Successful
The Dark Ways P*rn Has Changed Our Society | Jordan Peterson
How has the normalization of pornography and explicit sexual content affected today's society? Well, I'll tell you something that you might not know. This is quite interesting. So, I studied antisocial personality for a long time. Mostly at McGill, although I kept, so that was for about seven years. And then I kept my hand in the literature for decades after that. And I studied male antisocial behavior and female antisocial behavior. The patterns are, they overlap, but they have their distinctions. And I know there's a constellation of symptoms, so to speak, that make up criminal behavior and its precursors. And the essence of criminal behavior is predatory parasitism. And so that's really the definition of psychopathy. So, a predator is obviously someone who will take from you what is yours. And a parasite is someone who will manipulate you into working for their advantage. And a predatory parasite is a psychopath. And then you can decorate the psychopathy in various ways. So, if you're an extroverted parasitic predator, then you're a charming psychopath. And if you're an extroverted, non-neurotic, non-neurotic predatory parasite, then you're a fearless charming psychopath. And that would make you a movie villain, right? Because the psychopaths that you see portrayed as super villains in some sense are extroverted, non-neurotic, so fearless, predatory parasites. And they have the same charm that a cobra has. And so, now most people who are antisocial aren't antisocial to that degree. There are other patterns of behavior and attitude that are associated with that tilt towards criminal exploitation. And one of them is early sexual experience and multiple sexual partners. And so, it turns out that the constellation of symptoms that's associated with criminality and its extension into psychopathy is also associated with short-term mating strategies, promiscuity. So, what does pornography do? Well, that's pretty self-evident once you know those other facts. It's like it tilts people hard towards a short-term mating outlook, and that's a bad idea. So, it's not a good idea to employ sexuality in the services of short-term gratification. Why? Because short-term gratification is a bad strategy. Why? Because short-term gratification doesn't iterate well, and you know this. This is why it's not that good an idea to overuse cocaine. It's like, well, it's a great drug. It activates the system that is at the base of positive emotion itself. That's what it does technically. Why not use it? Because, you know, people, psychologists, researchers think, well, why do people use drugs? That's a stupid question. I'm dead serious about that. We absolutely know why people use drugs. What we don't know is why everyone doesn't use them all the time. And here's how we know this, for example. There are three broad categories of drugs of abuse. There's the anti-anxiety drugs, alcohol, barbiturates, and benzodiazepines, and there's the psychomotor stimulants, and that's cocaine and amphetamines, essentially, methamphetamine as well. And there's the opiates, which are analgesic. Now, we'll leave the hallucinogens aside because they're a strange category, and they're not -- technically, they're not drugs of abuse, and there are reasons for that. But cocaine, certainly, is, no, what does cocaine do? Well, you have a biological system within you that is activated when you're moving towards valuable goals, and the subjective experience of activation of that system is positive emotion, it's enthusiasm, it's engagement, it's the sense that you're doing something vital and meaningful. And cocaine and drugs like it activate that system. So it's no mystery at all why people will use cocaine. Well, so what happens if you use it all the time? The answer is you go downhill very, very rapidly, and short-term impulsive, hedonic gratification is not a strategy that iterates well across time. And short-term sexual gratification strategies have exactly the same problem. Now, imagine this is happening more and more commonly, by the way. So as women free themselves from the shackles of monogamous relationships and are more likely to engage in short-term mating strategies, you might think that's a very good thing for men. But turns out, it's not such a good thing for men because women are quite picky, and so women rate 80% of men online as below average and attractiveness, and whereas men rate 50% of women as below average and attractiveness, which by the way is true, right, statistically. But it's 80% of men. And so what that means is that the attention of women in an open mating market is focused on a very small percentage of men, and what's happening in colleges and universities where women dominate in terms of proportion of population is that all the women are chasing a very small number of men. So most of the men have no partners at all, and some of the men have more partners than they know what to do with, and so those men pursue short-term mating strategies, which is not so good for the women because they just as soon have an actual relationship. But then you might ask, well, what does it do to the men, and that's easy, is that it trains them to adopt anti-social short-term mating strategies. And that's really bad practice because if you practice exploiting people for your momentary gratification, then you'll become an expert at that. And that's an anti-social/psychopathic mode of interaction, and you might say, so what? Look at all the sex, and the answer is, well, that's just not going to work out very well for you as you try to build yourself something approximating a stable and fulfilling life, because you are not going to be able to do that if you treat other people as if they're the device for your momentary gratification. No one who's sophisticated in any real sense is going to put up with that, and so it might work well in the short-term, but it's an absolutely cataclysmically dreadful medium to long-term strategy. We know this too because psychopaths use strategy like that because they're predatory parasites. And to be a successful psychopath, unless you operate online, which is where most psychopaths operate now, you have to keep moving. You might say, well, everyone's successful is a psychopath. It's like, no, that's actually wrong. Psychopaths are rarely successful. They're somewhat more successful than people who don't do anything. But in order to maintain any success at all, they have to be itinerant, because if you're a predatory parasite and you manipulate other people, they figure it out and then they remember who you are, and people are very good at remembering those things, and then your reputation is damaged as a consequence of the truth, and then in order to continue operating successfully as a psychopath, you have to go somewhere else. So back to pornography. Well, first of all, it's a surfight of hedonistic pleasure. It's whim-based. It doesn't constitute the kind of action that lays the groundwork for functional relationships. It stops you from being desperate enough to go and put yourself on the line in a real relationship, it trains you sexually to respond only to pornography. It requires that you use more and more novel forms of pornography as your habit develops in order to get the same kick. It increases the probability of impotence in real life. There's nothing about it that's good. And then the fact of its wide distribution online, let's say, also entices girls into the kind of quasi-prostitution that characterizes, you know, only fans in sites like that. So now this isn't a good thing. It's not a good thing. So... (audience applauding)