People need to know what they should do,
and one of the things they should do
is take responsibility.
Have you heard of
Jordan Peterson?
He’s a psychologist who lectures about responsibility.
­­­ I assumed that would bore young people, yet
millions watch his videos,
and buy his book.
12 Rules is unbelievably successful.
Number one on Amazon,
t­­­hat almost never happens with non-fiction.
Yeah.
Well, it's also a difficult book.
It's a dark book as well.
It's not the sort of thing
that you would expect people to line up to buy.
And yet they do...
they line up...
IN long lines.
Excited, says Peterson
to learn about responsibility.
Young men get excited
when you talk to them about responsibility?
Yeah, fancy that, eh?
Who would have ever guessed that?
I wouldn't have.
No, no kidding.
No kidding.
Emergence of ethical behavior.
When Peterson first rented a lecture hall, he
didn’t know if anyone would listen to him speak.
Can you imagine this, eh?
As an invitation to a lecture.
Okay, we're gonna talk about the old testament
in a really dark way.
It's like you think that's gonna be successful?
And we're gonna talk about responsibility and truth.
Oh, they'll be beating down the doors
to attend those lectures.
And they all sold out.
His lectures continue selling out,
because, he says,
People have been fed this diet of pabulum,
rights, and impulsive freedom.
Free tuition.
Making quality childcare affordable.
You have a right to a living wage.
All we've had for sixty years is a dialogue
about rights.
There's just an absolute starvation
for the other side of the story.
Well, that leaves a hole in people's hearts.
Peterson fills that hole with
things he learned from his
clinical psychology practice.
It's in responsibility that most people find
the meaning
that sustains them through life.
It's not in happiness.
It's not in impulsive pleasure.
Instead, he says,
the way to find meaning is:
to adopt the responsibility for your own well-being,
and to try to put your family together, and
to try to serve your community,
and to try to seek for eternal truths and to live them.
That's the sort of thing
that can ground you in your life
enough, so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.
Research backs him up.
People feel fulfilled
when they feel competent.
It's very helpful for people to hear
that they should make themselves competent,
and dangerous, and take their proper place in the world.
Competent, and dangerous.
Why dangerous?
There's nothing to you otherwise.
If you're not a formidable force,
there's no morality in your self-control.
If you're incapable of violence,
not being violent isn't a virtue.
People who teach martial arts know this full well,
right?
If you learn a martial art
you learn to be dangerous,
but simultaneously you learn to control it.
It's the alternative to being weak.
Naive, and weak, and harmless,
which is what young men are being encouraged to be.
Encouraged, says Peterson by
educators and media that bash masculinity.
The problem is toxic masculinity.
Toxic masculinity.
You're alienating young men.
We're telling them that they're patriarchal oppressors.
That's a bad message, says Peterson.
Life is a very difficult process.
You’re not prepared for it unless
you have the capacity to be dangerous.
By dangerous, that implies I should be
ready to threaten someone, to hurt somebody.
No, you should be capable of it,
but that doesn't mean you should use it.
Your female critics say,
you men are already stronger than we.
You abuse us, and you're encouraging that.
Oh, well,
that's definitely not the case.
But lots of people call Peterson sexist, transphobic,
evil.
From Vox,
you've claimed feminists have an unconscious wish
for brutal male domination.
You tell me why they line up with the Islamists?
Not all do.
They just haven't criticized them.
Well, that's good enough for me.
You'd think if the feminists
practiced what they'd preached,
there'd be non-stop demonstrations
against Saudi Arabia.
Saudi women -- They still cannot get married,
travel abroad, or open a bank account without
permission of a male guardian.
You see how much concern there is
among the radical feminists for the rights of women.
Others dismiss him as shallow.
Articles call him a charlatan.
“The stupid man’s smart person”?
Peddling fascist mysticism
because comments like
“toughen up, you weasel”
and “compassion is a vice”
provide “philosophical backup" to
demagogues like Donald Trump.
He’s fired!
Compassion is a vice?
If it's taken too far.
Hyper-protectiveness.
Helicopter parenting.
All of that.
When you have children,
you have to encourage them to take risks
because they have to grow up,
and take their place in the world.
You can't protect them too much
because if you do, you destroy them.
And that’s a message that leads millions of people to
buy this book
and line up to hear Jordan Peterson speak.