academic because if you say that they're gonna ask you well where's your proof and if you say well i don't have any proof it's just a gut feeling they're going to laugh at you and say that oh you're one of those superstitious irrational people and they're going to kick you out and you're going to lose all credibility professionally as an academic so he can't come out and say that and he also values science too he's not just doing it for show he he also values the methods of science he believes in evolution evolutionary biology he uses this for his arguments and so forth so his challenge personally that he's struggling with is he's struggling how do i integrate the gut feeling i have that god is important and it might even be real but i don't know what it is i don't know how to prove it versus science is real and rationality is true and that's important too how do you reconcile these two things he can't quite tell you and he himself doesn't know because actually he's gotten himself stuck with the stage green shadow so here let's really dive deep are you ready for this one of the biggest things that has him stuck with stage green and the shadow is that stage green this is what he talks about as post-modernism most of the people who listen to him have no idea what post-modernism is it's a very complex and nuanced topic i actually have episodes about jacques dereta post-modernism deconstruction and non-duality you can go check that out but anyways the summary of it is this is that the difference between modernism versus postmodernism is that modernism had a sort of objective view of reality there's a objective way that things are there are men there are women there are atoms and molecules chairs and tables in the world things are how they seem and how we think of them that's roughly the modernist view and we can think about them rationally and there's good things in the world and there's bad things in the world then the postmodernist came along and started questioning all that and said wait a minute maybe these are arbitrary biases that we have maybe this stuff isn't actually absolutely true but it's subjective maybe it's relative maybe if you're living in the middle east your culture is the best for you relatively speaking and if you're living in america your culture is the best for you relatively speaking but then if you're living in japan or china american culture is not the best for you and that's not because any one of these people is wrong or deluded it's simply because they have different points of view and likewise for example if you believe that there are only men and only women and this is a physical biological fact well that might be true for you because that's what you believe whereas if you believe that gender is fluid and you can change these things around and that these are not biological facts that's what's true for you because it's relative now the modernist would say no no what are you talking about it's not relative these are biological facts there's xy chromosomes and it just it's what is in your it's baked into your dna and likewise a modernist would say there's black people there's white people it's crystal clear everybody knows the difference what's the problem the problem is that these rigid categories that you create eventually they all start to collapse because actually they're not grounded in anything objectively true because actually relativity is at play within reality reality is a relativistic system at many levels and there is something called social construction where we construct various illusions such as money in order to help mankind do what it does we even construct things like the border around the country what is a country a country is a social construction there's no such thing as america we constructed it in our minds and so the postmodernists take this very far and they try to relativize everything so jordan peterson has a instinctive reaction against this and many conservatives do they're frightened by the implications of total relativism relativism run amok and so part of the part of jordan peterson's biggest critique of stage green is that you can't just relativize everything if you relativize everything everything loses meaning and value and then you're lost and you don't know what to do and then you fall into a sort of nihilism and depression and then you can't build a good life therefore jordan peters would say that you need to construct some sort of hierarchy for your life of value and meaning so that you know what to do what your priorities are and you gotta you gotta pick one of these values to put at the top of your of your pyramid of of priorities and that value could be god in the literal sense or it could be god in the poetic or metaphorical sense where for example if you're a wall street executive and all you care about is money jordan peters would say that means money and success is your god and if you're a scientist that is hyper rational and uh quantitative and you know science is is your purpose in life then he would say science or mathematics is your god rationality is your god or if what's most important to you is taking care of your family and raising children he would say family is your highest value family is your god and so on and so he would say you know pick one of these things then orient your life towards that now he tells you god is the highest value but he doesn't tell you why because he himself doesn't know and the way he frames it is in this sort of mythological poetic allegorical sense where he says that well probably the bible and many of these myths and stories from the past they're not literally true they're not true in the scientific sense because he can't say that the bible is scientifically true because he's he's a scientific person but also he doesn't want to give up the bible completely so he's trying to hedge his bets here which is a tricky tight rope walk to navigate but he manages to do it somehow and so um so the way he does it is by saying that well these are stories that contain lessons from our ancestors that are valuable that have been discovered over centuries and millennia and that what religion is really about is it's not about some literal story being true scientifically it's about just wisdom psychological wisdom that is important to kind of ground your psyche and give you direction meaning in life that's what it's about and the danger of stage green relativism and post-modernism is that it breaks all of that down and it makes you believe as though like well anything goes i'm free to do anything i'm free to be a man i'm free to be a woman i'm free to cut my dick off i'm free to dye my hair purple i'm free to change my race i'm free to get surgery i'm free to jump off a cliff like i'm free to do anything and it doesn't matter what i do and he would say but it does matter what you do because if you jump off a cliff you're not going to be happy some things make you happy some things don't and religion tells you which things make you happy and which ones don't as it was discovered by your ancestors for thousands of years so wouldn't it be wise of you to follow that religious stuff and so now you might say well leo that sounds pretty good that sounds pretty smart so what's wrong with that so isn't relativism dangerous and a problem doesn't it lead to nihilism and inaction it can but again everything can take and be taken to its extremes everything can be misused everything can become unhealthy when it's out of proportion so healthiness depends on proportion not really the thing itself per se so you know if you if you drink too much water you're going to die that doesn't mean water is bad just means you got to know how much water to drink and when to stop so here's the thing now we get to the real crux of the situation this is what jordan peterson really doesn't understand about god and about values and about meaning this is the thing he's resisting this is his biggest shadow and if he could get over this he could really become an amazing teacher the problem is that jordan peterson has a misunderstanding a fundamental misunderstanding of what religion is and where it came from and why it exists religion is not a collection just of parables and allegories and myths with some sort of practical way of adding a little bit of meaning to your life it's way deeper than that religion its ultimate source is the insights of the most advanced mystics that have lived throughout human history these mystics were able to reach radical expanded states of consciousness superhuman states of consciousness from which they became conscious of the ultimate absolute truth of what reality truly is of what consciousness is and then once they accessed these truths they shared them with mankind and suggested that mankind try to pursue these shroods for themselves but because mankind the majority mankind was ignorant and delusional and too selfish the truths were misunderstood and misinterpreted and turned into dogma and ideology and myths and stories because the actual states of consciousness cannot be communicated nor can they be scientifically proven nor can they be turned in any kind of scientific algorithms for how to access them and they can be only accessed by very exceptional hardcore individuals who are willing to question reality very deeply to levels that would threaten most other humans how do i know this because i've actually done it i've reached those levels of consciousness that are written about in the bible in buddhism in islam in hinduism in jainism in um judaism all of these religions and spiritual traditions talk about the same ultimate truths which is otherwise known as god allah buddha mind buddha nature whatever you want to call it so here's how it really works you start thinking deeply about the nature of reality and you start questioning it philosophically you start questioning epistemology and metaphysics you start questioning what reality is you start questioning what you are and what your mind is and you start to deconstruct everything you've learned from your culture you deconstruct religion you deconstruct schooling you deconstruct political ideology you deconstruct science you deconstruct all your economic ideas you deconstruct everything and you remove your mind you free your mind of all attachments and all biases because you want to really get to the truth of things you stop believing in anything including beliefs in science and other things and you delve deeper and deeper and deeper into the relativity of reality you sort of recognize that all culture all cultural norms all languages all scientific systems all models all maps all books everything i've learned it's all relative it's not absolutely true and then you start wondering to yourself well what is absolutely true and you go deeper and deeper and deeper that you start questioning yourself with a deep profound corrosive skepticism which takes over your entire mind this is not just something you do on your spare time this consumes you it drives you mad it drives you into nihilism and solipsism and skepticism and cynicism and it's very difficult psychologically on you it's very threatening because all of your attachments even things like the idea that you should have a family or that family is even good you question that the idea that money is important you question that you even question the idea whether life itself is important and you surrender your attachment to life itself and if you continue down this process all the way down and you deconstruct your entire mind and psyche what happens is that you go beyond psychology and you go into metaphysics and you go into pure consciousness and then what you become conscious of is that your ego mind and your entire identity as a self completely collapses as though it never even existed your self-image of you as a biological human it collapses the colors and sounds and things still stay the same your body still stays here but your self-image your psychological psyche self-image it all collapses into nothing and with that collapses the idea of a physical objective reality and when this happens it feels like you've gone insane because there's no more difference between sanity and insanity good and bad right and wrong everything collapses into pure relativity and when that happens it's the most counterintuitive and astounding thing because you would think well leo what you're describing here sounds like the height of madness and the worst possible thing that anyone could wish on themselves why would anyone do this why not just live a normal good life but you don't appreciate what happens when you lose yourself when you lose yourself when you lose your mind when you lose any notion of an objective external reality and what i'm describing here is something that jesus did that the buddha did that happened to muhammad that all the great mystics of the past have done when all of that collapses your mind collapses what are you left with you're left with consciousness nothing but consciousness all that exists is consciousness this is consciousness the material world that you thought was solid and real it was always just consciousness infinite consciousness absolute consciousness this consciousness is the absolute truth it's not a belief it's not an ideology it's not wishful thinking it's not something you program your mind with this is the result of removing all programming from the mind destroying the mind entirely transcending the mind entirely and so a very twisted paradoxical thing happens is that even though you go deeper and deeper into relativity and you're as you're doing this all meaning and value is lost and here's where jordan peterson shadow comes in is that he's not open to this process he's not open to deconstruction because what he's worried about is losing value and meaning he thinks you need that to live a good life but here's what he doesn't understand is that if you go all the way down this rabbit hole and you lose all meaning and all value what happens is that literally all meaning and value collapses the difference between good and bad collapses and it disappears and then what happens you're not left with neutrality you would think maybe oh it's just neutrality no what you're left with is you're left with god consciousness you're left with absolute good you're left with infinite love you would say infinite love that makes no sense why would why would absolute relativity and the collapse of all values and meanings lead to infinite love well because the logic of it is this is that what value is what meaning is is to value or prioritize one thing over another thing it's to say well i like vanilla ice cream but not chocolate ice cream so vanilla is on top of chocolate or to say i like men more than i like women or vice versa or to say i like capitalism over socialism or vice versa you're valuing things or to say i like family above career or career above family and this is the whole illusion of life is thinking that there actually are differences between these things that these things are important so when you become infinitely conscious when you lose your sense of self you realize that all of these valuations and meanings that i was creating these were false substitutes for pure infinite consciousness and love which is what reality has always been and can't be anything other than that because what love is is it's not a human emotion love is the recognition that all values and biases are purely selfish and completely relative and it's the surrendering of all that and the transcendence of that into absolute truth which is love the reason absolute truth is love is because when you stop selfishly evaluating things and attaching meanings to things like thinking that well life is good and death is bad or sex is evil and drugs are evil or you know that person is good and this person is evil when you stop making these judgments what you're left with is not neutrality what you're left with is the recognition that everything is of equal value if everything is of equal value if everything has no value that's the same thing as to say equal value equal value is the same as no value and no value is the same as infinite value the value of absolutely everything in the universe becomes infinite you become one with the entire universe literally and you recognize that the only thing that was keeping you locked into a finite set of value is because you were valuing one thing over another thing you were making these distinctions and you were making judgments and it's these judgments that have ruined your life and made you unable to be happy and fulfilled and also separated you from god and from love so what jordan peterson does not understand is that god exists not in a poetic metaphorical way god literally exists you are god this thing that is conscious right here right now you being conscious that's what god is i'm not talking about the human you the human you is an illusion i'm not talking about your self-image that's an illusion i'm talking about this state of consciousness that is occurring right here right now as i'm speaking you are conscious of colors and sounds this is a field of infinite universal consciousness love is not something you feel love is the recognition that you are everything that you are one with everything that you accept and surrender to everything without judging it or resisting it and the reason that god is the top of the hierarchy is because god is truth and god is love and the reason for that is because there's only one god there's only one thing in the universe which is the universe itself reality is itself therefore to say that god is the highest value is just to say that reality is the highest value why is reality the highest value because there's nothing outside of reality because reality is infinite anything you imagine outside of reality is a part of reality by definition of how reality is defined therefore the highest value is simply infinity or everything which is to say love this is something jordan peterson intuits but does not understand and cannot explicitly tell you because he's not conscious of these things the highest value of all life for all life forms in the universe is love this is not just a hippie saying this is not a stage green new age teaching i'm talking about absolute truth you can become directly conscious of this for yourself and if you just think about it intuitively it makes sense too what have you been chasing your entire life love that's it as a child what did you want from your parents love what did you want from your mother and your father love what did you want from your girlfriends and boyfriends love what did you want from your teachers love what did you want from the video games you were playing and the movies you're watching love what did you want from life love what do you want when you eat food you want to love the food what do you want to do when you're hanging out with your friends you want to love your friends you want to do loving things with your friends to your friends have them do loving things to you even if you're doing science you're doing it out of love it's a love of the exploration of the nature unit the universe you love science anything you're doing in reality if you're doing it for the right reasons you're doing it out of love and then it's just a matter of how exactly will it be manifested for some of you it will be art for some of you it will be business for some of you it will be sex for some of you it would be raising a family for some of you it will be lecturing and teaching for others of you it will be exploring nature for all of us the highest value is love and the reason that is is because there's nothing else in the universe but love the universe the physical universe your physical hands are a manifestation of love that's what you recognize when you collapse the self and your mind but you cannot understand this without collapsing yourself and your mind the only thing that is preventing you from recognizing infinite love all the things i just said is your selfishness your ego and your attachment to a human identity and your attachment to biases for different values you value one thing over another thing if you keep doing that and you insist on doing that and you refuse to surrender that you will never awaken to the fact that everything is love if you are resistant to relativity you will never awaken to infinite love and infinite love is not a relative thing infinite love is absolute and i said leo so you're contradicting yourself you're saying that it's all relative and then now you're saying it's absolute which is it it's both it's a paradox because it's a synthesis of every distinction it's a synthesis of every duality reality is one god is one you are one there has only been one thing happening in your consciousness your entire life you this bubble of consciousness is all that there is there's nothing else it's one the only thing that was creating the illusion that there is more than one is your imagination and that's what god is god is an infinite field of consciousness of pure unlimited imagination it's all powerful imagination it's imagination that's so powerful that it can even imagine that it is not imagining reality and that becomes what you consider reality physical reality is a dream it's purely imaginary but you don't think it's a dream because you're imagining that it's not a dream accepting this for most people is very very threatening and radical because it erodes and deconstructs all power structures all hierarchies all value systems even your idea of sanity and physical reality all of it gets deconstructed not as a philosophy actually actually when you fully collapse your mind you actually go through a process of death and rebirth this is not a metaphorical poetical death and rebirth you actually go through death you literally die the idea of you dies forever and you say oh my god that's that's awful it's only awful if you judge it to be awful but when you realize that your judgment of it as awful is itself an illusion what happens is that everything collapses into an infinite singularity of pure love and then what happens is you discover god and you discover heaven that's what heaven is heaven is not a nice place somewhere in the clouds where they feed you grapes and give you endless orgasms heaven is nothing other than the realization that there's no difference between anything there's no value to anything there's no meaning to anything because everything is empty and meaningless everything is so meaningless and so valueless that it goes full circle into infinite meaning infinite value absolute value absolute love this is what every religious teaching has been about since the dawn of civilization but most people who are reading these teachings and interpreting them are too unconscious and too selfish and too corrupt and too biased and too fearful to understand the teachings and to actually do them you can't understand these teachings by reading them or memorizing them or by aping them through some ten commandment process you can only do it by literally deconstructing your mind and your reality losing your sanity diving completely into nihilism relativism until you lose the sense of physical reality and then you die and then you're reborn as god and then you are a walking god amongst men and men look up to you as though there's something special about you and there is you fully awoken to yourself as god the universe has awoken to itself as infinite love and infinite consciousness and absolute truth and the game is done you recognize that all of your life was just a game that you designed to allow yourself to awaken and give yourself the gift of infinite love and you cannot appreciate the gift of infinite love unless you've lived without it which is what your life is you have separated yourself from infinite love from god so that god could give you the gift of infinite love which is just to say that you are giving yourself the greatest gift in the universe and what is the greatest gift in the universe the universe itself i know it's a lot to take in it's a lot to stomach it's unbelievable it sounds crazy it sounds insane what i'm describing now is a stage turquoise level of very profound profound consciousness and development that nobody you know has experienced your parents haven't experienced this your teachers haven't experienced this the public intellectuals you listen to on youtube they haven't achieved this and the only way you can understand this is by going through it yourself personally you have to lay your head on the chopping block and get it chopped off you have to lose your sense of self before you can discover the highest value in the universe so as it turns out the only obstacle to the highest value in the universe is your limited conception of yourself if you were to surrender your limited conception of yourself which you're terrified to surrender you call that death if you were to literally surrender that you wouldn't die what would really happen is that your sense of self would expand from the finite self to the infinite self and then you would become illuminated enlightened awake when you see pictures of jesus or the christian saints depicted in the bible or on stained glass windows or on various kinds of you know christian iconography they depict a saint with a halo around his head or even this kind of burst of of yellow light you know behind jesus's head shining forth in all directions evenly what does that represent that represents a human being who has died the finite self in that human has died and collapsed his mind the very notion of a physical existence has collapsed in his mind the idea that he was ever born or will ever die has so collapsed in his mind because it was just imaginary he collapses so deeply that he became an infinite point of pure consciousness and love and that is what is depicted by that halo it is not merely a metaphor or a myth it's more like literal you literally become an infinite singularity of love and consciousness that's what god is you become god realized and that is the highest value because that is the highest state of consciousness that consciousness can take and everything that's happening in the universe whether it's you going to work you eating a cheeseburger you driving your car you having sex you chasing money these are all just branches and tangents off of the pursuit of love you're doing all of these things as poor substitutes for the seeking of love that's all you've ever saw it when you go you seek a hamburger you're seeking it for the love it gives you that you feel when you consume it when you're having sex with your spouse or partner same thing but these are all finite material experiences of love they're all limited the love you have for your mother your father your child your spouse you might think that that's a lot of love it's not it's nothing it's it's like a drop in the ocean it's nothing when you surrender all that and this is the this is what's so counterintuitive you have to have the courage to take the leap of faith to surrender all of your attachments and all of your biases for fear for your mother for your father for your children for everything everything you love you have to give up so that you can gain it all back and the entire universe as infinity and so long as you're too attached and too scared to give it up if you're too attached to give up jesus or the bible or your religion or allah or muhammad or the buddha you'll never actually realize what they realized in buddhism they have a great saying which goes when you meet the buddha on the road kill him because the final thing that will hold you back from complete god realization is your attachment to the idea of a buddha or a guru or a jesus who is above you anything you think is above you is a limitation to your true self because that's a shadow that you have not integrated nobody is above you or below you because you're everything and you're everyone how can anyone be above you and jesus told you this jesus said he is the son of god does that mean he's the only son of god no of course not what it means is that his body was the incarnation of god and all physical objects are the incarnation of god and your body is the incarnation of god all equally none above the other jesus told you the kingdom of heaven was within was he speaking metaphorically no was he just saying that because oh well if you're just meditating and you're happy by yourself then that's the that's heaven no he was telling you literally that you're god that you're love but you didn't understand because you weren't conscious enough so this is the biggest oversight in jordan peterson's work and i don't blame him it's not easy to to accomplish this feat the reason he hasn't accomplished it is because he's too stuck with the relativist shadow he's too afraid of it he's afraid that if he goes down this road he's going to lose his mind and he's going to lose all meaning his whole life with collapse his family will collapse his career will collapse all of that and that's true it might all collapse this is threatening stuff see you have to you have to think like this if what i'm saying is true it's not talked about very much in society or when it is it's talked in corrupted ways the way that religion talks about it why is that well because either it's false and i'm deluding you or it's because it's so rare and so threatening that any time a single individual accomplishes this it becomes impossible to communicate because anyone you try to communicate it to who's just sort of like normal a normie who buys into consensus physical reality you try to communicate it to them and you they think you're insane so it becomes virtually impossible to communicate because see people want to ask you for like proof like leo prove it to me if this is true prove it but you see you don't understand the depth of the problem it can't be proven to you in a scientific manner because science itself and the notion of proof itself is something that your mind is constructing to to create a physical illusion you have to deconstruct proof and science and no one can do that for you i can't do it for you you literally have to surrender your life and of course what's the last thing you will surrender your life you're terrified fundamentally the thing that is holding you back is fear of death the thing that's holding jordan peterson back is fear of death but also fear of relativism fear of stage green fear of post-modernism fear of socialism fear fear in general is the only thing that holds you back from god and from love because fear is the contraction of consciousness away from love whenever you fear anything in reality what you're subconsciously saying to yourself is that thing is bad i don't want that thing i reject that thing i reject death i reject uh terrorism i reject uh slavery i reject hitler i reject all these things and the more you reject what you're doing is you're creating shadows out of that you're rejecting yourself because there's nothing in the universe but yourself so the universe is rejecting parts of itself and because of this you are tormented and you struggle because of this you have health issues jordan peterson faces health issues recently where are those ultimately coming from a lot of those kind of health issues especially autoimmune disorders come from not merely physical problems but from the stress that your body and psyche lives with every day you're not even conscious of this stress because it's just a a constant for you the stress of just surviving and judging and hating and rejecting parts of yourself disowning parts of yourself and battling with your shadow shadow boxing with yourself your entire life this is very stressful on the psyche it leads to disorders and diseases it leads to dysfunction the diseases that this leads to are not only individual they're also collective because you see the fundamental disease is selfishness and egotism the the fundamental disease that plagues jordan peterson is his own self just as the fundamental disease that plagues you is your own self and then the fundamental disease spreads itself through your words deeds actions and thoughts and emotions all across the globe and it synergizes with the selfishness of all the other people eight billion people on the planet and together we have now a host of collective problems and dysfunctions and disorders as all of our collective egos and selfishness and fear synergizes with itself resulting in war genocide slavery violence exploitation corruption disease pollution where is all this coming from it's coming from the self the limit itself it's coming from bias this is what jordan peterson really wants to communicate to you but he can't because he himself has not gone through the process of deconstructing his own mind and reality he could do that but i'm not gonna hold my breath so that's why i'm stepping in and filling in some of the gaps it might have i don't know maybe it sounded too like i've been very negative on jordan peterson this whole time but actually i'm not negative about him i think he's doing important work i think a lot of people are at the point in their life where they need a lot of stage blue foundation that they don't have a healthy one a healthy one and so he's he's fulfilling that function but we also equally need people to help fulfill the function of stage green healthy healthy stage green that's where the progressives come in we also need healthy stage orange a little bit of capitalism is not such a bad thing and when you integrate all of these and then you go beyond that to the higher stages that's when your life completely transforms you think that you've you've watched some jordan peterson videos and your life has improved you ain't seen nothing yet watch what happens when you fully integrate these three stages of blue orange and green and then you move beyond that into what's called tier two tier two is a whole order of magnitude beyond the lower stages and then you can go even beyond that into this infinite love that i'm talking about i'm pointing you towards what jordan peterson wants you to pursue which is god or the highest value right so i've articulated to you as clearly as it's possible to do using language you can't do better than this using language but language of course is insufficient why did i talk about this is it for you to believe me and to become a cult member no i talked about this as a vision for what is possible for you that is the function of religion the function of religion is to show you your highest potential and what is your highest potential your highest potential is infinity of course your highest potential has no limits whatsoever that's what i've shown you here today hopefully you've understood that now it's up to you to decide whether you want to pursue that but also be patient you are not going to be able to understand or to actualize what i just told you in a few months or even in a few years it took me a few decades to reach this level of understanding and consciousness and i'm still not done i'm still growing every single day so my point to you is that if jordan peterson has introduced you to this idea of self-improvement and self-help and psychology that's great now you recognize how important psychology is now let's take it to the next level yes psychology is important yes self-help is important spend a good five ten years developing that great but what's even more important is epistemology metaphysics philosophy and spirituality and ultimately consciousness and truth that's even more important it's more fundamental and so predominantly what i focus on with my teachings with actualize.org is that i cover basic self-help sometimes as well you'll find plenty of practical episodes that i have recorded in the past but once you've gotten the basics of your life down and you really want to reach your full potential you really like how serious are you about life if you really want to see what's possible you should you must transcend psychology and go with me into consciousness work it's not an ideology it's not a belief system it's not a cult you do the work for yourself and you discover the things that i say are true for yourself and if you don't discover it's true then it's not true it's only true if it's true in your direct experience and the bulk of my work is to help people to deconstruct their mind in ways that people like jordan pearson cannot because they're too afraid to do it see my special gift or power if you want to say i have one is that from a very young age i was so skeptical of everything that i believed nothing i questioned absolutely everything until it killed me literally i questioned the very fabric of physical reality until it killed me and i was happy to do it because i knew that all of these things that people were believing in were just constructions it was just all [ __ ] it was just stories it's all stories physical reality this is a [ __ ] story your birth is just a story your death is just a story science is just a story your brain is just a story atoms and molecules these are all [ __ ] stories that you're imagining you don't need them have the courage to go for what's really true and how do you know what's true i actually have a video called how to discover what's true but um go watch that but uh in short how do you know what's true you question absolutely everything and whatever survives that process is what's true and if you question everything and nothing survives and you destroy the entire universe with your questioning that's what's true the entire universe was imaginary and of course that's exactly what will happen and the only thing holding you back is just your fear and your laziness and your complacency and your being a sheep following all these other people including jordan peterson you're just one of his sheep but hey you know i recognize the importance of of moving people up the spiral you you cannot just take someone and leapfrog them across all the stages to the very top your psyche can't handle that if you experienced the levels of god consciousness and love that i've experienced you would be vomiting on the floor and you might even pass out and you might even die because it's it's so extreme it's taken me years of laying the groundwork and deconstructing my mind and my reality to be able to reach these levels of consciousness and understanding and so what i do is i just i guide people serious people to do that for themselves and the only way you can do this is if you're very serious this is not a casual pursuit it is dangerous there are risks your life is at risk and that's precisely why you know people like jesus and the buddha these were not moderates these were very radical people that's why they're so rare it's very rare to find a person who's willing to to destroy and throw away his entire life and even the physical world and his own sanity to reach something like truth most people just want to live a comfortable life but at the same time how comfortable are you the problem is that when you're living a comfortable life it's not very comfortable the most comfortable life counter-intuitively is to surrender your life then you'll have comfort until then you're going to be whining and moaning about every little thing that rubs you the wrong way and you're going to be shadow boxing with yourself your whole life you're going to be miserable and look at jordan peterson a lot of times you just look at his face and he looks miserable he doesn't look like a happy man he doesn't laugh a lot he holds bitterness and anger inside of him and fear now this is not a personal attack on him these are just normal human emotions that people have and i would say that in fact he's better at handling them than most people i think most other people would be less developed than him and handle it worse given the amount of pressure and fame that's upon him that's that's not an easy burden to carry but but also um don't fool yourself with this idea that oh well leo if i just if i just kind of play it safe and i just pursue money and just a family and some sex and some of this kind of stuff my life will just be good right no your life will be miserable your life will be mediocre even if you become mega successful jordan peterson is more successful than most people can dream of he makes millions of dollars every year does this make him happy no of course not does this make him loving no all the same bitterness and problems and shadows are still there your shadows will stay with you no matter how rich you become no matter how much sex you have no matter no matter what country you live in what house you live in that's not an ultimate solution to anything the only ultimate solution is to give up yourself quit quit resisting take the leap of faith and discover that you're god that's the only thing that's worthwhile to do in life everything else is tangents and distractions and avoidance of that but it takes a very rare individual to be able to actually do it but if maybe you are such a rare individual or you're thinking you might be you found the right place watch my videos my videos will help you to deconstruct your mind in ways that i think very few other teachers and gurus can help you to do that's my specialty that's what i love see what i love is deconstruction it does help if you're going to be deconstructing everything to actually love deconstruction rather than to hate it it's a beautiful thing what i'm talking about is not nihilistic or depressing even though it might sound that way to your ego it's actually the greatest beauty the greatest joy there is nothing else quite like it all right so that's it now you got an idea see doesn't this make sense of things for you doesn't everything make sense now all the culture wars the progressives the conservatives the maga people the socialists the capitalists jordan peterson all of religion look at how much we explained you might think yourself well leo this took a long time this took two and a half hours yeah it took two and a half hours to explain all of [ __ ] life to you if you can't see the value in that then i don't know how to help you you've got something wrong with your head there's a trade-off between depth and length and also commitment how committed are you to this work i recommend you make this this moment this video i may i recommend you make this the the turning point for the rest of your life see you got a little bit of taste of it here for two hours now i recommend you devote the rest of your life to this kind of work this is what life is about you want the most meaningful life counter-intuitively paradoxically this is it the meaning of life is to deconstruct all meaning and to surrender all meaning and then to take it all back through infinite meaning and love and then enjoy your life that's it you