Jordan B Peterson: You Need To Listen To Your Wife! We've Built A Lonely & Sexless Society! If You & Your Partner Do This, You'll Divorce!

Jordan Peterson (0:00)

We know that couples that live together before the marriage actually increases the probability that the relationship will fail. And the reason for that is very straightforward.

Steven Bartlett (0:06)

And talking of things that risk harming relationships, the subject we've never spoken about before is...

Jordan Peterson (0:11)

Oh yeah, and that's a huge reason sex has disappeared. People need to stop doing that. Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor. People love or love to hate. He's undeniably one of the greatest intellectual phenomenons on the planet.

Steven Bartlett (0:23)

And many view him as the ultimate father figure.

Jordan Peterson (0:25)

Welcome back, Mr. Peterson. We're built for maximal challenge. And that isn't the way we view ourselves in the modern world. We view ourselves as built for consumption and pleasure. For example, watching pornography.

Steven Bartlett (0:35)

But what are the downstream consequences of that?

Jordan Peterson (0:37)

Well, first of all, it's easy.

Steven Bartlett (0:38)

To get what?

Jordan Peterson (0:39)

Sexual gratification.

Steven Bartlett (0:40)

But does it matter?

Jordan Peterson (0:41)

Oh, it's a catastrophe. You're not desperate anymore. And if you're going to have the true adventure of your life, you're going to need love, shame, guilt, desperation and pain. Like, it's hard. But now people take the easy road, like avoiding conflict, for example. And I spent a lot of time studying evil. It arises when good men hold their tongue. Now, you may suffer some consequences of speaking, but retreating one step at a time defensively, that makes you sick of yourself, there's nothing worse that can happen to you. You want your life to be unbearably entertaining. And maybe all the sorrow and catastrophe has to be part of it, because otherwise there's nothing about it that's glorious.

Steven Bartlett (1:18)

Over the last two years, you've been through a particularly difficult time. And because you've been through that, have you been able to develop a strategy that helps you go through suffering?

Jordan Peterson (1:26)

Yeah, oh, definitely. So, the first thing.

Steven Bartlett (1:34)

Your book comes at a really interesting time in my life personally. Your book is called We Who Wrestle With God. And it's my belief and suspicion that there's a lot of people wrestling with God at the moment. And when I say the word God, I don't necessarily mean some man in the sky with a beard. What I really mean is a greater meaning, a greater sense of meaning. The world feels like, and you speak to this in the book, that it's gotten more and more individualistic and there's consequence to that.

Jordan Peterson (2:01)

Fractionated is another way of thinking about it, right? Because you can think about it as individualistic and that's a positive spin, so to speak, but alienated, isolated and fractionated is the, what would you say, is the accompaniment to that. See, I think the case is that the liberal experiment in individualism only works when the conservative foundation is in place, right? If you aggregate people together and they share enough fundamental values, especially of a particular sort, then you can concentrate on the individual and individual freedom. But there's a lot of preconditions for that. And you know, the Scottish liberals, so the ones who really established Western liberalism as a philosophical and political movement, they knew that. You know, it was individual liberty, Judeo-Christian substructure, and that was an assumption. Now, the problem with modern liberalism is that that underlying foundation has become extremely shaky, and everyone feels it. That's what the culture war is about, fundamentally. And that fact is invalidating the fractionated liberal experiment. Partly, see, it's partly because we have the wrong conception of identity, fundamentally. Identity is a hierarchical structure. So we kind of think that you end at your boundaries as an individual, but you don't because, well, you're probably not going to want to be alone.

So then let's say you're married, okay? So now your identity as a husband, that's a social identity. And then you have an identity as a father, that's a social identity. Then you have an identity as a member of your community, and a member of your city, and a member of your state, and a member of your nation. And then you're involved in a metaphysical endeavor that constitutes the foundation for the nation, let's say. That would be one nation under God, that's one way of thinking about it. Or you could think about it as the self-evident truce that underlie the state. Your identity exists at all those levels. And then your mental health isn't something you carry around in your head. It's the harmony that exists or doesn't exist between all those levels. And that isn't how liberal individualists think about identity at all. And that's because they were, for a long time, fortunate enough so all those other strata were in place.