Jordan Peterson - Are People Happier with Traditional Gender Roles? - Joe Rogan

Do you think that the Scandinavian model that has revealed that when you do make things more equal, you will find that people generally tend to gravitate more towards traditional gender roles? Do you think that this makes people happier? Has it been observed that this is a happier result? That's a good question. The indices of life satisfaction are pretty high in Scandinavia, but I don't know if anybody has done an analysis that would indicate whether the sexual sorting is a contributor to that. That's a good question. I mean, the general idea has been that the Scandinavians are happier because their societies are more egalitarian, but they're not more egalitarian in the sense that men and women are also more different. Men and women are more different, but the opportunities are more egalitarian. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the societies are more satisfied. But it's tough because there's other variables because the Scandinavian countries are relatively homogenous, and more homogenous societies tend to be more peaceful and happier, not more diverse societies. And they're also small countries, so they're somewhat easier to govern. And they tend to be wealthy. So it'd be hard to parse out all those contributors, right, to figure out what it is that's making the Scandinavians relatively content. Because it's almost like a super tribe versus a country. Yeah, yeah, right. Well, and those sorts of societies in some sense are easier to manage. Is there any benefit to this model that we could perhaps bring to the United States or to Canada and maybe mitigate some of the issues that we have between the right and the left? Like maybe there's some sort of a compromise that'll lead to a less debate and dispute. Well, I think that you guys in the States are doing real well, actually, personally. I mean, you know, your system of checks and balances seems to work out pretty well. There's a fair bit of, let's say, left domination right now of the mainstream media. I think that's a reasonable claim. And also of academia and of the intelligentsia. But the political system is skewed pretty hard to the Republican end of things at the moment. And so that's not a bad balance. And then in the last election, I mean, maybe you could make a case, perhaps, that things had tilted a little too far to the Republican side, but that got balanced out because the Democrats took the House again. And it seems like they were more moderate Democrats. That seems to be the scuttlebutt. So it isn't obvious to me that your system isn't functioning well. I think that one of the things that's happening that's making things look more contentious than they are is that the mainstream media is under such assault by the up and coming media forums, including people like you, that as their financial models deteriorate and as their journalistic standards take a hit and as they lose their fact checkers and their time to be careful with the stories, they concentrate more on exaggerating the extremes to attract attention. And so, you know, there was an article published in the Atlantic Monthly about a month ago showing that, and it depends now, you calculate these things, but that the radical leftists and the radical right-wingers are only about 5% of the population on each side, and that the vast majority of Americans consider themselves something approximating the relatively silent majority. And so I don't think that things are polarized as badly as they seem. And it is also the case right now that if you poll people and ask them about the conditions of their life in the United States, they tend to say that they're doing quite well, but that other people aren't. And so I think maybe, I don't know this for sure, but I think maybe that the technological pressure that's being put on the mainstream media is driving extreme political views as a means of gathering the attention of a shrinking market share. That's a very interesting take on it, and I wonder how detrimental that is to us as a whole, because we are constantly dealing with this clickbait nonsense headline, you know, and everything is a dispute, everything's a war. Well, it's nerve wracking. Yes. You know, I mean, I noticed this years ago, because I really stopped watching the news, oh, 25 years ago, although I've been heavily involved in the last two years, because I noticed that most of what passed for news wasn't, because my sense was, well, if it isn't important in a month, if it isn't important a month from now, it was never important. And almost everything that's news is like, important right now. And so I tried to stay away from that, it was better for my peace of mind, and I often recommended to my clinical clients who were depressed and anxious that they shield themselves from the news as much as possible. But now there's, the news is everywhere, right? It's everywhere, it's Twitter, it's Facebook, it's YouTube, it's like, we're just inundated by it. It's like CNN on steroids, it's 24 hour news cycle, and it's produced by everyone, whether they're informed or not, and it's really high emotion. And I think that that is making things look a lot worse to us than they actually are.