The Subsidiary Hierarchy of Identity
Integrate yourself, then marriage, then children, then community, then upward — self-focus is the misery
- Difficulty
- Expert
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Peterson's answer to the identity crisis he sees in 18-to-40-year-olds: identity is not a whim or an appetite you declare, it is a nested structure of voluntary responsibility you climb. First you integrate the warring drives inside yourself into something that serves all of them harmoniously across a long time — that is maturity. Then you add levels: partner, parent, local community, town, city, nation, and finally what should be served most fundamentally. He grounds it in a specific empirical claim — that self-consciousness and negative emotion are so tightly coupled they are statistically indistinguishable — which makes the climb out of self-focus the direct mechanism for reducing misery.
Origin
Formed in response to Bartlett's data that his 18-to-40 audience is in crisis, and to the CALM CEO's statistic that 19-to-35-year-olds are twice as likely to report being in crisis as any other group.
Core principles
- 01Whim-based identities built on appetite or arbitrary category produce anxiety, hopelessness, and misery.
- 02Every drive attempts to philosophise in its own spirit and dominate the whole — integration is the counter.
- 03Maturity is a structure that serves all your drives simultaneously and harmoniously across a long time.
- 04Self-consciousness and negative emotion are statistically indistinguishable.
- 05Up is definable: a better solution unites more situations and more people across broader spans of time.
How to run it
- 1
Get your act together and take care of yourself
Integrate across anxiety, hatred, pain, jealousy, fear, hunger and lust into a single functioning unity rather than being ruled by whichever drive is loudest.
Pro tip Test the structure by whether it serves all the drives over a long horizon, not whether it satisfies one now.
Watch out Declaring yourself to be one appetite — rage, sexuality, consumption — is the protester or consumer model, and it does not hold.
- 2
Become tolerable to be around
Integrate enough that there is capacity left over for someone else to play with you.
- 3
Establish a permanent relationship
Invite someone to join forces, produce a united vision, and accept that your identity is now the interplay of you and you-as-partner, with obligations and opportunities attached.
Pro tip Getting outside yourself decreases anxiety — that is the mechanism, not a moral bonus.
Watch out If your marriage feels like a prison you are either immature about what you want or you have not negotiated properly.
- 4
Add children and community
Take on the next levels of responsibility — parenthood, then local business or organisation, then town, city, state, nation.
Pro tip Each level is described as both responsibility and an opportunity to flesh yourself out.
- 5
Aim at the highest level
Orient the whole hierarchy toward what should be served most fundamentally, which Peterson treats as the definition of God and the terminus of the identity structure.
Pro tip Use the test of 'up': a better solution unites more situations and people across broader spans of time.
Watch out Abandoning that orientation does not remove it — the god just becomes your own subjectivity.
In the wild
Bartlett reports that the CEO of the mental health charity CALM told him 19-to-35-year-olds are twice as likely to report being in crisis as any other group.
→ Peterson attributes it to a straightforward cause — the more you are focused on yourself, the more miserable you are.
Peterson compares radical subjectivity organised around immediate impulse to the governing structure of a room full of two-year-olds.
→ It does not work at any scale, which is the practical argument for the subsidiary structure over whim-based identity.
Common mistakes
Building identity on a single appetite
Making sexual behaviour or any immediate drive the core of identity presumes nothing more vital exists in you, which produces anxiety, hopelessness and misery.
Reading constraint as imprisonment
Feeling that marriage forbids things usually means you cannot immediately gratify short-term whims, or that you have negotiated badly — not that commitment is a cage.
Treating self-focus as self-care
Because self-consciousness and negative emotion are statistically indistinguishable, the culturally endorsed turn inward is a direct route to misery, however it is marketed.
Is it for you?
Best for
Young adults struggling with the transition into adult identity, meaning, and direction.
Not ideal for
People in acute crisis who need immediate stabilisation before taking on additional responsibility.
From the transcript
“And the solution is something called a subsidiary solution.”
“integrate it into a structure that serves all of those spirits simultaneously and harmoniously across a long time. That's maturity.”
“The more you are focused on yourself, the more miserable you are.”
“A better solution unites more situations and people across broader spans of time.”
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