Jordan Peterson Explains the Male Dominance Hierarchy - The Joe Rogan Experience

Hello freak bitches. This is one of the things that I think Western civilization has contributed so brilliantly to the expansion of knowledge in the world is what's the cure for the inadequacies of the group? Well, you might say it's the perfect state. So one of the ways I'm going to do a series of lectures on the Bible starting May 16th and for reasons that I outlined to some degree when I was talking about Genesis a little bit earlier. But in the Old Testament, for example, the Israelites are always trying to make their peace with God. So they're trying to live in the world without getting walloped constantly by natural events and by invading forces. Which they attribute to God's will. Yes, yes. Whatever's beyond their understanding in some sense. They're more sophisticated than merely this, but whatever's beyond their understanding. But they're kind of conceptualizing being as such and trying to figure out how to deal with it. And one of the hypothesis they come up with is something like, well, you can bargain with it. And the thing is, you can. That's one of the things that's so cool. And partly the reason you can bargain with reality is because the reality that you encounter as you move forward in time is partly the world, but partly the abstract social system. And so you can bargain with the future abstract social system all the time. You do that every time you make a promise. You do it every time you sacrifice one thing for another. You know, so you you forego a impulsive temptation and that gives you a moral claim that you can redeem in the future. That happens all the time. That's what money is for God's sake. And you know, we discovered the future at some point. As I said, we were chimpanzees at one point. We discovered the future. Then we discovered that you could bargain with the future as if it was a person. That's amazing. It's amazing. And that's partly where the idea of God as a personality came from. I should flip that. That idea that you could bargain with the future came out of the idea that God was a personality because the God as a personality idea came first. But it was a it was a it was a developmental stage on the way to even being able to say the future. You know, we have no idea how it's like a six million year path from chimpanzee to to self aware human being, you know, and we don't we have no idea where these unbelievably sophisticated ideas that we have come from, like the idea of sacrifice. Do you know how much blood was spilled before human beings were able to sacrifice abstractly instead of killing something? We had to act out. God enjoys you killing something because he's happy with the blood. We had to act that out for God. Who knows? 20,000 years, 100,000 years before we got anywhere near the idea that you could do that abstractly. So when I look at these old stories, I look at them like an evolutionary biologist. Now I'm not trying to reduce them in any way, because what we don't understand about evolution, that could make a very thick book. And there's other strange things about religious phenomenology that we don't have a clue about, you know, like the fact that the drugs often called entheogens or psychedelics can reliably produce mystical experiences. No one has any idea what to make of that. You can just discount it. It's like, yeah, well, you know, they're drugs. Yeah, sure. People been using the things for, who knows, 50,000 years, 150,000 years. They might be the source of all our religious ideas. I don't, I'm not saying that they are, but they could well be. And so why do we have a capacity for mystical experience? Who knows? It's associated with the sense of awe. It's associated with the same feeling that you get when you listen to particularly dramatic music. Or when something moves you deeply and you know, the hair on the back of your neck stands up, you know what that is? That's pilo erection. That's the same thing that happens to a cat when it looks at a particularly big dog. It's awe. You feel that when there's a swell of music, awe, the hair stands up on the back of your neck. It's like you puff up just like a cat, except, you know, like a bald cat. What do you make of this idea that, well, not the idea, but the reality that these entheogens closely mimic human neurochemistry? No, they do. There's absolutely no doubt about that. But what do you think the reason for that is? Well, part of the reason is that we share an evolutionary pathway with all these things that we eat, you know, plants and fungi. And you know, look, we're linked evolutionarily to every form of life on the planet, you know? And like serotonin in lobsters has the same effect on lobsters as it does on human beings. So if you up their serotonin levels artificially, the lobster gets, stands up more erect and stronger and is much more willing to fight. And if you decrease the serotonin in the lobsters nervous system, then it gets all depressed and runs away and hides. Think about that. I mean, we split off from lobsters about 350 million years ago, and they still live in dominance hierarchies. That's how old the dominance hierarchy is. That's older than trees. It's older than flowers. It's permanent, right? They've evolved for the hierarchy. And the spirit of the hierarchy, that's the Old Testament God, that's at least part of it, the spirit of the hierarchy. So these things are, well, they're mind boggling to me, which is partly why I'm investigating them. But all of our wiring is conditional on that. So I mean, women use the dominance hierarchy to select mates. So it's so strange because, you know, people think of evolution from a natural selection perspective, almost always. But sexual selection plays a huge role. Here, I'll lay out something wild for you, okay? So we know that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. Now people have a hard time with that, but you could imagine that, roughly speaking, that would happen if every single woman had one baby and only every second man fathered a child. So for men, it would be you either have two kids or zero. Well, that's basically what it is on average across time. If you're a man, you have two children, maybe with two different women, or zero. If you're a woman, everyone has a one. That's how it averages out. So there's more disparity of success among men, and that's very common in the animal kingdom, by the way. Now the question is, how do women select their mates? Now unlike female chimps, female humans are choosy mate-ers. Female chimps will mate with any chimp. They go into heat. They'll mate with any chimp. The dominant males are more likely to mate with them, but that's because they chase away the subordinates. It's not because the females exercise choice. Human females exercise choice, and that's one of the things that differentiated us from chimpanzees. But how do they do it? Well, they look at the male dominance hierarchy, and that's where the men are competing. Now you could say they're competing for power, but that's a pretty corrupt way of looking at it. Like they're competing for, let's say, influence. They're competing for leadership. And so in some sense, the people at the top of the hierarchy, if their men are elected by the other men. Now I know there's brutes and there's predators and all of that, but I'm talking on average across time. It's like the men organize themselves, and there are influential men that rise to the top, and the women take them. Now you think about that. What that means is that over the millions of years that a dominance hierarchy with those properties existed, so let's say since we split from chimps, let's say that's six million years. That means that the male dominance hierarchy is the environment that pushes the mating male to the top. So that means the male that's most likely to take precedence in the male dominance hierarchy is the one most likely to leave a genetic contribution. So that means that the male dominance hierarchy is a selection mechanism mediated by the female. So what that means is that as we've moved forward through six million years of time, men have become more and more well adapted, not only to the presence of the male dominance hierarchy, but to the ability to move up it. And that's the central spirit, you could say in some sense. That's the central spirit of the individual. The individual is the thing that can move up dominance hierarchies. It's the thing that's at the top. It's the eye at the top of the pyramid. It's been selected for. And then what's happened is that we've watched so we get better and better and better for biological reasons culturally mediated at figuring out how to climb across a set of dominance hierarchies so we can leave a genetic contribution. That's what's happened to human beings. Now imagine that that's happened for six million years. So now imagine that we started to watch that because we're curious creatures. We're always trying to figure out who we are. And then as we watched that, we started to tell stories about what the people who could climb the hierarchies were like. Those were heroes. That's where hero mythology came from. And the biggest hero is the person who will go out and kill the snake. Well unsurprisingly, because that was a big hero man. And maybe when we were living in trees, that was a hero. So the big hero is the person who goes out, slays the dragon, gets the gold, brings it back to the community and distributes it. He's also the person most likely to go up the dominance hierarchy. He's the person most likely to find the virgin, right? Because it's a virgin that you free from the dragon and you get to claim her, right? And so the dominance hierarchy is a mechanism that selects heroes and then breeds them. And so then we watch that for six million years. We start to understand what it means to be the hero. We start to tell stories about that. And so then not only are we genetically aiming at that with the dominance hierarchy as a selection mechanism mediated by female choice, but our stories are trying to push us in that direction. And so then we say, well, look, that person's admirable. Tell a story about him. And we say, this person is admirable. Tell a story about him. And this person is admirable. And at the same time, we talk about the people who aren't admirable. And then we start having admirable and non admirable as categories. And out of that, you get something like good and evil. And then you can start to imagine the perfect person. That would be not only so, it would be you take 10 admirable people and you pull out someone who's meta admirable. And that's a hero. That becomes a religious figure across time. That becomes a savior, a messiah across time as we conceptualize what the ideal person is. And in the West, here's how we figured it out. We said the ideal person, the ideal man is the person who tells the truth. And what that means is that's the best way of climbing up any possible dominance hierarchy in the way that's most stable and most lasting. That's the conclusion of Western culture. So in a sense, psychologically, when you're talking about postmodernists and their rejection of these classic male structures, what they're doing is realizing that they're not going to compete in the classic as stated male hierarchy. So they're creating their own version of it. Sure. That's the creative element. Sure. Well, we asked earlier, what's the motivation of these pathological guys who are out there like bolstering up the feminists? Yeah. Well, you know, they don't compete any other way. They don't compete. They figured out how to compete. They compete as allies, let's say. Very sneaky. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Sneaky. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's it. Thanks for watching. We'll see you guys next time. Bye. Bye. Have a great day. Bye. Bye.