Parsing Out Dystopia: Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein Stumble Around The Future

The Jordan Peterson Podcast released on March 15 featured a dialog between the host and evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein covering a wide-range of topics including their personal lives, social media, postmodernism, cancel culture, and the psychology of identity development. I found it fascinating except the last 30 minutes or so of it which became mired in peer commiseration and self-help-ism which, I suppose, is to be expected under the circumstances of Peterson's on-going recovery from acute illness. That last part of the podcast just didn't interest as much as the middle portion beginning about 40 minutes in and lasting just past an hour in. Here is a heavily edited (trimmed preserving context) sampling of the good stuff.

They begin by talking about the basis for political values and the best intentions of governmental policies that are often necessary to keep society functioning in this age of accelerating change.  This flows into how difficult it is to make good public policy. The emphasis in the following is all Peterson's and Weinstein's. I have underlined some parts because I want to discuss them at the end. Here's my transcript of the highlights (for me) from this discussion.

BW: My sense is that I hope to see change that will make civilization good enough that I get to be a conservative, that I get to say “actually, we're doing so well that we have no choice but to preserve this. If we try to improve it we'll mess it up.” That's where I want to go. But what I am discovering is that the bedrock of my liberalism is nothing like the underpinnings of the so-called liberalism of most of the people on the left side of the political spectrum. My liberalism comes from a sense that, yes, compassion is a virtue but that policy must be based on a dispassionate analysis of problems. It is based on the understanding that the “magic” of the West comes from a tension between those who aspire to change things for the better and those who recognize the danger of changing them at all. We look around the world and everybody makes arguments that sound as if they come from first principles. But most people do not arrive at conclusions from first principles. If they extrapolate at all, they don't do it very well. And that results in severe compartmentalization of thought. And that means when confronted with changes that threaten a system upon which we are dependent, most people don't recognize it and if they do recognize it they wouldn't know what to do about it.

JP: It's very hard to define a problem correctly. It is very hard to develop an intervention that addresses that problem and only that problem. And it's very hard to get the intervention to do what you want it to.

BW: I think that's incredibly wise. I would add one thing to your list. It's not just that it's hard to get an intervention to do what you want it to do. It is that it is hard to get it to do what you want it to do and, at scale, these things tend to evolve. The problem of unintended consequences coupled with the problem of perverse incentives and therefore bad policy that is effectively corruption is a very frightening problem.

BW: The social media, for lack of a better term for it, is going to dwarf the printing press for various reasons, some of them because it's so easy, but also because it's of a fundamentally different nature. When you're reading a book, it may be that somebody writes something that's bad for you to absorb but you know you're reading a book because the experience of it, the perception of it is of a book. Whereas, social media increasingly fools the mind.

JP: Look at Twitter. Here's an example of unintended consequences. What don't we know? We don't know what regulates human communication. We know if you restrict the bandwidth people don't understand each other as well. But, we don't know how communication functions. It's complicated. So, we absolutely don't know what happens to communication when you restrict people to 140 or 280 characters and put them in a network with millions of other people. We have no idea. It could be that you tremendously bias the discourse toward impulsive anger. It looks like that if you look at Twitter. And because it is 140 or 280 characters you can whip something off very quickly and it's almost as if the technology is implicitly commanding you to be impulsively aggressive...We completely underestimate the power of the technology because it looks harmless. It just sits there on your phone and doesn't do anything. God only knows what kind of Tower of Babel that is.

BW: Right and, not only that, but the fact that the algorithm changes and we don't get any notice of it. Not only do we not have access to whatever the algorithm's content is but we don't know when it changes. Which means that it's impossible for us to even track the impact of our own behavior.

JP: The algorithms increasingly have a life of their own. Increasingly, they are governed by artificial intelligence. It derives implications that we don't even understand and, as you've pointed out, it all changes so quickly we can't keep up with it in any event.

BW: What I suspect is really going on is that if you are sufficiently plugged in to the internet early enough there comes a point in which your persona on the internet takes primacy. It is more important than your actual physical life persona.

JP: Jesus, it's worse than that, I would say, from personal experience. There is more of me on the internet than there is in me. My electronic avatars are far more powerful than me personally. I can watch this because I've been away for a year and a half and yet my internet presence has steadily increased during that time. I look online now and it's 700 million views.

BW: Now imagine that as the developmental environment for children. Here's the connection I want to draw. My contention is that the online landscape is postmodern. If we were just to simply describe it, the rules, the physics of online life are postmodern. If I decided tomorrow that I was a woman, right? I could change my internet presence such that I would present in a female way. I could say, “hey, anybody who doesn't treat me as female is a jerk.” And the point is I have transitioned, completely. Obviously, there's no such thing in the physical world. You can transition. You can take hormones or blockers. You can get surgeries. But no man has ever become a woman and reproduced in a female way. The point is the physical world has all kinds of constraints that come from physics and biology which do not translate to the online world. For people like you and me for whom the online world is an add-on world, we think obviously real life is the important one and then the online thing has some interface which is frightening but we understand how they relate. But if you reverse these two things, then what you get is a generation that it's problem-solving mind says “actually, of course you can transition. You can transition and then it's everybody's obligation to live by who you've told us you are. And anybody who doesn't is a bad person.” What has to be true for that to be the case?

BW: If you imagine then an online world in which effectively we can all be equal tomorrow as long as we say that's the objective and we can all present as we want and others can be forced to adhere to it or risk being thrown-off the discussion then all of this begins to make a great deal of sense. And so I'm wondering if we are not in effect in a kind of civil war between those for whom the real world has primacy and those for whom the online world had primacy and if that is not the fundamental nature of the battle.

JP: Well, I think that could be the fundamental nature of part of the battle. Obviously, part of what's going on is whatever this unbelievably rapid rate of technological transformation is doing to us. My daughter and some people of approximately her age, so late-20's, are helping me with managed social media. She's noticed that people five years younger than her have advantages in understanding the newly developed forms of social media that she's already outside of. And so that process of being hooked into the web and that being the determining factor for your worldview is probably accelerating. It's going to accelerate. Obviously, it's going to accelerate because the web is becoming more and more dominant. Machines are becoming more and more intelligent. So they abstract themselves away from the world. And the question is “well, what's the consequence of that abstraction?” There's more going on with whatever it is that's happening than technological transformation.

BW: Well, I think there's a couple of ways you can look at it. I mean, obviously, I don't think this is a real battle. Obviously, the internet runs on hardware in the real world. When the power goes out we are all reduced to our biological selves. So, I don't think there actually is anything to fight over. One of these worlds has primacy and the other is an add-on. This is not debatable. But my point is really about the mental confusion that arises for most people. Think about the lives most people are living. Most people, at best, are working a job in which they trade their labor for money that they get to spend on goods or relatively generic adventures. And the part of their life that is interesting and compelling is the internet over which they range freely and engage in battle and they fall in love, increasingly, and whatever else they do. My point is that is a distortion developmentally. It misleads the mind into misunderstanding what is necessary. If you take postmodern rules of the internet and you now impose them on politics in the real world, you get crises. You get the basic structure of civilization coming apart in front of our eyes, which I really believe that it is. […] People who now think the internet has primacy are now exerting a force to “correct” the real world in the direction of their naive internet understanding of things are in danger of crashing the aircraft. And, in some sense, people like you and me are responding to what they are saying about how we should restructure the real world and saying “that doesn't make sense. It won't work. It is going to put us in grave danger. It is going to disrupt essential things.” There are those who can hear us and we are popular with those who can hear us and there are those who regard our pointing out the obvious as a danger to their program who are intent on silencing us.

JP: I have thought about this obsession with identity from a developmental perspective too. This insistence by a loud minority that their determination of their identity take primacy is, first of all it's wrong technically, I think. An identity isn't merely what you feel you are. An identity is way more complicated than that as any decent social constructionist should already know. An identity is a role, a set of complex roles that you negotiate with other people, so that you can thrive across a very long span of time. It can't be something you impose on other people because then they won't cooperate with you. Now, you might say that you have a right to impose certain aspects of it on other people and you could have a reasonable debate about that. But identity is not merely what you feel it is and it certainly is not what you feel it is moment to moment. That identity is actually like that of a three or four year old child. I mean this technically, it's not an insult. When you're a child, you pick up one identity after another and play with them. […] Girls will play to be boys at that age and boys will play to be girls. They play with multitudinous identities and then they settle in to one. So then the question is: “what if you disrupt that play?” That's fantasy play. And then another question might be: “what if you disrupt it with technology?” Not that technology itself is producing a message that is counter to that. But that the fact the children are on technology all the time means they are not engaging in that kind of identity establishing fantasy play. And then you might say, “well maybe what you see happening in that case is bursting out in late adolescence.” And the insistence there that my identity is what I say it is actually the scream in some sense of an organism that hasn't gone through that ego-centric period of play where they are in a fictional sense exactly how they define themselves. […] I see a fair bit of this as delayed fantasy play with the kind of pathology that comes up when you delay a necessary developmental stage. Now, that could be wrong and probably is but, still, it looks to me like that's part of what's happening.

BW: You've got generations now, one and half of them maybe, for whom the online environment was so compelling and so much the source of their affirmation, that its rules have become sacrosanct to them and those rules really do look like it's a childish world. You join some community of people, you tell them who you are, there are rules about them having to respect that you have told them...

JP: The online environment is also making everyone acutely paranoid. And I think the reason for that is it's easy for our thinking to go astray. As we talked about earlier in this discussion, other people tap you back into shape and you are surrounded by a random assortment of other people in the real world because you didn't select them. So, because it's random, it provides you with what is in essence relatively unbiased feedback information. But online you can choose your compatriots and it is likely to be the case that, at your weakest point psychologically, you choose the least demanding compatriots, so your craziest ideas are the least likely to be challenged.

JP: I've kept up. I've transformed myself multiple times over the years. I was taken out by this illness and it isn't obvious to me that I can catch up again. And I've watched my peers, my high school classmates, my university classmates, I've seen people who don't have one transformation in them. They adapt to the high school environment and that's it. That's where they are for the rest of their life. They peak at 17, they're done. They don't change. Then I've seen people who can manage one transformation. I've seen people, much rarer, who can manage two or three. After that it's like a massive drop-off of probability with every demand for transformation. 

~ 

I want to start with a comment about this last quote. Peterson is so spot on with this transformation thing. Like him, I know people from high school that never matured beyond that psychological stage. I would say most people manage one transformation in their whole lives, at most. Many never experience any transformation at all. Like Peterson, I feel as if I have transformed my life several times. I'm not talking about domestic situations or careers or places I've lived or visited. I'm talking about internal transformation. Changing how I define myself as a person and what values I hold most dear. So, I have affinity with him here.

In fact, noting the brief but erudite discussion about the acceleration of change above, I would say that people living in the present dystopia who don't transform are at a terrible disadvantage. Change itself demands transformation to some extent or you just end up being left behind. If you stay the same you lose ground because the train is leaving the station. In fact, there is no train anymore. Dystopia does not care if you are disoriented. And the less you transform yourself, the more disorienting the change is going to be.

It's a self-help trope to say people should plan for multiple careers during the course of their lives, with multiple configurations of skill sets, given the tectonic changes in employment during your lifetime. That should be equally true of personal psychological development. You should be in a constant state of self-evaluation and self-improvement. To remain relevant to the Modern you need to transform yourself internally several times, not just once or twice. Dystopia is not mere desolation and confusion, it must be about discovery and growth or you will become either a nihilist, a religious fanatic, or a pathological mess. Nietzsche pointed this out well enough in his work. His last writings suggest that you should strive not to just “become who you are” but also to enter an almost constant state of becoming, wherein Being is continual becoming.

Peterson is also right in the second to last quote. Social media basically breeds the craziest ideas because users divide themselves into little online cults that all basically agree with each other and exhibit all manner of bias to elevate their perspective just because it is their perspective and discount (bias) competitive assumptions and affirmations. This is a real problem. But, I would argue, this is not the problem he thinks it is. Rather, it is a symptom of what is happening with the interface of technology and humanity. Dystopia is not only the authoritative environment George Orwell envisioned. It is equally the splintering of humanity into hundreds of subcultures. This is not something that can be fixed. It is how things are in the Modern.

So, now I'll go back and work through the stuff I underlined beginning at the top. Weinstein makes an excellent point early on (at 13:15) about “first principles.” I take what he means here to be similar to something I've been thinking a lot about lately. Politically, and perhaps in other ways, we have all sacrificed our principles (to the extent anyone has principles anymore) for the convenience of circumstance. In other words, we really don't adhere to a fixed set of ideas. More often, we react to whatever the circumstances are without regard to our principles – as a matter of convenience rather than values. A great example is how the US Senate held back Marrick Garland's hearings for his appointment to the Supreme Court for nine months but rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett in a few weeks. This qualifies as classic bullshit in addition to exemplifying a lack of principle and a preference toward convenience.

Perhaps I would go so far as to say convenience is a primary value that has overwhelmed what used to be referred to as principles. At any rate, the implication of this is that we no longer recognize changes to our cultural system (via technology, for example). Moreover, we don't know what to do in response to these changes because we are so addicted to convenience of circumstance (kick global warming down the road or the massive accumulation of debt is a future problem). This is a fundamental issue facing us.

Peterson is concerned (at 43:00) that it is “almost as if the technology is implicitly commanding you to be impulsively aggressive.” This is insightful. It is precisely what Twitter does. But, the anger that is expressed comes from outside the platform. The platform just makes it convenient to vent to multiple people. There is absolutely no “good” served by Twitter being around. I think the whole platform should be abolished. People who spend time on Twitter just get dumber, never smarter. You can not learn anything of genuine relevance to your life in this changing dystopia in the span of 280 characters. It screams stupid.

But the more important point is that for Peterson it “seems technology is commanding.” It is. Twitter really is stupid. It really does make you dumber and more irrational. Nevertheless, it is an unstoppable force in society. It is the way things are changing and will continue to change. (This is another consequence of our preference for convenience over first principles.) To that extent, yes, the technology is commanding us here. We literally have no control over it or over our addictions to social media of any kind. I will argue that social media is an updated example of precisely what Martin Heidegger intended in his concept of “Human Being enframed” in his brilliant essay on technology. More on that in a future post.

“The algorithms increasingly have a life of their own. Increasingly they are governed by artificial intelligence.” This has been pointed out by many people, including Yuval Noah Harari. I would say the Modern (as I mean the term) is filled with algorithms that are becoming smarter than we are. We have not arrived at that point yet but we will be there in the next few decades. Again, I will express this more fully in a future post but the bottom line is that we are literally at a point in human civilization where we are training the algorithms. If an alien visitor landed in my back yard tomorrow and asked me to explain to them what's going on right now I would answer: “Oh, we're warming up the planet and training algorithms to take over our lives.” That's most of it. Everyone should see this coming but hardly anyone notices at all or, if they do notice, they are complacent about it. (Again, this plays into Weinstein's concern about “first principles.”)

By claiming that the online world is “postmodern,” Weinstein basically means dystopian. He contrasts the online world with the physical world, the major difference apparently being that the online world is preferred by a great many people to the physical world. “This is a terrible thing,” he would say. Like the robot from Lost In Space, Weinstein ways his arms about while repeating “Danger! Danger!” But he is not pointing out danger at all. Certainly there is a dangerous aspect to it. But what he's talking about how rapidly changing technology affects human behavior. That is not going to change. It is only going to transform much farther and faster than he even wants to consider. It does not matter that the workings of the online world don't transfer neatly into the real world. If primacy goes to the online world then artificiality will be the new normal.

Again, these guys are very expertly articulating issues about the immersive affect of social media on human beings. But these are not “problems” that can be “solved” so much as birthing pains of our transcendence into the Modern. If there is a “civil war” for primacy, the real world is going to lose. His point about we are all reduced to biological selves when the electricity goes off is trivial really. 99.9% of the time we don't live in a world without electricity (unless you are in Texas or California). That is, at best, a temporary inconvenience and it is certainly not enough to stop our attraction for online reality. Peterson bemoans that “there is more happening here than technological transformation.” I respectfully disagree. I assume he is meaning that the impact upon human beings is the “more” that is happening in technological transformation. Technology is learning from us. What's more, it is manipulating us based upon what it learns and we are only in the beginning stages of this process. The “problems” these two great minds bring up are simply symptoms of a much larger force of change. But technology is already in the driver's seat.

Both Weinstein and Peterson are wise to point out that this is all terribly disruptive and is leading to people applying online “rules” to the real world while apparently missing critical psychological developmental stages because “fantasy time” has been replaced by screen time on the internet. But is that a legitimate indictment? Sure, there is fundamental and widespread trauma but what can anyone do about it? Isn't it the same for every age? Wasn't society disrupted by industrialization? Urbanization led to people becoming less aware of the weather and of nature.  This was a fundamental change in our psychology too, at the time.  City parks ultimately became a sufficient substitute for what we really needed out of nature. (I need more than that personally but I am not typical nor normal in that regard.)  Mass marketing and consumerism? Television? Families stopped interacting as much when Lost in Space aired. Jesus Christ has a better chance of coming tomorrow than we have of stopping the effects of social media and the willful merger of ourselves with technology in the coming decades.

There is no remedy for the problems Peterson and Weinstein are wrestling with here. They are still seeing everything through the lens of the past, as if the full extent of this force of technological change were yet to happen. In truth, it has already happened, we are just waiting for the algorithms and artificial intelligence to become smarter. The only possibility that I see is the transformation of who we are as beings in order to accommodate the convenient immersion offered by technology. That will be a disruptive transformation. Personal psychological development will evolve.  Maybe transgender awareness and the resulting issues is a harbinger of things to come.  

As technology develops knowledge of its own (because that is what it is doing, learning and gaining knowledge as if it were a sentient being) it will offer an even more sophisticated and multifaceted alternative to the real world. Human beings, being enframed as we are by immersive technology, will gladly choose whatever the holographic media of the future becomes. If many of us already prefer being online to the real world, how many more of us will make that choice freely when what is being offered is more wonderful (customized through algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves) than anything in this so-called “real” world.

Peterson and Weinstein know what they are looking at. They understand the disruption and absurdity it causes. But what they don't have is the proper context. The future is already here. It is leaking into the present in such a way as to seem strange to those who wish to use the past as the lens through which to interpret things. Their “problems” are only symptoms of something bigger that is becoming. This is more or less inevitable given what human beings are (reactive lovers of convenience and consumption) and what artificial reality technology is (a proactive learning and controlling apparatus). You cannot have the type of change that will occur over the next few decades without causing psychological trauma. That is why we so desperately need to keep transforming ourselves.

Even though I think Peterson and Weinstein are talking about issues that have no resolution, this is still a wonderful discussion. It clearly points out the consequences of what is happening on a variety of levels. That I see things slightly differently from Peterson (that these problems are really just the phenomena of an unstoppable force), does not change the fact that I look forward to his podcast each week.  The insights I usually gain through listening often inspire me.  The opinions expressed so articulately by Peterson and his guests are a feast for any curious mind.