[Music] and joining us now Jordan Peterson professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Jordan it's always good to have you on TVO thanks for coming back tonight well in the Fallout from all this financial business in the United States we've been hearing and reading that the collapse of Wall Street actually comes down to one word and that word is trust at the end of the day is this a story about trust well it seems to me that it's a story about two things I mean one thing is I think it's a story about rapid change you know your the panelists who were on here before discussed the fact that there's been all sorts of new financial instruments constructed in the last 10 years and the and that produces an acceleration of change and I I think it's very difficult for anybody to keep track of so but I think where you see the consequences of lack of trust is in the stalled efforts to deal with the crisis because it appears as though the American leadership have used up much of their political capital and as a consequence whyever that might be as a consequence rapid movement on this issue seems to be impossible how important would you gauge trust to the smooth operation of a modern Western Society well I think I mean there's good evidence from from the research from the body of psychological research that the two most important things with regards to productivity in general are basic intelligence and conscientiousness and conscientiousness which is a personality trait looks like the it looks like the ability to put words into action so for if you and I are engaged in a transaction and you tell me that you're going to do something then I can treat you as if you're a straightforward person you're not somebody I have to spend a lot of time figuring out I can take you at your word and and that simplifies our relationship so that we can do business together and if you're capable of doing that it looks like it looks like you're successful and all the things that we use all the abstractions that we use to keep track of what constitutes value are all bet are all based on interpersonal trust so I think it's it's it's the most fundamental of Natural Resources it's a Psychological Resource but it's the most fundamental thing I think that answer goes a long way to explaining why the Washington bailout package failed because apparently there is zero trust between Republicans and Democrats and administration people in Congress and on it goes right and people and Leadership and you know I think there there's a there's a number of things I think that that play into that the first is I think bush is paying the price now or maybe the American people in general are paying the price for having been led into a war that was predicated essentially on a lie I mean it's pretty obvious I think regardless of of which part of the let me stop you a lie or a mistake no no I think it was a lie a lie yeah I do I think it was they tweaked the intelligence they knew the weapons of destuction w I don't know if they tweaked the intelligence but there's lots of ways of deceiving yourself you know if you have a set idea in mind and you look at a body of data you can only pay attention to the data that supports your theory and if you're ideologically rigid and committed to a particular perspective the probability that the deception this deception is going to kick in before you even look at the facts but I want to get the reference he's saying Bush lied to the American people or he lied to himself in order to sell this War I think bush has probably been lying to himself for a long time and and I think a lot of that comes I think that comes along with ideological precommitment and we know that the people who governed the United States had advised Clinton back in 1993 that an attack on Iraq an attempt to establish democracy was was a good idea that's a matter of public record and we also know that after the events of of uh of 911 that it the leadership of the United States judged that that was an optimal time to play a particular kind of marketing campaign to the American people to sell the war and and I mean one one of the things you see increasingly characterizing politics is that politics is marketing and the problem with marketing is that it's about it's only about winning and winning is important but it's not the only thing it's not about truth necessarily well and Truth is like truth seems to be tightly related to productivity and if Bureau bureaucratic organizations business and and and governments and so forth are actually in the business of producing something of value and all they do is market and win then everything that's being produced that's of value is put off to the side okay my my fault because I kind of got you off track here on the Iraq business but I think the point I think you were starting to make was that because of the Iraq War this president has precious little trust currency what you will with the American people and therefore what well therefore it's very difficult for for him to muster any force behind his arguments that you know that he can be trusted to deal with the banking crisis and that his the plan that he and his advisers put forth is the appropriate plan and that that plan is actually in the best interests of everyone especially given that he's basically it it looks like he's been speaking for you know the the uppermost strata of of wealth owners in the United States for the last eight years and the the see the thing is that people don't understand this crisis like I don't understand it I'm not convinced that the people who say they understand it actually understand it because if people really understood it You' think maybe that it wouldn't have happened like a crisis looks like the unexpected is occurring okay so because you don't understand it you need to trust the people that are dealing with it and if they if they're not to be trusted because of their past history then you're you're kind of left bereft no one can take action I suspect you're exactly right that members of Congress certainly don't understand the the niceties and the ins and outs of the financial situation right now in the United States but one they do get they sure don't trust the people who are in charge of getting the Mone of this mess and that's why they turned it down fair to say well I also think it's partly that it also may be that what they're doing is right you know like it seems to me that TR it's possible that attempts to solve a $700 billion problem in one week are premature with a three-page bill well right it it and and there's and there's aspects of the bill that seemed questionable you know um the fact for example that there weren't limits on executive compensation built into the first package I mean you you'd think that maybe it might be a time for an announcement by interested parties in Wall Street that voluntary limits on that kind of compensation might be considered at least as an interim measure as a as a as an attempt to reild yeah I know they got there eventually but it wasn't you know first and foremost in their pack in their consideration and like does it have to be solved in a week and is it good if it was solved in a week because it's possible that this is a necessary correction you know Market do have to correct and maybe if people step in too soon with a magic package that all it'll do is produce a larger crisis somewhere down the road well to that point what do you think the level of trust is today given that when the package failed the market in the states went down 777 points but then today went up 300 and some odd points right well I mean obviously it's still down from where it was so there's a net loss but I mean the sky it doesn't exactly look like the sky fell and you know I also think it's it like the markets are a huge machine and the Machine has rules and one of the rules is you win and the other rule is that you lose and you can't throw a ball up in the air and then legislate for it not to fall and you know it certainly isn't clear to me although I wouldn't consider myself the world's most informed economic Observer I don't have the training like it isn't clear to me that that the markets can't be left to correct themselves I mean we've been told that by people who should know that for 20 years probably mhm well maybe this isn't maybe this is a natural correction and it's possible that governments have to do something about it but I don't see how you establish proof that that's necessary certainly the majority of Congress did accepted your last premise well and and and the majority of Republicans as well right because really if I remember correctly a higher proportion of Republicans voted to defeat the bill than Democrats AB absolutely how if trust is a thing and it is presumably something you know when you see how do you quantify it or how do you measure it well you can measure you can measure trustability so to speak conscientiousness as a personality trait so for example we've designed an instrument that that's being published this month that forces people to choose between different self-descriptive uh traits as a as a a so for example I might ask you um are you kind-hearted or are you hardworking are you creative or are you uh warm M are you talkative or are you Brave and I mean those are those are obviously all traits that are positive the probability is quite high that you're not uh you know that you you're not blessed with a surfite of all those positive traits that there's some variation in them by by getting people to make forc choices between the right set of descriptive adjectives you can come up with a reasonable picture of their personality and conscientiousness as I said which is looks like it's a personality trait that's associated with Integrity it looks like it's something like the ability to translate abstraction so your word basically your verbal abstraction into Behavior human beings can abstract right which means we can take a representation of something and manipulate the representation without manipulating the thing well it looks like what happens with conscientious people is they abstract up from The Real World manipulate the abstractions make a plan and then they actually implement the plan and that makes them very simple to deal with because like you're a complicated creature you know as a biological organism your capability span the range from Mother Teresa to Hitler fundamentally and if I have to deal with all that complexity every time I'm interacting with you I'm not going to have any energy left over to do anything productive if you're a conscientious person and you say something and then you do it I can take you at your word and that makes our interactions productive so that that's how you measure it at the individual level personality scales do that and and they're they're reasonably good measures which means if you give someone a personality scale that measures conscien say and then you track their performance in academics or in Creative Endeavors or in business for a reasonably long period of time their self ratings or personality ratings of them that are derived by others are pretty good predictors of their long-term performance and so that means two things it means conscientious people with Integrity are more productive and it also means that our society rewards conscientiousness and integrity and that's a really good thing too because that means that people who plan for the long run and who and who carry out plans over a lengthy period of time can be reasonably assured that their long-term planning and their sacrifices in the present will be rewarded in the future on this story in the United States today how much conscientiousness and integrity are you seeing among the players who are responsible for dealing with this crisis well I don't I don't really think that that that can be answered you know because I think that's the sort of thing that can only be answered in retrospect I mean you you could say that Congress is dithering you you could say that Congress is locked in a bipartisan struggle you could say that Congress is acting exactly how it should act which is that it's been given a very complicated proposal and a very expensive proposal and it's doing its best to debate its way through it so it's possible that the system is working the way it should work now I think what's happened though is that because I really think because people have got used to spin they've got used to salesmanship in politics they they they kind of consider that the Norm the problem is when you constantly use spin is you you you demolish your political Capital like so there's a lot of shortterm gain in that because you can fool you know all of the people some of the time but the chickens always come home to roost and and I think in any system that's actually functional the chickens do always come home to roost and that's what's happening now and I think bush in particular is paying the price for really not being trustworthy in the last crisis and and not inspiring the sort of confidence that would enable him to address Congress and and and make what he's suggesting stick but the American people believe in Redemption they believe in second acts in life can you come back from a kind of a bush-like loss of currency to your reputation well I think the economy can certainly rebound um I think that it whether or not Bush can come back tough for him he's got a few months left well and it doesn't matter in a sense I think the capacity of the American political system for constant renewal is remarkable and I think that's one of the genuine strengths of democracy I mean democracy is really good at allowing and and capitalism as well at allowing corrupt systems to burn down and have new things rise out of the ashes you know and that and that's that death and rebirth idea that death and rebirth is Redemptive and necessary is deeply rooted in Western Society but bush has made the point that he doesn't worry too much about what the journalists say about him today because as he said they're still uh re-evaluating George Washington's presidency and he says by the time they figured out whether I was any good I'm going to be long dead it is possible that they are going to have to revise the book on Bush someday isn't it well it is and it is and I I I also think though that the court of public opinion is probably the wrong place to determine whether or not your actions are appropriate like the appropriate court is the theater of conscience I think that it's necessary for individuals to do what they truly believe believe to be right and and sort of regardless of the immediate consequences because then this is a matter of faith in a way and of course Bush and the right-wing Republicans in particular place great emphasis on faith I mean you either believe that the world is structured that the world is structured and that there are rules to existence that should be followed or you don't believe that if you do believe it you try to do what you think is right and you try to do that with every single action and every single utterance and you let the consequences play out the way they're going to that's different than trying to win mhm and like I've got nothing against winning but like there there's a difference between winning and being productive and being productive is more important than winning and and you have to kind of accept that on faith because you can't prove it within the confines of any given time frame okay but you know obviously bush has lost the big he's lost trust today right his currency in the terms of trust is at an all-time low right now his favorability ratings are terrible I think the worst ever of any president ever pulled but that is not NE I guess I should ask not say is it to suggest that that will always be the case and it is possible sometime in the future that currency will be rebuilt by historians for example who will take a second look at his time in office 50 to 100 years from now and say you know what we had it wrong yeah well I mean the implications like people think the past is fixed you know but the past is less fixed than you think because you're always viewing it you know through a particular frame of reference it's very difficult to make final judgments about whether or not a given person's actions were appropriate or inappropriate he can claim that they're appropriate and you know maybe maybe they are he does face a crisis of confidence at the moment you know and I would attribute that to to to his conduct with regards to the selling of the war now I could be wrong about that and maybe he is a an absolutely ethical person and none of that was just marketing although I doubt it I I don't think that's how it looks if you look at the historical record I still think though that and I actually think that this is a core belief in it's a core aspect of the Christian faith that bush professes to belong to is that the proper place for determining whether or not your actions are correct is within the confines of your own conscience and I can't believe that the marketing job that was done around the Iraq war was in accordance with conscience I can't believe that one thing we are obliged to trust here on this program is the clock and at the moment it says we're out of time Jordan Peterson though glad that you came in TVO tonight and talk to us about trust and I trust that you had a good time tonight y thanks for the opportunity thank you Back To Top