Weak Men Aren't Good. They're Just Weak

Lex Fridman opens the second Jordan Peterson conversation by pointing at a new lecture series on Nietzsche for Peterson Academy. The talks, Fridman says, have a locked-in struggle with an idea that itself feels Nietzschean. Peterson agrees that the German philosopher shaped his style and his writing, and that many of his other influences were Nietzsche's heirs. He was blown away the first time he read him: intellectually denser than almost anyone, with Dostoevsky as a possible rival, though Dostoevsky is much more wordy.

The density, Peterson thinks, came from illness. Nietzsche thought all day and could not spend much time at the desk, so he compressed thought into a short aphoristic style that is worth striving for, and he remained an exciting, romantic writer in the bargain. The series Fridman praised takes apart the first half of *Beyond Good and Evil*. Fridman notes that taking each sentence that seriously requires a deep respect for the author; the same method would work on Orwell or any writer of that rank.

Peterson's test for a great book is almost physical. He folds the corner of a page when he finds something worth remembering, and he could not do that with *Beyond Good and Evil* because every page ended up marked. That is the reverse of many books he reads now, which often contain no idea he has not already met. He has lately gone back to Mircea Eliade, the Romanian historian of religions, whose work he calls a real antidote to the postmodern, nihilistic, Marxist stream of literary interpretation that universities have adopted. Eliade's *The Sacred and the Profane* runs through *We Who Wrestle With God*, the book Peterson was then about to publish, and every sentence is dreamlike in its density.

The literary philosophers — Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Eliade — work, Peterson says, because they surround words with a cloud of images that can be turned into action. He recommends *The User Illusion* as the best book on consciousness he has ever read. Communication, on that account, is not the transfer of propositions. You translate the way you act in the world into images, compress the images into words, toss the words to someone else, and they decompress them back into images and then into action. A meaningful conversation is that loop running well.

Classic empiricism, he argues, gets the next step wrong. It treats perception as a value-free, passive business: turn your head, and the world is simply there. There is no perception without action. If your eyes stop moving for a tenth of a second, you stop seeing. They jiggle, they move involuntarily and voluntarily, sampling a small slice of the space in front of you, and the slice you sample depends on your aims. Perception is value-saturated because it is always in the service of doing something.

That is why reading a genuinely deep thinker is almost a bodily event. The writer is not only changing how you think and feel; he is changing the strategy you use to perceive, and therefore the way the world reveals itself. Peterson's formulation is sharp: you can treat your perceptions as the axioms of your thought. A perception is a thought poured into concrete until you see it rather than conceptualize it. Change the axioms, and you have changed the floor, not the furniture.

Fridman pushes the thought toward danger. Marx's utopia and Hitler's dystopia are also powerful ideas; they can saturate perception with one set of values and leave only a narrow band of possible actions. Peterson calls that a form of possession. Perception serves action, action serves a goal, and propagandistic thinkers try to unify every possible goal into a single coherent aim. Unity has real advantages: it is simple, it lowers anxiety, and it raises motivation. If the unifying idea is valid, that is a gift. If it is invalid, it is the worst of all possible ideas.

Postmodernists with a neo-Marxist bent, he says, assume that the fundamental unifier is power — compulsion and force as the only true ethos of mankind. He cannot think of a worse idea. Nihilism is dangerous, but it is a disintegrating notion, not a unifier. Hedonism is dangerous too. For sheer pathology, Foucault in a nutshell, and Marx for that matter, the claim that power rules everything is not only a terrible unifier; it fully justifies your own use of power. Nietzsche's "will to power" is routinely dragged into this company, and Peterson says that is a mistranslation of intent. Nietzsche meant that a human being is an expression of will, a life force that strives not to protect itself but to exhaust itself in being and becoming, oriented upward toward meaning, not toward domination.

You can organize a project by voluntary play, both parties committed to a shared aim, or you can say help me or I will kill your family. Force works. It is nowhere near as good, even on practical grounds, as a voluntary joint pattern of movement toward a goal. That, for Peterson, is the qualitative difference between a unifying force based on compulsion and the ethos of free Western societies — not a morally relativistic illusion. The *Übermensch* is another idea that sounds like power and was co-opted, with help from Nietzsche's sister after his death, into a racial dominion story. Peterson thinks there is also a flaw in the original: Nietzsche announced the death of God with dire warnings, not as a triumph. Kill the unifier and you get confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness, or social fracture, or something else climbing out of the abyss. Nietzsche predicted that communism would be one such something, and that it would kill tens of millions in the twentieth century. Dostoevsky saw the same thing in *Demons*.

If the transcendent no longer orients us, Nietzsche said, we must create our own values. The psychoanalysts, Peterson notes, saw the trap first: you are not a clear unity inside. Turn to yourself and you turn to a fractionated plurality, Freud's war of competing motivations. How can you make your own values when you are not master in your own house, and why would a single life be long enough to invent an ethos that stabilizes a psyche and a society? Fridman objects that religion, communism, and Nazism all unify and all divide; religious conclusions have been used to start wars. Peterson points to a subplot in the Gospels: the enemies of Christ are the Pharisees, the scribes, and the lawyers — religious hypocrites, academics who worship their own intellect, legal minds who use the law as a weapon. The existential conundrum is that the most evil people use the best possible ideas to the worst possible ends. He sees a version online in the weaponization of Christian slogans, "Christ is king" among them, by a right-wing psychopathic troll belt for whom the political left-right axis is already the wrong analysis.

How, then, do you know communism is a bad idea rather than a good idea ruined by bad actors? Modern communists say real communism has never been tried; you could say the same, with more justice, of real Christianity. Peterson's rejoinder is blunt: every time it has been implemented, in every culture, the consequences have been the same catastrophe. The follow-up fantasy — if I were in charge, the utopia would have arrived — is a dangerous pretense. The Western canon, he argues, answers the holder problem through sacrifice. You can tell the valid holder of an idea because that person takes the consequences onto himself. The Passion binds two ultimate sacrifices, the child and the self: a son offered to God. In sophisticated drama, good and evil are spirits that possess every character to a greater or lesser degree, and in the high Christian story the battle is fought first as an internal drama. Your moral duty is to constrain evil in yourself; done well, Jung's point, it does not have to be played out in the social world as fate.

On Nietzsche's "slave morality," Peterson says the woke phenomenon is the thing Nietzsche was criticizing, and that some Christian language can be gerrymandered to support it. He thinks Nietzsche was still wrong in the essential criticism, because Nietzsche never attacked the Gospel stories directly so much as the pathologies of institutionalized religion, especially a too-nice Protestant form in which good collapses into harmless or empathic. In Eden, freedom stops at the foundation: there is an implicit moral order you do not get to rewrite. Play looks un-rigid until you notice that basketball and chess are nothing without their rules, and that inside those rules the space of freedom is immense — more chess games than particles in the observable universe. Stick to the rules of a fair conversation, and the realm of freedom increases. Communism fails, on his engineering sketch, because complex social life cannot be simplified enough for a central planner; Solzhenitsyn recorded Soviet authorities facing two hundred pricing decisions a day. Religious thought, for Peterson, is the record of the ideas that have in fact scaled and iterated.

The hero myth, Peterson says, is a quest myth, a story of exploration and expanded adaptation, and it sits in mammalian neurophysiology far below cognition. Half the hypothalamus, which runs hunger, thirst, temperature, lust, and defensive aggression, is also the origin of the dopaminergic tracts that subsume exploration. The rule is roughly: when the basic drives are sated, explore. Go into the unknown, take the risk, because the information and skill will be worthwhile even for saving those same drives, and learn to do it in a way that iterates and unites you with other people. That pattern, he thinks, is what deep religious narratives have been trying to encapsulate.

Belief in God, in the Abraham story he unpacks in *We Who Wrestle With God*, is a specific characterization: the divine as the call to adventure. Abraham is the first true individual in the biblical narrative, the archetypal developing person, and he already has the socialist utopia at hand — a wealthy family, everything he needs. He does nothing until he is in his seventies. Then a voice tells him to leave his zone of comfort, his parents, his tent, his community, his tribe, his land, and go out into the world. Abraham's first reaction is the obvious one. Why would he? Dostoevsky had already diagnosed the type in *Notes from Underground*: put people in perfect material comfort and they will go insane on purpose so that something interesting happens. We are not built for satiation.

The covenant that follows is a four-layer deal. Follow the voice of adventure and you will become a blessing to yourself — already a bargain, because people generally live at odds with themselves. You will earn a real reputation, validly, because you actually made something. You will establish something lasting, which is what "father of nations" means. And you will do all three in a way that is maximally beneficial to everyone else. Biologically and as engineering, Peterson says, the outward-developing instinct of a curious child is the same instinct that yields psychological stability, a rise in the social hierarchy, an iterable achievement, and a pattern others can join. The contrary theory — that the spirit which moves you beyond yourself is against your self-respect, against other people's interest, against the chance of making something permanent — is a stupid theory.

Fridman draws the inference: the most worthwhile adventure is probably highly correlated with the hardest available one. Peterson adds the word that will run through the rest of the conversation — voluntarily undertaken. The counter-hypothesis is that the best life is to shrink from challenge and remain infantile. No one actually thinks that is true. In the Christian telling, the Passion is Abraham's adventure brought to its limit, a catastrophic tragedy with a redemptive edge, and the implication is that there is no distinction between the true adventure of life and the path of maximal responsibility.

Voluntary is not a small word. The night before the crucifixion, Christ asks to be relieved of the burden and sweats blood, which is understandable: the Romans designed that death to be the most agonizing, humiliating, and disgusting they could manage. Can you take that on as an adventure? It depends on your relationship with death. You can fight it and resent it; there are reasons. The religious answer, and the reason for the title *We Who Wrestle With God*, is that you welcome the struggle. Fridman asks whether there is a moderate dose. Peterson does not offer a bell curve. Bring it on, including when it gets as hard as it can get.

And the crucifixion is not even the end of the map. Mythologically, Christ harrows hell after death. Psychologically, Peterson reads that as the demand that you not only take on the existential burden of life but confront malevolence at its root. Malevolence, he thinks, is worse than tragedy. The clinical literature on post-traumatic stress is his evidence: most people shattered by trauma were not broken by mere suffering but by an encounter with malice. A soldier discovers that part of him enjoys the mayhem, and the discovery will not fit with anything he thought about himself or about human beings. A naive person who meets the right narcissistic psychopath is in mortal trouble, and death is not where the trouble ends.

How does a man in his twenties, eyes open, escape the gravity of *Notes from Underground* and pick an adventure? Peterson offers two further faces of the divine in the Old Testament: calling and conscience. Calling is how destiny announces itself, and it is not Nietzsche's create-your-own-values. You cannot gerrymander your interests. Some things grip you; some things you cannot force yourself to care about. Rudolf Otto called that grip the numinous — the same bristling awe a cat has toward a dog. Love, aesthetic pull, friendship, status, duty: various domains light up, and that positive pull is God as calling, kin to Abraham's spirit of adventure.

Conscience is the other voice. Certain things take root and bother you. You are pulled forward, and a second signal says stay on the narrow path, marking deviations with shame, guilt, anxiety, and regret. The God of the Old Testament, at least in large part, is that dynamic. Fridman asks about the darker emotions, envy in particular. Pride and envy, Peterson says, are among the worst; they are the sins of Cain. Cain's sacrifice is not his best, so he is rejected. He becomes bitter. God tells him two brutal things: if your sacrifices were appropriate, you would be accepted; and you cannot blame your misery on failure — you invited the spirit of envy and resentment and let it possess you. Cain is embittered by the answer and kills Abel.

The classic religious counter to that path is gratitude, and Peterson means it as something you can literally practice. A young person starts from nowhere, fails constantly, and watches neighbors or strangers on the internet succeed. Gratitude's first move is chronological: you know nothing and you are at the bottom, but you are not eighty. One of the best predictors of wealth in the United States is age. Who has it better, the old rich man or the young poor one? Most old rich men, he says, would trade the fortune for youth. Every dragon has its treasure; learning to see a challenge as an opportunity is the beginning of wisdom. Fridman adds a sharper tactic: instead of ignoring the person you envy, celebrate them. Peterson says that works. They have the thing, which means it is in principle gettable; the envy itself tells you what you actually want. The block is insufficient faith in yourself, or in the world's potential, the sense that even miserable you could not get a crack at the brass ring.

He restates a rule from an earlier book: compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to someone else now. You may not be able to have what they have on that axis, but you can make an incremental improvement in whatever direction you are aiming, and the return on incremental improvement is exponential or geometric, not linear. That is why the mythic hero is always born low — Christ in a manger, to poor parents, in a forgotten place. Job, tortured in a wager between God and Satan, decides he will not lose faith in his own essential goodness or in the goodness of being, however terrible the face it is showing. Lose that faith and you are infinitely worse off in an instant. The engineering version of a leap when reason fails is an axiom: if I move forward in good faith, whatever happens will be the best thing that could happen. That, Peterson says, is how you make an alliance with truth — truth as the deity, the outcome as variable.

Fridman wonders, against the grain of Nietzsche's own lonely life, whether some early satiation — getting laid, as he puts it — is a useful first step before adventure. Peterson is willing to bring sex in because it is a powerful motive that has to be integrated, but he will not put it first. Anthropologically, the most unstable social situation you can generate is young men with no access to women; they will do anything to reverse it. The deeper claim is that the path of adventure is itself the best path to romantic attractiveness. Default mating-market value for a fifteen-year-old male is about zero, and there is a reason: you are not good for much yet. Get yourself together, take on an adventure, find a calling, abide by conscience, and you become attractive.

The numbers he cites are blunt. The correlation between male sexual opportunity and relative masculine status is about 0.6, higher than the correlation between intelligence and academic achievement. He does not think the social-science and health literature contains a larger link between two independent phenomena than the one between relative male social status and reproductive success. Cause and effect run in a loop: men are motivated to status because it confers reproductive success, cognitively and biologically. The documentary *Crumb*, about the cartoonist Robert Crumb, is his exhibit. In high school Crumb was in the category of males for whom a date was not unlikely but unimaginable; the feedback was contempt. He found drawing and music, pursued them single-mindedly, became successful, and was immediately attractive to women. If you are useless, Peterson asks, why should they have anything to do with you? They are going to raise infants. They do not need another one. Hypergamy, on this account, is a hedge against an eighteen-year dependency.

Family is not only a barrier. Peterson has asked successful guests how their path appeared; the pattern is typical. Almost all had a mother and a father, and at least one parent, often both, strongly encouraged their interests. Fridman pushes back: in many biographies, struggle inside the family looks like the catalyst. Peterson does not deny the useful adversary. His own son, a tough-minded infant who did not take no for an answer, spent a lot of time at two sitting on the stairs until he was willing to be a civilized human being. That can be read as patriarchal oppression; Peterson reads it as facilitating cortical maturation. A child who is misbehaving is usually under a primordial impulse — anger, over-excitement, frustration, selfishness. You can also find a model in books. Frank McCourt, in *Angela's Ashes*, split an alcoholic father into sober morning encouragement and drunk evening ruin, and amplified the first.

Peterson's own father was hard to please. Approval came late, around forty, and was never effusive, but it was not arbitrary: as a small child he had done things his father was pleased about, so he knew the standard was reachable. The ideal is to apply the highest possible standard the particular child can reach, which requires a real relationship, because the edge is different for each person. Love, in that sense, is not mere acceptance. It is acceptance, encouragement, and a willingness to say that is beneath you. One household rule for his little kids: do not do anything that makes you look like an idiot in public. The reason was not vanity. I think you are great, he told them, and you are not going to let people get the wrong idea.

How much challenge belongs in a marriage? Peterson says it depends on temperament. His wife is a provocative person, and he sometimes casually wishes she were easier to get along with; as soon as he thinks it, he takes it back. They have been friends since they were little children. She plays rough, and it turns out he likes that, with a crucial qualifier: rough but fair, fairness being an ongoing negotiation. Part of the provocation, especially from women toward men, is a test. Can you hold your temper when someone is bothering you? She may want to know because she does not want you snapping and hurting her kids. Asking you is useless; you will say you would never. Never, eh — let's find out.

A man's relationship with temper, he says, should be that he has one and can regulate it. That is part of the attractiveness of the monstrous in women's fantasies, and it returns him to Nietzsche: most of what passes for morality is cowardice. "I never cheat on my wife" — is anyone asking you whom you actually find attractive, or has no one asked? "I am a peaceful man" — no, you are a weak coward who would not dare a confrontation, physical or metaphysical, and you are passing it off as virtue so you do not have to face the fact. The twisted pseudo-Christian morality Nietzsche attacked was exactly that fusion of failure, mask, and resentment, and the resentment is purposeful. It wants to undermine and destroy.

Fridman hears the danger as niceness with an ocean of resentment underneath. Peterson agrees, and he uses his wife as the counterexample: she is not particularly agreeable, and she is not resentful, because she does not give away things she is unwilling to give. If you are agreeable, nice, and conflict-avoidant, you will push yourself too far to please the other person and then turn bitter. That is not helpful. They have been together fifty years. The same logic will reappear when the talk turns from the household to history: a good man has to be formidable. Weak men are not good. They are just weak.

After a break, Fridman drops into the twentieth century. Churchill was in many ways not a good man. Stalin, as Peterson has documented, was a horrible man. Both can be argued as necessary to stop someone worse in Hitler. Do you need monsters to fight monsters? Peterson's answer is that everything has its proper place. Life without fear, anger, or pain sounds easier; those things cause great suffering and are still beneficial when they sit where they belong. A capacity that is a terrible force for evil in one context can be the most potent force for good in another. A good man has to be formidable. Working as a clinician, he took "no" apart. He used it sparingly with his children because it is a heavy weapon, but he meant it. No meant: if you continue that pattern, something you do not like will happen to you with 100 percent certainty. When you are willing to implement that, you hardly have to.

Fridman presses the Stalin problem: Hitler would not have been stopped without him, and the Red Army's mass rape of German women on the road to Berlin is monstrosity in full. You can easily find yourself, Peterson says, with only bad options left, which is why you try to conduct yourself carefully — so you do not make so many mistakes that disaster is all that remains. Second-guessing the whole trajectory of World War II is hard; Westerners have generally treated the alliance as necessary. The mistake after the war, he thinks, was failing to deal as forthrightly with the catastrophes of communism as with fascism, especially among university intellectuals. Students in his personality classes at Harvard and Toronto, reading Solzhenitsyn, knew nothing of the Soviet atrocities, nothing of Ukraine's dead, no idea that communists killed tens of millions after the Revolution. Estimates for Mao's Great Leap run, in some counts, to a hundred million; twenty million is a reasonable figure for the Soviet Union, and Solzhenitsyn's upper bound was higher. Douglas MacArthur wanted to take the Soviets out after the war and was removed from any post where that might have been possible. He was not wrong, Peterson says, that Stalin was as big a monster as Hitler, or bigger.

He names living men who carry a bit of the monstrous in a usable place: Douglas Murray, slight, with a spine of steel; Jocko Willink; Joe Rogan; and Fridman himself. Formidable is not a synonym for sadistic. It is the condition of a "no" that means something, without which "yes" is just a preference.

Asked for an evaluation of the present political landscape, Peterson says the political frame is already wrong. What he sees is a small percentage of dark-tetrad personalities: Machiavellian, narcissistic, hungry for undeserved attention, psychopathic in the sense of predatory parasitism, plus sadism. In serious form that is perhaps three to five percent of the population, normally kept in decent check by civilized people and stable interaction. Cost-free social media communication disinhibits their machinations and they gain disproportionate influence. When he says they want undeserved recognition and status, he means that is all they want. They are overrepresented in fractious political discourse because they can wear the benevolent ideas of the right or the left, and switch, as camouflage. A cluster on the left says we are so compassionate; a cluster on the right says we are so Christian and so free-speech. Peterson's line is that they are neither.

How do you know when you are sitting across from a psychopath? He would not claim that he does. In ordinary life, you get screwed once, remember, and after three times you stop playing, then you tell everyone you know. Anonymity and algorithmic intensity break that. Robert Hare, the foremost clinical authority on psychopathy, was an agreeable man who gave people the benefit of the doubt. He interviewed hundreds of imprisoned violent offenders and told Peterson that every time he sat down with a psychopath, they pulled the wool over his eyes. Only later, on videotape, could he see the tricks. In person, their moves were more sophisticated than his detection. Peterson, also agreeable, will give the benefit of the doubt and watch; after three crooked maneuvers he updates the game. He is not always smart enough to pick it up. Fridman trusts the audience more than the interviewer. Peterson has come to the same conclusion: run the long conversation and let listeners sort it out. Two and a half hours is a long time to hold a manipulative stance if you are empty. You get tired, irritable, you leak. Fridman says one hour is too short; after two hours the leaks start. The distributed crowd brings slightly different falsehood detectors, and the aggregate is pretty accurate.

What he has wanted from platforms is a hard split between anonymous and verified accounts — different categories. If you want to see what anonymous people say, you can, but do not confuse them with actual people. It is a well-established finding that people behave more badly when they are anonymous. He dates a serious sideways turn in the culture to around 2015, when new modes of communication arrived with no idea how to police them. About thirty percent of the internet is pornography; a huge amount of traffic is outright criminal, with a penumbra of psychopathic trolling that may be the bulk of interaction because free riders cannot be held responsible. Algorithms that maximize short-term attention, especially via negative emotion, are themselves an unsustainable unifying axiom.

Fridman hopes many trolls are not the three-to-five percent but young people trying on cynicism, tasting the dark pleasure of taking someone down. Peterson agrees that everyone has some capacity for sadism, that the young are more prone, and that people become more agreeable and conscientious as they mature. One percent of criminals commit sixty-five percent of the crimes; even many repeat offenders desist in their late twenties if you hold them that long — delayed maturation. Most people are salvageable. Not everyone: they have to want it, and past a point the energy required to haul someone out of a pit they dug is more than anyone will spend. Leaders of movements, historically, are more likely to be the psychopaths; followers are more likely to be the lost. Germany was denazified without bringing every participant to justice. In the biblical narratives, even the patriarchs often start as bad actors. Jacob, who becomes Israel, begins as a mama's boy, a liar, a thief from his brother, a deceiver of his father, a coward — and then turns around.

Fridman asks about darker hours. Peterson started contending with evil at thirteen or fourteen; it was his main motive of study for some thirty years. Once he was convinced evil existed, he assumed that understanding it well enough would yield a solution, and then found that describing its opposite was harder. Good is not Auschwitz, and not enjoying being an Auschwitz guard — start there. Where are you when you are as far from that as you can get? It has something to do with play. The antithesis of tyranny, he came to think, is play. More recently he was very ill, in tremendous pain, almost without a break for three years. What carried him was the strength of immediate relationships, friendships, and, because he was already well known, a wider circle of support. It is necessary to bear the burdens of your own existence, he says, but that does not mean you can or should do it alone. The biblical insistence is that the more darkness you are willing to encounter voluntarily, the more likely it is that the spirit of Abraham and the patriarchs will walk with you. Hardship is a catalyst only when it is voluntarily undertaken. Trick a phobic patient toward an elevator and you make them worse; negotiate so they move toward it on their own and they become generally braver.

Every single minute of those three years, he says, was worse than any single time he had experienced in his entire life up to that. It was pain, literal pain. He walked ten to twelve miles a day, rain or shine, winter included. As the day progressed the pain would fall, until around ten or eleven at night he approached an ordinary bad day; as soon as he slept, the clock reset. Sleep itself became the enemy. It was Sisyphus on steroids: some mornings it took an hour and a half to stand up, he would get himself back into something resembling a human being, and he knew that exhaustion plus sleep would put him at the bottom of the hill again. After a couple of years of that, it was family that carried him. His wife Tammy was diagnosed with a form of cancer that, as far as they knew, had killed every person who ever had it except her. What gave her hope, and played a role in saving her, was realizing the depth of her son's love. There is no difference, Peterson says, between ourselves and the people we love; there might be none between ourselves and everyone, but you can start with the people you love. In a small-town pharmacy, waiting twenty minutes for a prescription, newly recovering, he thought: I am not on fire. I could stand here for the rest of my life. If you are just standing there and you are not on fire, things are a lot better than they might be. He says he remembers that almost all the time.

Fridman hates the idea that some people are better than others. Peterson answers with Cain again: Cain is mediocre because he refuses to do his best, not because of something intrinsic. In clinic he knew people lost on every comparative dimension. One woman was uneducated, not intelligent, from a brutal family, with a long psychiatric history; she had been on a long-term inpatient ward that made *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest* look like a romantic comedy, some patients there thirty years. She came back to ask permission to take some of those people for a walk. She was better than other people, in the only sense that matters. Intelligence has no correlation with morality; if you are smart, you can be a lot better at being worse. The metaphysical presumption that everyone is made in the image of God looks preposterous next to the diversity of ability, and societies that accept it as axiomatic are the ones you would choose to live in. Treat people that way and your interactions go better. The developmental sequence is naive and trusting, then hurt and cynical, then cynical and trusting — trust as courage. I will put my hand out, but not because I am a fool. When you are betrayed: grieve, look elsewhere, forgive at least to lighten your own burden, help if you can, and if none of that is possible, wash your hands and take the next adventure.

How do you write one true sentence, Hemingway's demand? First, Peterson says, you orient your life upward as completely as you can, or you cannot tell truth from falsehood. He became serious about that practice when he became convinced that the resentful, craven, deceitful immorality of the individual — spiritual, psychological, not economic or sociological — was the root of the atrocities that make us doubt our own worth. Set a goal and a path opens; the world divides into obstacles and things that move you forward; if the aim is untrue you cannot tell true from false. You course-correct toward the ultimate. Crossing the Overton window is part of play: at the Comedy Mothership every comedian was saying things you cannot say, but inside a game. His own lectures are a high-wire act, a question he does not know how to finish. Online, exploration is punished, which is why free-speech protection has to cover the right of well-meaning people to be wrong, and probably of people who are not well-meaning, because we are not always well-meaning either. The alternative is insisting that people say only what is 100 percent right all the time. Anyone judged by their worst sentence is doomed unless they are silent. That is a working definition of a totalitarian state: no one is playing, ever. You have a moral obligation to maintain a positive orientation. The future is rife with contradictory possibilities; the more rapid the change, the more good and evil show up at once. The way to make the future what we wish, he says, is to maintain faith that that direction will prevail — a moral commitment, not naive optimism.