[Music]
thank you all for coming I'm going to
begin by introducing Jordan Peterson and
then I will talk a little bit about how
this event is going to work and then
we'll get underway so Jordan Peterson
has been called quote one of the most
important thinkers to emerge on the
world stage for many years by The
Spectator he has been a dishwasher gas
jockey bartender short-order cook
beekeeper oil derrick bit rita / plywood
mill laborer and railway line worker
he's taught mythology to lawyers doctors
and businessmen consulted for the UN
Secretary General's high-level panel on
sustainable development helped his
clinical clients manage depression
obsessive compulsive disorder anxiety
and schizophrenia served as an advisor
to senior partners of major law firms
identified thousands of promising
entrepreneurs on six different
continents and lectured extensively in
North America and Europe he has flown a
hammerhead role in a carbon-fiber stunt
plane piloted a mahogany racing sailboat
around Alcatraz Island explored an
arizona meteorite crater with a group of
astronauts built a Native American
longhouse on the upper floor of his
Toronto home and been inducted into the
coastal Pacific quoc waka waka tribe
Malcolm Gladwell discussed psychology
with him while researching his books
Norman Doidge is a good friend and
collaborator thriller writer Greg
Hurwitz employed several of his quote
valuable things as a plot feature in his
number 1 international bestseller orphan
x and he worked with jim balsillie
former RI m CEO on a project for the UN
secretary-general with the students and
colleagues dr. peterson has published
more than a hundred scientific papers
transforming the modern understanding of
personality and revolutionized the
psychology of religion with his now
classic book maps of meaning the
architecture of belief as a Harvard
professor he was nominated for the
prestigious Levinson teaching Prize and
is regarded by his current University of
Toronto students as one of three truly
life-changing teachers dr. Peterson is a
Cora most viewed writer and values and
principles and Perrin
in education he has innumerable Twitter
followers and Facebook followers his
YouTube channel now has about a million
subscribers and his classroom lectures
on mythology were turned into a popular
13 part TV series on TV Ontario dr.
Peterson's online self-help program the
self authoring suite has been featured
and oh the Oprah Magazine
on CBC Radio and on NPR's national
website it has helped over 150,000
people resolve the problems of their
past and radically improved their future
without further ado please join me in
welcoming dr. Jordan Peterson tilapia
so the way this is going to work is that
I'm going to have a conversation with
dr. Peterson for 90 minutes and then
there is going to be a 90 minute Q&A
this event is being video recorded and
will be published online for
non-commercial non advertising purposes
during the Q&A session when you were
handed a microphone please speak
directly into it our viewers on YouTube
will appreciate it
and finally I am a moderator between
professor Peterson and the audience but
also a biased participant in this
conversation okay well it's a relief
that's all over okay so I thought we
would start things off with this I
assume that many in the audience are
curious but relatively unfamiliar with
you or have heard a lot about you
without ever reading or listening to you
so I thought we might start with you
introducing yourself to the audience and
maybe telling them some of the main
things that you think they might be
interested in knowing about you well I
guess the most relevant detail is that I
spent about 15 years writing this and I
worked on it about three hours a day
every day during that period of time and
at at the same time I was finishing off
my doctorate and I started lecturing at
Harvard but I was doing that continually
and thinking about it continually and
reading the material that I needed to
read in order to write the book
continually as well and I didn't realize
until more recently that what I was
doing was at the heart of the postmodern
conundrum I would say I was very much
obsessed by the events of the Cold War
for reasons I don't exactly understand I
had a lot of dreams about nuclear
annihilation for years on end
I mean it wasn't that uncommon to be
obsessed by that when I grew up I mean
because it was a preoccupation of
everyone who was my age I suppose there
there were lots of years probably
between 1962 I would say probably in
1985 where people were pretty convinced
that the probability of a nuclear war
was high much higher now than people
considered now and I was curious about
this I was curious about why everyone
wasn't obsessed about this all the time
first of all because it seemed like the
fundamental issue that two armed camps
were pointing something in excess of
25,000 hydrogen bombs each at each other
I couldn't understand how anybody could
concentrate on anything other than that
since it seems so utterly insane and I
was curious what was going on exactly
was this one leaked the explanation was
that there's a very large number of ways
that human beings could organize
themselves in society like a large
number of games that we could
hypothetically play and they're all
equally arbitrary in an in an equally
arbitrary universe and that the
Communists had decided to play one kind
of game and the West and the Western
free-market Democratic types have had
decided to play another game and it was
all arbitrary in some sense and so
that's what I was trying to figure out
was what the hell was going on with this
conflict and was it merely a battle
between two hypothetically equally valid
interpretations of the world drawn from
a set of extraordinary large potential
interpretations which I think would be
essentially a postmodernist take on it
and I think I went into the problem
neutrally in that I didn't think I knew
what the answer was you know so so lots
of times when you talk to people who
think or wouldn't you talk to people who
write they have an idea and it's right
and then they write whatever they're
writing to justify the idea that's how
they look at it but it's not a good way
to write a good way to write and think
is to have a problem
and then try to solve it right to
actually solve it not to demonstrate
that you're a priori commitment is true
and you know one of the signs I would
say that my a priori commitments weren't
the purpose for the writing was that I
walked away from that 15-year project
with a view of the world that was
completely different than the view that
I had going in and learned all sorts of
things especially about the role of
narrative and and religious thinking in
life that I had no idea was possible
when I started and a lot of that was a
consequence of reading the great people
who I read deeply you know I read well
all the great works of Friedrich
Nietzsche and the great works of
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and most of us
collected works everything that had been
published up to that point and a very
large swath of the relevant clinical
literature the great clinicians of the
20th century and a huge stack of
neuroscience and etc etc because I was
reading constantly during this time and
I realized some things that I think are
true the Communists were wrong they
weren't and not just a little bit wrong
and not wrong in some arbitrary way they
were playing a game that human beings
cannot play without descending into a
murderous catastrophe and there's
something about what we've done in the
West that's correct
and I it's hearts complicated because
our our cognitive structures that's one
way of thinking about it or our
socio-political arrangements they're
actually they actually parallel one
another in an important way aren't are
grounded in a you know strange set of
axioms and the axioms aren't rational
precisely it's more like their narrative
their narrative axioms their stories and
the story of the West is that the
individual is sovereign over the group
and that that's the solution to
tribalism and I think that's the correct
solution now what that means
metaphysically because it's it's also
embedded in our religious doctrines
right because
especially in Christianity although not
exclusively to Christianity the
individual is sovereign the suffering
individual is sovereign and there's
something about that that's true at
least psychologically and I don't know
what that might mean metaphysically
because who the hell knows what anything
means metaphysically right I mean your
your knowledge runs out at some point
anyways I worked all these ideas out and
then I taught for a long time courses
that were based on the ideas and the
courses were very impactful I would say
they had the same impact on the people
that I was teaching as walking through
the material had on me and well it was
out of that that all of this political
controversy arose I mean I was never
focused on political controversy even
though I'm interested in politics and I
thought it many points in my life about
a political career I always put it aside
for a psychological and philosophical
career I would say and but but things
started to shift badly in Canada over
the last five years and our government
dared to implement legislation that
compelled speech and one of the things
that I had learned when I was doing all
this background investigation was that
there isn't a higher value than free
speech it isn't free speech it's not the
right way of thinking about it because
it's free thought and even that's not
the right way of thinking about it
because thought is the precursor to
action and life so there's no difference
between free speech and free life and I
was just not willing to put up with
restrictions on my free life and so I
made some videos pointing out the
pathology of this doctrine and the fact
that the government had radically
overreached its its appropriate limits
and well then you know well and maybe
you don't know but I've been enveloped
in continual scandal since for 18 months
as a consequence which to me as a
clinician indicates that I got my damn
diagnosis right right it's not about
pronouns it's about something
deeper than that and I stand by that I
believe that it's the case and I don't
think that we would all be here tonight
if that wasn't the situation so so I
wanted my first or my next question to
be about Lafayette and so I thought I
would read a couple of Facebook posts
that certain students who are critical
of you read in the lead-up to this event
and just ask you to respond to them okay
so this is a student writing Lafayette
College I'm utterly disappointed that
you're allowing this to take place on
our campus
I thought we went through this last
semester with roaming Millenial inviting
hateful speakers who make wildly
unsubstantiated claims is not going to
fly with the student body I get it
the mill series events are private and
not endorsed by the college but you
absolutely have the power to make a
statement on this the fact that you're
not is an embarrassment to our community
if you believe this man is a legitimate
source of knowledge because he has a
degree in clinical psychology feel free
to ask our psychology department faculty
and Counseling Center staff about the
validity of his claims I'm certain they
would not endorse this speaker do better
in all caps for those of you unfamiliar
Jordan Peterson is known for denouncing
the me2 movement claiming that women are
in no way marginalized in the West
arguing against the existence of
gender-neutral pronouns arguing against
gun control in the US and claiming that
identity politics and social justice
movements are part of a devious Marxist
agenda and then another student
responded and this is briefer College
conservatives know that if they bring in
a speaker who was willing to blatantly
insult a portion of the audience and the
libs get angry enough about this for
good reason then they may get an op-ed
written about them in the New York Times
as a result there are a whole group of
hacks like Milo and Peterson who get
famous and invited purely for their
promise to misgender trans students and
advocate provocative but ultimately
toothless arguments about social
Darwinist race theory what I'm saying is
that you have every right to be
pissed Jordan Peterson is a harmful
but know that but know that you
being pissed is also a hundred percent
at the point of why he was invited he's
not a conservative he's just a guy who's
mildly racist enough to offend College
liberals and therefore secure wins for
the cultural right comparatively mild
stuff
it's the chattering buzz of
ideologically possessed demons so
there's nothing in it that's that's not
entirely predictable that's that's one
of the things you know you notice when
you're talking to people if you if you
want to find out whether the person is
there or the ideology is there you
listen to see if you're hearing anything
that someone else of the same
ideological mindset couldn't have told
you you know like I've had thousands of
conversations with people because I've
spent 20 years as a clinical
psychologist and one of the things I've
learned about people is that they're
unbelievably interesting if you get
someone to sit down and you move past
the superficial which you can actually
do quite rapidly they'll tell you all
sorts of things that only they know that
are unbelievably enlightening about
their own peculiar problems about the
way they look at the world about their
their idiosyncratic familial dynamics
like just fascinating personal stuff
it's the stuff of great novels you know
and just and this is ordinary people I
don't really think there is an ordinary
person exactly there the facade of
ordinariness but behind that people are
very rarely ordinary and so they're the
conversations are almost instantaneously
fascinating and one of the one of the
guidelines that I used in my clinical
practice constantly was like I had this
sense I probably learned this mostly
from Carl Rogers was that if the
conversation wasn't really interesting
then we weren't doing anything that was
therapeutically useful but the
interesting all of the interesting
elements of it were were very very
personal and so to replace this and I
learned this mostly from sold from
Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his detailed
analysis of what
would call ideological possession I
talked to people he talked about people
he met in the gulag camps who were under
the sway of of rigid communist orthodoxy
and noted very clearly that it was like
there was a crank in some sense on the
side of their head and you could just
crank the crank and out would come the
ideological dogma and it's all entirely
predictable and people who are in a
situation like that don't understand
that they're possessed by an idea rights
Carl Jung said people don't have ideas
ideas have people it's like so there's
nothing in that that's anything other
than exactly what you would predict and
then there's a deeper issue - and this
is one that I think has bedeviled me
ever since I made my initial videos
which is the rally it's impossible for
those on the radical left to admit that
anyone who opposes what they're doing
might be reasonable because what that
would mean would be that you could be
reasonable and opposed the radical left
and that would imply that what the
radical left was doing wasn't reasonable
and so instead of dealing with the fact
that I actually happened to be quite
reasonable the attempt is to assume that
anyone who objects must be part of the
radical right it's like well actually no
there's lots of space between the
radical left and the radical right
there's the moderate reasonable left for
example and you and then there's the
center and then there's the moderate
reasonable right and then there's the
far right and then there's the extreme
right all of that exists in opposition
to the radical left but it's very
convenient for the radicals on the left
to say oh well you don't buy our
doctrine and and and then to immediately
make the presupposition that you must be
the most Highness example of that entire
array of potential objection it's like
yeah well whatever you know it's just
not a viable stance and so but it's
convenient and it it it it's a bad thing
because it drives polarization and
that's a bad thing but it also it
doesn't address the issue so one of the
things that I've been thinking about
over the last couple of weeks and plan
to write about here's a mystery for all
of you I don't care what your political
background isn't it isn't like I'm anti
left I've made videos documenting this I
know why there's a left wing there's a
left wing because inequality is a
problem it's a way worse problem than
the radical leftists liked to admit
because you can't lay it at the feet of
capitalism and the free market
inequality is a way worse problem than
that but it's definitely a problem and
because inequality is a problem you need
part of the political structure to speak
up to the for the people who end up
arrayed at the bottom of hierarchies
it's crucial someone has to speak for
them that's the place of the left but
then but then consider this get so we
can get we can state that the right
speaks for hierarchy and the left speaks
on behalf of those who are oppressed by
inequality good we need that dialogue
the radical left okay we know from 20th
century history that things can go too
far on the right no one disputes that
and that things can go too far on the
left and we also know that when things
go too far it's seriously not good right
so when things went too far on the right
then we had 120 million people died in
the Second World War and when things
went too far on the left
we had god only knows how many people
murdered as a consequence of internal
repression at least a hundred million
and we risk putting the entire planet we
risk putting the planet into flames okay
so that's the consequence all right so
now in the aftermath of world war two
let's say we've come to some sort of
sociological agreement I would say that
you can identify the radical right
wingers when people make claims of
racial superiority you put them in a box
and you say well you're outside of
acceptable political discourse and so
you saw that with will William F Buckley
in the 60s when he started his
conservative review he dissociated
himself from the David Duke types and
you saw it more recently with people for
example like ben shapiro who immediately
distanced himself from the
Charlottesville types okay so now we we
kind of have a sense of where you've
crossed the damn line in your
ethno-nationalism right as soon as you
move into the racial superiority domain
at the
superiority domain it's like no you've
got to be dangerous all right
here's a question where the hell do you
cross the line on the left exactly well
the answer is who knows well that's not
a very good answer I would say it's
incumbent it's incumbent on people in
the center and in the moderate left to
say look things can go too far on the
left and here's how we know that's
happened and that hasn't happened at all
now I think there's a reason for that I
think there's a technical reason as well
as a motivational reason too technical
reasons it's harder for people on the
left to draw boundaries because people
on the left aren't boundary drawing
types their boundary dissolving types
temper mentally speaking so that's a
problem the second problem is is it
doesn't look to me like there is a
smoking pistol on the Left that's as
obvious as racial superiority doctrines
you know it's like there in Canada
there's a lot of push for this
triumvirate of radical ideas diversity
inclusivity and equity which diversity
it's like well who's against that it's
like being against poverty inclusivity
well yes of course we want people
included equity that's a more bitter
pill to swallow because that's equality
of outcome and for me that's a marker
it's like if you're talking about
equality of outcome you've gone too far
and if you're talking about diversity
inclusivity and equality of outcome
equity then you've gone too far and you
might disagree you might disagree that's
fine disagree if that isn't the marker
for going too far then what's the marker
because obviously you can go too far and
obviously that's not good and to close
on that I would also say to the people
on the moderate left if you want your
doctrines to have purchase and to
continue to speak for the for those who
stack up at the bottom of inevitable
hierarchies then you owe it to yourself
to dissociate yourself from the
dangerous radicals because otherwise
they invalidate your ideas and that
doesn't seem to be you'd think the
Democrats might have learned that in the
last election
but they haven't they haven't learned
that so well so that's my spiel about
those comments I guess ok so you've
changed the lives of many young people
and adults in this country in the
Anglosphere in the West in the world you
have a massive following my girlfriend's
parents call you uncle Jordan for
example on the other hand and this is
just a fact tons of people on the left
as we've just seen because of your power
and also your frontal attack on a lot of
their views hate you and viciously
caricature you then there are these
other figures like Jonathan Hite and
Robbie George they have a lot in common
with you they are respected academics
they are at least relatively well known
outside academia they share your
critiques of the humanities of student
activists of trends in Western culture
they don't have nearly the following
that you do but they also aren't as
hated or viciously caricatured moreover
they may have changed the minds of more
people on college campuses that is
people on campuses who have some
sympathy for left activists or who may
agree with much of what you say but
react negatively to confrontation and
harsh criticism height has appealed to
such individuals by taking the Dale
Carnegie win friends and influence
people approach so my questions are
first do you agree with this dichotomy
second did you consciously choose one
path over the other and if so why well I
mean with height for example was more
power to him as far as I'm concerned you
know he has a different temperament than
me he's he's more introverted he's less
volatile I would say he's probably more
agreeable or more polite anyways and I
think that what he's doing is extremely
effective especially from the
perspective of very carefully
documenting the empirical facts about
the ideological what the ideological a
left-leaning ideological tilt of
campuses which is something that needs
to be explored on empirical ground so
so like I said more power to him and
there's nothing wrong with being
reasonable I guess and then you asked
well is that the right pathway for me
it's like well apparently not what
happened when I made my initial videos
was that you know I had I had spoke I
talked to people a lot I've worked with
people a lot about negotiation it's one
of the things that I specialized in I
would say in my clinical and consulting
practice was teaching people how to
negotiate and I can tell you some things
about negotiating that you might find
interesting and useful the first is you
can't negotiate from a position of
weakness so all of you who are going to
be developing your careers in the future
you need to understand that if you want
to push your career forward well first
of all that you do in fact have to push
it forward because if you're competent
and silent you will be ignored and and
you know that's rough because you might
think well people should reward you
because you're confident and yes of
course they should but if you're
competent in silent then you're just not
you're not a problem
you're just part of the background
that's keeping everything functioning
and so if you want to develop your
career in terms of promotion say and
salary is like you have to be competent
and you have to be strategic and to be
strategic when you negotiate for a new
position or for a new salary you have to
be able to say if you don't give me what
I want then something you don't like
will happen to you and what that means
it's not a physical threat it's it's
that you have an option you know so you
have your CV your resume an order right
you're educated and competent and
desirable to people outside of your
immediate job you're willing to
instantly put yourself on in the job
market and undergo the stress of finding
a new position and undergoing interviews
and all of that and you have that all
planned out so that when you go talk to
the person that you're negotiating with
with regards to your salary you're
credible and you see because they it's
very seldom that you're talking to the
person who's at the top of the pecking
order let's say what you need to do that
with them is to tell them a story
they can tell to their boss to make you
not a problem and one good story is look
we really need this person because
they're hyper competent and they have a
better offer it's like well then you're
gonna win the negotiation but if you go
in there with no power well you're gonna
lose obviously so the first thing that
you need to know if you're gonna
negotiate is that you have to be able to
say no and what no means is that you're
not going to do it and when I made the
videos about Bill c16 I thought it
through and I thought there's no damn
way I'm following this law I don't care
what happens and I didn't say that
lightly I thought it through I thought
okay well let's assume the worst case
scenario in the worst case scenario
would be that a student would report me
to the Ontario Human Rights Commission
and then they would do an investigation
and they would find me guilty because
the Ontario Human Rights Commission
finds 99% of the people brought to it
guilty because that's what totalitarians
do and then I would refuse to pay the
fine or cooperate with whatever the
reeducation they would put me through
would be and then that would move to
civil court and then I would be fine for
contempt and then it would you know then
the whole legal capacity would unfold
and I thought well I could either do
that or I could allow the government to
regulate my speech it's like nope that's
not happening so you might think about
that as confrontational and it is
confrontational it's like there isn't a
goddamn thing that can be done to me to
make me allow the government to compel
my speech that's not happening and the
reason for that I believe the reason for
that is because I spent decades studying
totalitarianism it's not good and the
way the totalitarian states develop is
that people give up their right to be
their right to to exist with their own
thoughts they lie they that's what
happens is that individuals the
individual sacrifice their own souls to
the dictates of the state and then
everything goes badly sideways it's like
and you think well how much evidence for
that do we need you know you're looking
at a quarter of a billion deaths
it's like isn't that enough well the
people that I read who were profound
Viktor Frankl is a good example for
beginners if you want to read about this
sort of thing he wrote a book called
man's search for meaning and Frankel and
also Solzhenitsyn and a variety of other
commentators as well who really looked
into what happened in in in both in Nazi
Germany and and in the in the communist
States their conclusion was universal is
that the lies of this state the lies and
tyranny of the state are aided and
abetted by the moral sacrifice of the
individual it's not top-down the Nazis
are telling you what to do and you're
all innocent and obeying that's not how
it works is you you falsify your your
being bit by bit and you end up where
you don't want to be and that's a bad
idea
and if you're interested in that there's
a great book but called ordinary man you
read that and you won't be the same
person afterwards so I would beware of
reading it but it's a story about these
policemen in Germany so they were
middle-aged guys you know and they
they'd been they grew up and were
socialized before the Nazis came to
power so they're just your typical
middle-class policemen and they were
brought into Poland after the Nazis had
marched through and and charged with
keeping order in the occupied state and
they knew their commander knew that it
was going to be brutal because they were
in war a war time and they regard the
Jews for example as enemies and so there
was going to be a fair bit of rounding
up with all that with all of what that
implied and the commander told the
policemen that they could go home if
they wanted to that they didn't have to
participate in this and then what
ordinary men does is document document
their transformation from ordinary
policemen the sort of people that you
know two guys who were taking naked
pregnant women out into the middle of
fields and shooting them in the back of
the head and it documents one step at a
time how an ordinary person turns into
someone like that
you think well we don't want that sort
of thing to happen anymore well then you
don't want to be that sort of person
that's how it's fixed and if you're not
gonna be that sort of person then you
don't take the first steps because the
first steps lead you down a pathway that
at least in principle you don't want to
go so well I think part of what makes me
combat himse compared to someone like
height is that I spent years looking at
the worst things there are to look at
and I've learned from that and I've
learned certainly learned things that I
won't do and one of them is I won't let
the government regulate my speech it's a
mistake I don't care what compassionate
principles hypothetically motivate that
move it was an unprecedented in English
common law that move and was all buried
under this leftist compassion which is
mostly it's mostly a lie so I have
reasons I think other than those that
motivate someone like Jonathan hight to
be particularly passionate about this
issue on the subject of totalitarianism
I wanted to do something very quickly so
I'm guessing that even though most
people in the room have negative views
of both men they have a more intensely
negative view of Hitler than of Stalin
I'm guessing almost everyone in the room
has a far more negative visceral
reaction to the swastika than to the
hammer and sickle some of the protesters
at your event at McMaster University
stood behind a banner with a hammer and
sickle you've said that a hammer and
sickle is no funnier than a swastika
that quote the reprehensible the
reprehensible ideologies that are based
in fundamental Marxism killed at least a
hundred million people in the 20th
century unquote I've discussed this
proposition with numerous people in
recent months and almost no one seems to
buy it no one disputes the body
count under socialist regimes few
dispute that Stalin was a vicious
murderer roughly on par with Hitler in
moral terms most think that communism
should not be tried again in other words
they share your critique of the argument
that previous communist experiments did
not represent proper communism and that
proper communism should be tried
nevertheless they still disagree with
you that we should react as negatively
to the hammer and sickle as we do to the
swastika why because they say the two
ideologies are not morally comparable
National Socialism is much worse
morally than Marxism or Marxism Leninism
so what do you say to this well I would
say the first thing is that it's highly
probable that you were talking to
intellectuals students well we'll call
them budding intellectuals it's it is a
it is a mystery you know it's a it's a
it is a mystery because it is the case
that there is something about the Nazi
doctrine that seems to have a visceral
impact that that the Communist doctrine
doesn't have and I said when I opened my
room remarks tonight that it might be
the issue of racial superiority you know
it's a it's something single that you
can put your finger on whereas what's
happening on the left that's horrifying
is murky it might even be
multi-dimensional like maybe there isn't
a single radical leftist idea that's
murderous like the racial superiority
doctrine maybe it's a combination of
three or maybe at some set of four out
of ten who knows so and because of that
it doesn't seem as repugnant and there
was also a universalizing tendency among
the communists that seemed to be less
morally reprehensible than the
ethno-nationalism of the nazis so you
know you think
to go back to 1914 it's complicated but
if you go back to say 1918 at the time
of the Russian Revolution it's not like
the Communists knew that their attempts
to bring about the socialist utopia
would be doomed to absolute murderous
catastrophe right they were they were
working in in ignorance now it's not
that simple because by that time
Dostoevsky had already written the
devil's the possessed and he outlined
very very clearly what he thought would
happen if people like that got the reins
of power and Nietzsche had done the same
thing in his writing so people knew that
there was something toxic let's say and
deadly about the doctrine but it hadn't
been played out on the world stage but
now it's like well this is why I said
what I said at the beginning fine you
know if I don't know exactly how to make
the moral distinction but it's a
distinction that has to be made I think
that people who apologize
who say something like I think I think
that that it's virtually I don't know if
it's as reprehensible to say that a
given ethnic group should be consigned
to the fire and to say that wasn't real
communism but they're damn close and
when I hear someone say that wasn't real
communism I know what they mean what
they mean was if I was the dictator in
Stellan shoes I personally would have
brought in the utopia that's what that
statement means and or it means an
ignorant of history that's so utterly
appalling that that any political
statement made on behalf of that person
whatsoever should immediately be
followed by a paroxysm of extreme
embarrassment I just want to be clear
that these students were conceding that
they don't agree that they share your
critique they don't share it enough ok
fair enough
I just want
so they would more or less agree with
what you just said I think about it's
not okay to say those regimes weren't
proper communism and the proper
communism should be tried they still
dispute though that socialism as an
ideology is on par with Nazism so I just
wanted to make well we could say
communism let's say we could say radical
leftist ideology as I said already there
are reasons for the left and the right
wing right the right wing stands for
hierarchy and the left wing stands for
the for those who are displaced by
hierarchy right an endless problem but
that doesn't mean that still leaves it
in the camp of the people speaking on
behalf of egalitarianism to figure out
just what the hell went wrong and to
take some responsibility for it you know
it's no joke and we see these things
play out continually still look at what
happened to Venezuela
here's a fun story do you know that it
is now illegal for physicians to list
lists starvation as the cause of death
for a Venezuelan child in a hospital
that's how they're dealing with the fact
of starvation right you just make it
illegal to have that diagnosed as your
cause of death that'll solve the problem
it's like you know we have a group of of
well-meaning socialists in Canada who
just produce something called the leap
manifesto a couple of years ago and it's
a pretty radical it's a pretty radical
document they're trying to move our
Socialist Party the NDP new democratic
party towards the acceptance of this
leap manifesto which doesn't look like
it's going to happen but they were all
radical promoters of the Venezuelan
government before everything went like
badly sideways you know I think the
average Venezuelan now has lost 17
pounds that's not because they were put
on a voluntary dieting program right
it's not good and so if you're tilting
towards the left and your temper
mentally inclined that way and half the
population is then you have an ethical
problem on your on your hands which is
how do you segregate yourself from the
radical policies that produce the
catastrophes of the 20th century and you
can't just say well that's not my
problem it's like well okay
if it's not your problem now it
certainly might become your problem in
the future so and I would say it's
actually everybody's problem in the
aftermath of the 20th century it's
everybody's problem so so it's it's it's
it's complicated like there is a genuine
desire like I worked for a Socialist
Party for quite a while when I was a kid
you know when I saw both sides of it I
saw some very very admirable people I
was privy for for a variety of chance
reasons to the leadership of the
Socialist Party in Canada at the
provincial and the national L I met the
people who ran the provinces some of the
provinces and who ran the party and a
lot of them were really admirable people
like they'd spent their whole life I
would say working on behalf of the
working class you know so they were
genuine labour leaders and and and and
there was also a lot done in Canada on
the left that looks like it was actually
pretty good standard work week the
income you know that the establishment
of pensions the introduction of our
health care system which I would say
probably overall works better than the
American system although not at the
upper end and they were working hard on
behalf of people who had working-class
lives but then I also encountered the
sort of low-level activist types and I
didn't have any respect for them at all
I just thought they were pea dish and
resentful and irritable and that those
two things exist in a very uneasy
coalition on the west there's care for
the poor and hatred for the successful
and those two things aren't the same at
all and it looks to me like one of the
things that really happened when the
Communist doctrines were brought into
play and it also by the way we did the
multinational experiment right it
doesn't matter where you put these
policies into play the same bloody
outcome occurred didn't matter whether
it was Russia or China or Cambodia or
Vietnam or to pick a random African
country or Cuba or Venezuela for that
matter it was an unmitigated catastrophe
and so to me that's experiment plus
replication enough enough well that has
to be dealt with and it's not an delay
that intellectual left in the way
has been absolutely appalling in their
socks silence on the Communist
catastrophe like for my students a lot
of my students really haven't heard
about anything that happened in the
Soviet Union in any detail until they
take my personality class in the second
year of university it's like well what
the hell why are they learning about
that in a personality class in the
second year of university that's not
that should be first and foremost in in
their in their historical knowledge what
happened in the 20th century I mean it
was almost fatal what happened and we
still haven't completely recovered from
it right I think isn't your President
Donald Trump going to talk to like
insane totalitarian number one sometime
here in the near future but that's still
a soviet-era State those people are
armed to the teeth you know they have
the weapon they they have weaponry that
could easily take you out and so we're
not I don't know if you know do you know
what happens if you blast a single
hydrogen bomb 100 miles above the United
States just one you lose all your
electronics right they're all done
tractors cars trains subways computers
phones all of them burn out and that's
it so we're not done with this yet and
and the Korean State North Korea as an
emblematic representative of the
communist catastrophe
you know everyone there starves there's
millions of people died 20 years ago
it's had not got any better so it's not
like it's not like we solved this
problem and there's a deafening silence
on the intellectual side of the spectrum
with regards to what happened on the
egalitarian left and there's no excuse
for it so so somewhat relatedly I think
it's fair to say that even though you
have criticized segments of both the
left social justice warriors and the
right the alt-right your critical
commentary over the last year and a half
has focused significantly more on the
left than on the right a lot of people
I've talked to here at Lafayette at
Lafayette take issue with that they say
that we're
so far from a Marxist takeover of our
culture and political institutions but
to suggest otherwise is to engage in a
classic kind of right-wing exaggeration
and hysteria that we've seen before in
Western countries in the early to mid
20th century they also say and this is
important to them that the nationalist
authoritarian right poses more of a
threat to freedom of the individual than
the left does today as it has in the
West since the early 20th century they
argue that the left may have sway in the
Academy and large segments of the media
but nationalist right parties figures
and movements with authoritarian
tendencies have risen become potent and
often been victorious in recent years
and they point to trump brexit the
National Front pointing to Trump is
rather pointless I mean I don't know
what Trump is but to think of him as a
figure of the radical right is a little
on the absurd side so I mean we are
polarizing and so who god only knows
where the ultimate danger will come from
if it's the ethno nationalist saan the
right or if it's the radical leftists on
the left who knows right I I suspect to
some degree that's a matter of
happenstance I mean that's what you'd
expect if you looked at 20th century
history but I emerged out of the Academy
and the Academy like there aren't
right-wing people in the Academy not to
speak of that's completely that's
thoroughly documented and it's certainly
not the case in a country like Canada
there's no threat whatsoever in Canada
from from the radical right it's like I
don't know if you rounded up everybody
who was in the radical right in Canada
you might be able to scrape up like what
three or four thousand people if you're
really like if you really worked at it
you know so I just don't see that at
least in my own country that's just a
non-issue it's it's a non-starter I mean
the last time there was any kind of
radical right-wingers in Canada was
probably in Quebec in the 1950s and
maybe from the 1930s to the 1950s but
it's never been a political issue what
about the AFD or the Italian I
remember the name of the Italian party
the National Front in France where would
you put would you oh well I mean you're
in Europe it's more there's more
polarization I would say but the
Europeans also have problems that we
don't have you know they've been they've
been struggling with the consequences of
non ending violence in the Middle East
and the wave of refugees that has
emerged as a consequence of that and so
the situation in Europe is different and
I would say there is more movement and
activity on the right so but and you
know I'm not a admirer of identity
politics well and that's for the reasons
I brought up to begin with think that
you have to decide conceptually
psychologically familiarly and socially
what your vision of a human being is and
if your vision of a human being is
essentially tribal so that you're
defined by your collective identity in
some manner then you're going to play
identity politics on the Left you're
gonna play identity politics on the
right it's like well I think the
identity politics types on the Left pose
a bigger threat in my country it's not
so obvious in your country because you
guys you're your political landscape is
more balanced I would say than ours
if the radical right posed a threat to
the Academy which they most decidedly do
not then I would be just as upset about
that and so I think again it's it's part
and parcel of the radical left failure
to take or the left's in general failure
to take responsibility for the radicals
it's like oh well why aren't you
criticizing equally on both sides well
that the threat doesn't exist equally on
both sides not in my country so I think
identity politics is murderous game no
matter who plays it you know and on the
Left it's well we've already talked
about that so what's wrong on the right
well you stand up and wave your flag and
talk about your ethnic identity or your
racial identity and you take pride in
that it's like what the hell did that
have to do with you yeah god damn loser
you know it's like you're you're one of
the great heroes of the past are you
that's why you're standing up and waving
your flag it's no you're not you're your
identify
with your group because you don't have
anything of your own to offer and so
it's pathetic and I've said that many
times and in my lectures too and people
know this if they've actually watched my
University lectures I spend tremendous
amount of time and have for 30 years
convincing my students that if they had
been in Nazi Germany there was a very
high probability that rather than being
Oskar Shindler and rescuing the Jews
they would have been a Nazi persecutor
because there's like five oscar
schindler's and like many million Nazis
so you can do the math for yourself and
if you don't think that if you think
that you would have been one of the few
heroes then you're either someone truly
remarkable or you're unbelievably
deluded and so I would suspect that
you're in the unbelievably deluded camp
because truly remarkable people are rare
and I've really I've really seen this in
the last year or two because one of the
things I have noted like I knew that
people were timid you know and I knew
why it's dangerous to stick your head up
above the rest I mean it's predator
avoidance strategy to keep your head
down and I mean that technically it
truly is to blend in with the crowd is a
predatory avoidance strategy that's what
fish do in schools of fish like it's
very low-level behavior and if you stick
your head up there's some real danger
and the advantage to that is that people
are pretty civilized and they go along
with the group and that's that's a good
thing because you know we should be
civilized and go along with the group
but it's a really bad thing when the
group goes sideways and I've had many
people colleagues and but many other
people to say wow really we agree with
what you're doing but we can't really
take the risk of standing up and saying
so it's like well now and then so most
people fall into that camp when I went
to Queen's University a month ago and
was subject to that chilling
demonstration I would say we're the
radicals climbed up into the
stained-glass window window wells and
pounded you know unendingly for ninety
minutes well we were all inside I had a
professor write me the day before and
say look my wife and I work at the
University we really support what what
you're doing but we can't even risk
coming to the talk because what if the
students see
complain it's like well yeah there's
courage for you man there's courage for
you you know and so but that's par for
the course and it's it's unsurprising to
some degree but well but anyways on the
right it's like it's an excuse by people
on the left not to take the things that
I'm saying seriously that's what it is
it's like well he's not attacking the
right as much it's like well they're not
after me they're not trying to close
down my speech so I took that personally
so had it been right-wingers coming
after me well it would have been the
same thing so it's a foolish objection I
think for decades ethnic groups have on
average scored significantly differently
on IQ tests according to psychology
professor Richard hare whom you
interviewed on your channel YouTube
there is no scientific consensus on the
causes of these average differences in
IQ test scores yet according to hare
psychologists do generally agree that
general intelligence exists that IQ
measures it well and in a non culturally
biased way that IQ is highly predictive
of success in educational and
professional terms and that for decades
ethnic groups have on average scored
significantly differently so assuming
this is true should we talk about it Sam
Harris raised this question in a podcast
conversation with Charles Murray
some argue that we should not talk about
this as doing so could fuel the racial
supremacist movements that you mentioned
with potentially horrific consequences
others mainly on the intellectual dark
web and to a very limited extent in
academia think we should talk about this
topic because average differences in IQ
scores have existed for decades they may
have played a role in generating the
disparate educational and professional
outcomes that we observe and care about
and thus that we cannot properly analyze
these disparate outcomes unless we do
talk about this subject Oh
geneticist David Reich recently argued
in the New York Times that if scientists
do not openly discuss the biological
basis of race pseudo scientists could
fill the vacuum with dangerous
consequences furthermore you professor
Peterson are highly critical of the
oppression narrative that permeates
segments of the Academy and activists
left and knowledge about average
differences in IQ scores between ethnic
groups while tough to assimilate could
puncture this narrative so the question
is what is your view on all that I've
just said Jesus you guys already did
take a long time to prepare these
questions didn't you all right so when I
went to Harvard
I came from McGill and I had spent a lot
of time with my advisor there and a
research team that he had trying to
understand the genesis of antisocial
behavior and among adolescents mostly so
well as kids as well
antisocial behavior is very persistent
so if you have a child whose conduct
disordered at the age of four the
probability that they will be criminal
at the age of fifteen or twenty is
extremely high it's unbelievably stable
it's a very dismal literature because
you see these early onset aggressive
kids and and it's persistent and then
you look at the intervention literature
and you throw up your hands because no
interventions work and believe me
psychologists have tried everything you
could possibly imagine and a bunch of
things that you can't in order to
ameliorate that so we're really
interested in trying to understand for
example if you're antisocial by the age
of four then there isn't an intervention
that seems to be effective so and the
standard penological theory is really
quite horrifying in this regard because
what you see is that male aggression
Peaks around the age of 15 and then it
declines fairly precipitously and and
and sort of normalizes again by the age
of 27 and standard phenological Theory
essentially is this cold-hearted it's
like if you have a
if you have someone who's a multiple
offender you just throw them in prison
till they're 27 then they age out of it
and that's all there is to it that's
that's what we've got now there's some
downside to that because there's a
corollary literature that suggests that
the worst thing that you can do with
antisocial people is to group them
together which is what we do in prisons
so so that's a whole mess anyways one of
the things we were doing was trying to
see if there might be cognitive
predictors of antisocial behavior and so
we used this battery of
neuropsychological tests that was put
together at the Montreal Neurological
Institute took about 11 hours to
administer and hypothetically assess
prefrontal cortical function and we
computerized out reduced it to about 90
minutes and then assessed antisocial
adolescents in in Montreal and found out
that they did show deficits in the
problem-solving ability that we
associated with with prefrontal ability
when I got to Harvard I thought well
that's interesting we could use the
neuro psych battery to predict negative
behavior perhaps we could use it to
predict positive behavior so I thought
well what if we turned the neuro psych
battery and over and thought well can we
predict grades for example because you
know that's a decent thing to predict so
we ran a study we ran a study that
looked at Harvard kids University of
Toronto kids line workers at a Milwaukee
Factory and managers and executives at
the same Factory and what we found was
that the average score across these
neuropsychological tests they were kind
of like games they were game-like you
know so in one in one test you had there
were five lights in the middle of the
screen and a box was associated with
each light and you had to learn by trial
and error which box was associated with
with each light that was one of the
tests so we took people's average score
across the tests because they seemed to
clump together into a single structure
you can do you can find that out
statistically if you take a bunch of
tests you can find out how they clump
together statistically by looking at
their patterns of correlations and you
might get multiple clumps which is what
happens with personality research where
you get five or you might get a sing
clomp which is what happens in cognitive
research and we got a single clump
essentially and then we were trying to
figure out if at the same time I was
reading the literature on performance
prediction and there's an extensive
literature on performance prediction a
lot of it generated by the Armed Forces
by the way indicating that IQ is a very
good predictor of long-term life success
and so here's the here's the general
rule if your job is simple which means
you do the same thing every day
then IQ predicts how fast you'll learn
the job but not how well you you do it
but if your job is complex which means
that the demands change on an ongoing
basis then the best predictor of success
is general cognitive ability and and I
learned that the general cognitive
ability test clumped together into a
single factor that's fluid intelligence
or IQ and then we didn't know if the
factor that we had found was the same
factor as IQ and and we still haven't
really figured out whether or not that
was the case because it kind of depends
on how you do the analysis but anyways I
I got deeply into the performance
prediction literature and I found oh
well if you wanted to predict people's
performance in life there's there's a
couple of things you need to know you
need to know their general cognitive
ability if they're going to do a complex
job you need to know their trait
conscientiousness some of you might have
heard that rebranded as grit in a very
corrupt act by the way because it's a
good predictor of long-term life success
freedom from negative emotion low
neuroticism is another predictor but
it's sort of third on the hierarchy and
then openness to experience which is a
personality trait is associated with
with expertise in creative domains the
evidence that now I should tell you
there's such a complicated question I
should tell you how to make an IQ test
is actually really easy and you need to
know this to actually understand what IQ
is so imagine that you generated a set
of 10,000 questions okay about anything
it could be math problems they could be
general knowledge they could be
vocabulary they could be multiple choice
it really doesn't matter what they're
about as long as they require
abstraction to solve so they'd be
formulated linguistically but
mathematically would also apply and then
you have those 10,000 questions now you
take
random set of a hundred of those
questions and you've give them to a
thousand people and all you do is sum up
the answers right from so some people
are gonna get most of them right and
some some of them are gonna get most of
them wrong you just rank order the
people in terms of their score correct
that for age and you have IQ that's all
there is to it and what you'll find is
that no matter which random set of a
hundred questions you take the people at
the top of one random set will be at the
top of all the others and in with very
very very high consistency so one thing
you need to know is that if any social
science claims whatsoever are correct
then the IQ claims are correct because
the IQ claims are more psychometrically
rigorous than any other phenomena
phenomenon that's been discovered by
social scientists now the IQ literature
is a dismal literature no one likes it
here's why here's an example so here's a
little here's a fun little fact for you
for liberals and conservatives alike
because conservatives think there's a
job for everyone if people just get off
their asses and get to work and liberals
think while you can train anyone to do
anything it's like no there isn't a job
for everyone and no you can't train
everyone to do everything that's wrong
and here's one of the consequences of
that so as I mentioned the Armed Forces
has done a lot of work on IQ and they
started back in 1919 and the reason they
did that was because well for obvious
reasons say let's say there's a war and
you want to get qualified people into
the officer positions as rapidly as
possible or you'll lose so that's a
reason and now the Armed Forces has
experimented with IQ test since 1919 and
in the last 20 years a law was passed as
a consequence of that analysis which was
that it was illegal to induct anyone
into the Armed Forces who had an IQ of
less than 83 now the question is why and
the answer was all of that effort put in
by the armed forces indicated that if
you had an IQ of 83 or less there wasn't
anything that you could be trained to do
in the military that wasn't positively
counterproductive now you got to think
about that a because the military is
chronically desperate for people right
it's not like they're it's not like
people are lining up to be inducted
right they have to go out and recruit
and it's not easy and so they're
desperate to get their hands on every
body they can possibly manage and then
especially in wartime but also in
peacetime but then there was another
reason to which was the Armed Forces was
also set up from a policy perspective to
take people in the underclass let's say
and train them and move them up at least
into the working class or maybe the
middle class so there's a policy element
to it too and so even from that
perspective you could see that the
military is desperate to bring people in
but well with an IQ of 83 or less it's
not happening okay so how many people
have an IQ of 83 or less 10 percent now
if that doesn't if that doesn't hurt you
to here then you didn't hear it properly
because what it implies is that in a
complex society like ours and one that's
becoming increasingly complex there
isn't anything for 10 percent of the
population to do all right well what are
we gonna do we're gonna ignore that
we're gonna run away from that and
believe me we have every reason to or
we're gonna contend with the fact that
we need to figure out how it is how it
is how it might be possible to find a
place for people on the lower end of the
general cognitive distribution to take
their productive and and worthwhile
place in society and that isn't just
gonna be a matter of dumping money down
the hierarchy because giving people who
have nothing to do money isn't helpful
it doesn't work it's not that simple
well so that's kind of an answer to the
question of whether or not we should
deal with uh with IQ forthrightly it's
like if you can find a flaw in that
logic like just go right ahead it's not
like I was thrilled to death to discover
all of this by nose by no stretch of the
imagination was that the case so so what
so IQ is reliable invalid that's the
first thing it's more reliable and valid
than any other psychometric test ever
designed by social scientists by a
factor of about three that's fact number
one fact number two is it predicts
long-term life outcome at about 0.3 0.4
which leaves about 85 percent 70 to 85
percent of the story unexplained but
it's still the best thing that we have
well it's also the case that in places
like Great Britain when IQ tests were
first introduced they were actually used
by the Socialists and they were used to
identify poor people who had potential
cognitive potential and to move them
into higher into Institutes of higher
education so there's an upside you know
a social upside as well
ethnic differences this is something you
can't say anything about without without
immediately being killed so I'm hesitant
to broach the topic but I'll tell you
one thing that I did in the last week
that's relevant to this so though and
this just shows you how complex the
problem is first of all we should point
out that race is a very difficult thing
to define because racial boundaries
aren't tight right so and so when you
talk about racial differences in IQ you
you're faced with the thorny problem of
defining race and that's a big problem
from a scientific perspective but we'll
leave that aside and I wrote an article
this week somebody stood up at one point
one of my talks and vice bless their
hearts took this particular question and
used it as an indication of the quality
of the people who are my so-called
followers and by the way the quality of
my so-called followers is pretty damn
high and you can find that out quite
rapidly just by going looking at the
YouTube comments which are head and
shoulders above what the standards said
of YouTube comments I can tell you that
so someone asked me they're both the
Jewish Question right and the the
implication it was actually someone
Jewish and the implication was that Jews
are over-represented in positions of
authority and power and and I was had
just spoken for like an hour and a half
and you know this guy had an axe to
grind and I thought there's no goddamn
way I'm getting into this at the moment
and so I I said I I said I can't answer
that question
but that's not a very good answer so I
wrote a blog post this week and I said
look here's that here's the situation
all right
Jews are over-represented in positions
of power and authority but then let's
open our eyes a little bit and think for
like two or three seconds and think hey
guess what they're also over-represented
in positions of competence and it's not
like we have more geniuses than we know
what to do with and if the Jews happen
to be producing more of them which they
are by the way then that's a pretty good
thing for the rest of us so let's not
confuse competence with power and
authority even though that's a favorite
trick of the radical leftists who always
failed to make that distinction well why
does this over representation occur
because it does it also there's also
over representation in political
movements including radical political
movements okay why
well answer one Jewish conspiracy okay
that's not a very good answer we've had
we've used that answer before all right
but but do we have an alternative well
here's an alternative the average
Ashkenazi
IQ is somewhere between 110 and 150
which is about one standard deviation
above the population average and so what
that means is that the average Ashkenazi
/ European Jew has an IQ that's higher
than 85% of the population that's a lot
higher now that doesn't make that much
difference in the middle of the
distribution okay but geniuses don't
exist at the middle of the distribution
they exist at the tails of the
distribution and you don't need much of
a move at the mean to produce walloping
differences at the tails and the tails
are important because a lot of where we
draw we draw exceptional people from the
exceptions right so here's an example of
the same thing most engineers are male
why because men are more interested in
things and women are more interested in
people and you might say well that's
socio-cultural it's like no it's not and
we know that because if you stack up
countries by their by their egalitarian
social policies which you can do quite
if
effectively and then you look at the
over-representation of men in STEM
fields the over-representation increases
as the country's become more egalitarian
so it's not socio-cultural okay now men
aren't that much more interested in
things than women it's one standard
deviation which is about the same
difference by the way between the
population norm and they ask you now Zhi
Zhu's but if you're looking at the
person the one person in 20 or the one
person in 50 who's most who's hyper
interested in things and that's likely
to become an engineer then most of them
are men here's another example of the
same thing
men are more aggressive than women now
you might ask how much and answer that
is best place to look at that is in
Sweden where the Galit Aryan policies
have been laid out for a long period of
time and you can you can get a more
direct inference about biology if you
took a random man and around and woman
out of the population and you had to bet
on who was more aggressive and you bet
on the man you'd be right 60 percent of
the time so that's not that much right
it's it's deviates from 50/50 but it's
not like ninety ten it's 60/40 okay so
so what does that mean well we got a
tail problem here again let's say that
now you decide to go out on to the
extremes of aggression and you identify
the most aggressive one in a hundred
persons they're all men guess who's in
prison those people that's why most of
the people in prison are men and so this
is elementary part of the problem in our
society is that we don't understand
statistics we don't understand that you
can have relatively small differences at
the population level that produce
walloping consequences at the tails of
the distribution okay so back to IQ one
final thing to say about IQ the ethnic
differences are difficult to dispense
with it's not easy to make them go away
you can say well the tests aren't
culture fair well here's a test of that
so imagine you you test group a we
an IQ test and you test Group B with an
IQ test and then you look at their
actual performance in whatever you're
predicting if the test was biased
against ethnic group a then it would
under predict their performance and that
doesn't happen now you could say well
there's systemic bias in the performance
measures and the potential measures and
that's a possibility all right now one
other thing about that there's a real
danger in the ethnicity IQ debate and
the the danger is that we confuse
intelligence with value or that we
include we we confused intelligence with
yet with human value that's a better way
of thinking about it and one of the
things that we're going to have to
understand here is that that's a mistake
is that being more intelligent doesn't
make you a better person that's not the
case it makes me you more useful for
complex cognitive operations but you can
be pretty damn horrific as a genius son
of a right it's morally neutral
and we also know that from the
psychometric data by the way there
doesn't seem to be any relationship
whatsoever between intelligence and
virtue and so if it does turn out that
nature and the fates do not align with
our egalitarian presuppositions which is
highly probable
we shouldn't therefore make the mistake
of assuming that if group a or person a
is lower on one of these attributes than
group B or person B that that is somehow
reflective of their intrinsic value as
human beings that's a big mistake now
that's I don't have anything else to say
about that okay so I had three more
questions and so maybe slightly shorter
answers to these three like maybe around
hopefully there's simpler questions
Avra average five minutes okay and then
and then we will open it up so another
taboo is to celebrate European culture
multiculturalists get pretty unhappy
when Europeans start expressing
in their culture or heritage many
especially on the left do not draw much
of a distinction at least in practice
between European pride and white
supremacy you care about freedom of the
individual the individuals freedom to
think to speak to associate in short to
act as he sees fit without external
compulsion as long as he doesn't
infringe on the similar liberties of
others
professor Ricardo duchesne a historical
sociologist and professor at the
University of New Brunswick argues that
quote individualism is a unique
attribute of European peoples quote it
has been exported to some degree to
other nations
but in my view it is not something that
comes to them naturally so he continues
quote you can't play the game of we're
all individuals we have to affirm and be
proud of our ethnic identity and
heritage to preserve the West's curious
individualism
if Europeans become minorities in the
West he argues the founding idea of the
West that no entity not an individual
not a community not the state can justly
deprive an individual of life liberty or
property by force no matter what the
individuals race class or religion I
wouldn't be surprised if Duchene when he
made this statement had you in mind
look the medieval Europeans identified
seven deadly sins for a reason and one
of them was pride it's like let's make
the presumption I do believe that for
for reasons that aren't obvious that the
West has got some things right we've got
the sovereignty of the individual right
that's the most fundamental thing we've
got right we've articulated that I think
you know in a remarkable way not only
theologically philosophically in our
body of laws in our societies and one of
the consequences of that as it's had its
effect on the rest of the world is that
everyone is getting richer quite fast
and that's a really good thing
okay having said that it's like am i
proud of that it's like I didn't do that
what the hell pride what's that that's
not the right response
how about responsibility for that how
would that be it's like you're part of
this this great and unlikely set of
propositions this strange set of
propositions that says that in some
ineffable manner the poorest person is
as valuable as the king it's like how
the hell did we ever figure that out
that's an impossible thing to think and
yet that's the that's the bedrock of our
legal system that's nothing to be proud
of that's something to tremble before to
take on as a an ethical burden and not
to wave a flag for how wonderful you are
that you happen to have the same skin
color as some of the people who thought
that up it's not the right response it's
like it's it's to open your eyes and
recognize that as a miracle and a
relatively relatively new miracle on the
world stage and to and to participate in
the process of upholding that in your
personal and your public life
that's not pride in European tradition
like when I go to Europe and I love
going to Europe and the European cities
are there are unbelievable masterpieces
which is why they're completely flooded
by pilgrims right
tourists pilgrims who go there to look
at the beauty soak I don't feel pride
about that I feel I feel like I have
something to live up to that's not the
same thing man and so these
right-wingers and this it's like look
what we've done it's like no it's not
you that did that
that's something man you got him you're
going to have your act together before
you would dare to say well that was me
it's like yeah sure sure it was you Yeah
right
no that's hard to stand up and take your
place in that in that kind of historical
process that unlikely miraculous
historical process not to just feel
ashamed at the way that you're presently
constituted in the face of that means
that you're you're deluded and you're
using your your your
great fortune at being a beneficiary of
that system look at what we've got here
this great piece that we're inhabiting
right now you're using your unearned the
unearned gift that's been granted to you
as a source of personal pride in your
accomplishments due to your skin it's
like no not good not a good argument so
and that doesn't mean that well there's
nothing valuable about European culture
there's plenty
there's plenty about it that's value
it's not even so clear to what degree
its European I mean it came out of the
Middle East you know I mean who it's so
muddle-headed that you hardly know where
to start so hopefully that was less than
five minutes there we go dispensed with
the radical right-wingers in four
minutes I've heard a number of
interesting things about Islam from you
and one of your intellectual soul mates
Camille Paglia Talia says that men and
women benefit in many ways from living
in largely separate worlds as they did
in traditional European societies and
obviously as they do in much of the
Muslim world today relatedly palea
considers passionate masculinity a
critical force for defending sustaining
and advancing civilization and she
argues the passionate masculinity while
virtually moribund in the Western middle
and upper classes is alive and well in
the Muslim world you have expressed some
sympathy for the Muslim critique of the
West
it's godlessness its spiritual void its
materialism it's technology induced
removal from life's elemental realities
you've said it is extraordinarily naive
to believe that the that the differences
between European culture and Islamic
culture are not about anything
fundamental you've expressed concern
that Islam is a totalizing system and in
a quote that stood out to me you said in
a patreon chat on YouTube that in your
view quote the only countries in the
world that are essentially worth living
in in any real sense
are the ones that are predicated on the
judeo-christian tradition and manifested
in the Western body of laws unquote so
an open-ended question how would you
synthesize your perspective on Islam and
the fact that the Muslim populations of
Europe and Canada a product of recent
immigration are growing and reproducing
much faster than the European descended
populations in these countries yeah and
you guys already did spend a lot of time
coming up with troublesome questions
didn't you we can see the problem is the
problem one of the problems is is that
I'm an ignorant man and there's lots of
things that I don't know know and I
don't know I don't understand Islam I
don't know enough about it to be an
intelligent commentary on it I've done
my best to peck away at the edges but
you know it would require multiple years
of study to understand the similarities
and differences between the two
viewpoints it looks to me like what
Islam did was take a group of radically
disparate tribes and unite them under a
single ethos of course the the Muslim
civilization expanded rap more rapidly
than any other civilization ever had and
and and and occupied a very large part
of the world which of course it still
does perhaps there's something to be
said for that unifying tendency
there's a problem and maybe this is at
the core of the problem there's no
distinction between church and state in
Islam and there is a distinction between
church and state in the West it isn't
obvious to me if it's the case that our
culture is grounded in an underlying
let's call it literary metaphysics
something like that a religious
metaphysic part of the bedrock of our
culture is the idea of the separation
between church and state and as far as I
can tell that idea doesn't exist in the
Muslim world and so I cannot understand
how that faith is commensurate with the
institutions of the West it doesn't seem
to me that there's any evidence that
it's commensurate because the number of
Islamic democracies is let's call it
finite the best example is probably been
Turkey and Turkey as far as I can tell
isn't doing that well at the moment on
the Democratic Front and it looked like
the great shining hope and a lot of that
was a consequence of secularization
you know I've spent a lot of time when I
was reading maps of meaning for example
looking for commonalities among
religious viewpoints and I was able to
find deep commonalities I thought
between Buddhism and Christianity and
Taoism and Christianity and Hinduism and
Christianity for that matter was a lot
harder when it came to Islam it's not a
faith that's opened itself up to me I
don't understand it well but I hope that
people of goodwill can build a bridge
between the two cultures because the
alternative is too gloomy to contemplate
and finally you've stated quote women
are more agreeable by nature than men
and agreeable people are compassionate
toward those they see as suffering and
that seems to include any minority
especially when you combine that with a
kind of neo-marxist doctrine that claims
that anyone who has an advantage swiped
it unquote women have been voting for a
century now and this you suggested in a
patreon chat may help to explain why in
the West we've collectively decided that
quote egalitarianism and conflict
avoidance constitute the two highest
virtues and Trump everything else
including free speech unquote you've
said that in the West today we are
perhaps for the first time in history
seeing on the political left or on
segments of the political left quote
what a female totalitarianism would look
like unquote
elaborate
I did a research project with one of my
students we haven't published it
unfortunately for a variety of reasons
she's been quite ill and I've been quite
preoccupied so those are the two
barriers at the moment but the first
thing we wanted to do was to find out
whether there was actually such a thing
as political correctness you can
actually do that technically as a social
scientist so what you do is this is what
we did is we got a group of people
together and we collected a whole bunch
of statements that seem to be vaguely
associated with the idea of political
correctness so maybe you could think
well it's a media construct and that's
fine you can go to analyze media
statements and then you can collect
ideas that seem to be associated with
whatever political correctness is we
collected about 400 of those and then we
asked we turned them into questions and
we asked a thousand people for their
opinions then you can do this
statistical process called a factor
analysis and it's the same thing that
pulls out a single factor of IQ from a
group of questions for example it's the
same thing that produced the Big Five
personality model what the factor
analysis does is tell you which quest if
questions group together so let's say
you have opinion a well if you have
opinion a if there's a hundred of you
everyone who has opinion a also has
opinion B an opinion C and if that's the
case then those clumped together there's
something about them that's the same now
what we could have found was that when
we analyzed these 400 questions there
was like 50 clumps and so that would
have blown there's such a thing as
political correctness hypothesis out of
the water
but that isn't what happened we found
two clumps one of which looked like
something like moderate leftism and the
other that looked very much like
totalitarian political correctness and
it was very very robust finding and and
we replicated it as well she did this
for her master's thesis by the way and
then we looked at what predicted these
beliefs first of all that the
correlation between the moderate leftist
clump of questions and the radical
leftist clump of questions actually
wasn't very high and so one of the
things that we surmise is that there's
an actual division on the left between
the moderates and the radicals and
that's just not played itself out and I
think you can actually see that
happening
the proclivity of the radical leftists
to devour themselves right so which
happens on a very regular basis or
perhaps you can see it in the proclivity
of the radical leftists to go after the
moderates when the martyrs criticize the
radicals whatever so there's two clumps
to political correctness both of them
were predicted by trade agreeableness
which is one of the traits that women
score higher on than men it's the
antithesis of aggression by the way and
by also by being female which was a real
shock to us because most of the so let's
say females and males differ with
regards to some outcome you try to
figure out why that is it might be just
because they're female but there's all
sorts of things associated with being
female or male that are like
second-order complications what we found
almost invariably with the personality
literature's if you look at differences
between men and women and then you
control for personality the differences
go away so they're not differences
between men and women per se they're
differences between personality but with
political correctness we found an
effective agreeableness which was a pure
personality effect and an effect of
being female so we also found a
pronounced effect of having taken at
least one seminar that was politically
correct in its orientation so that had a
walloping effect so there does seem to
be something about political according
to that research which you know it's I
try to rely on better research but none
has been done so that's the best that I
thought and and the woman who did this
research is very very smart and the
study was well done so I think it's
credible so and one of the things that's
interesting to me about that is that it
does tie into the Freudian nightmare of
the devouring mother essentially which
was Freud's I think signal contribution
to psychopathology you know for most
most of Freud's clients were people who
were struggling to get out of the
clutches of their family right and part
of that is human beings are very
dependent right because well because we
have this incredibly long period of
development 30 years maybe but certainly
18 years and so it's hard to struggle up
from infancy mature and leave as an
independent creature and lots of people
you see this and if you're a clinician
you see this all the time people are so
tangled up in
families that they can't get away from
them and that's the eatable situation
that Freud described so so so
brilliantly and Jung also elaborated on
it a lot of that's a consequence of
hyper dependence right it's it's the
danger of overprotection now there's a
rule if you're dealing with elderly
people say in an elder care institution
and the rule is something like don't do
anything for your charges that they can
do themselves it's kind of a harsh rule
you know if you see someone struggling
with their buttons maybe they're three
years old you want to rush over and help
it's like well maybe you don't because
they need to learn how to do up their
damn buttons or if there are 85 they
need to maintain their independence as
much as possible without your compassion
stealing it from them okay well we could
hypothesize that there would be no
pathology as a consequence of the female
rise to political power but given that
females are human beings too and we're
pretty much rife with pathology the
probability that there'll be a downside
is like there is two male participation
which would be more aggressive and hyper
and hyper compressed nests and hyper
competition the probability that there
would be a downside is extraordinarily
high well why wouldn't it be a downside
associated with hyper protectiveness
it's exactly what you'd expect and then
what you see playing out in the
political landscape as far as I'm as far
as I can tell and maybe I'm wrong is
wherever there's an inequality there's
an oppressor oppression narrative and so
anyone who's stacks up at the bottom of
a hierarchy is a victim slash infant and
anyone at the top is an oppressor slash
predator and I think confusing the
hierarchical structure especially when
it's based on competence and Western
structures of hierarchy are based in
large part although not entirely on
competence confusing that with a
predator infant or oppressor oppression
relationship is a very bad idea now
having said that it's obvious that every
social structure has a tyrannical
element like nobody in their right mind
is going to say well are
cultural structures are a hundred
percent fair and just obviously they're
not and every single person in this room
and some far more than others have been
brutalized by the social structure which
takes you around the neck shakes the
hell out of you and says you better be
like everyone else or else right that's
the tyrannical aspect of the social
structure so you have to be naive not to
think that there's a some oppressor
oppressor oppression dynamic in a social
structure but to make that the only the
only element of the discussion is
extraordinarily dangerous I mean one of
the things that looking at terrible
things has done for me is make me a very
grateful person like when I walk out on
the street and I see that people aren't
at each other's throats I really think
that that's a miracle like I was just in
Manhattan for a week you know if your
eyes are open that place is an absolute
miracle
I mean there's way too many people there
seven million people come in a day right
it's it's there's way too many people
they're just stacked on top of each
other these all these massive
skyscrapers and they all stand up there
they all all standing up all the traffic
lights work all the electricity works
the buildings aren't blowing up one
after another because of natural gas
leaks they just don't blow up and people
aren't like beating each other to death
with clubs in the street it's like so
when I go outside in New York I think my
god how did we manage this because I'm a
Hobbesian by Nature you know I think and
it's not like I'm entirely pessimistic
but I think that you're naive if you
don't think that the natural state of
human beings is one of brutality all you
have to do is look at history and you'll
be convinced of that very rapidly and so
the fact that look at us we can all sit
in here we don't know who we don't know
each other and we're having a
contentious political discussion and
like nothing terrible is happening and
if you don't see that as a miracle then
you're way too protected for your own
good so well so back to the back to the
agreeableness issue there are tyrannies
of care
the psychoanalyst said the good mother
fails and what that means is that when
your kid is 3 years old 2 years old and
stumbling around making mistakes you
back the hell off and you let them make
mistakes and you don't view the world as
infant and predator and you don't
project that onto the political system
because it's not a good idea
especially if those who especially for
those who you're misdiagnosed as
predators ok so now we are going to open
it up for Q&A all right so the the idea
that I've put thought into this is
perhaps a optimistic one but as you
might imagine you've been a topic of
conversation on this campus a lot in the
past week or so certainly among a lot of
us who discuss politics and one of the
things that's sort of United people who
like and dislike a lot of your ideas is
that we appreciate your defense of free
speech and we appreciate you coming here
to talk about it with us but one of the
things I thought was really interesting
is Professor Van Dyke addressed the
distinction between you and Jonathan
Hite and you mention this is sort of a
temperamental one and I think I'm sure
that's true to some extent but I noticed
you've made a lot of more sort of
substantively inflammatory claims like
in the course of this lecture you called
the authors of Facebook posts demons and
totalitarians in past events you've
called them things like neo Marxist
cultural Marxists you've called them I
believe a fifth column that is
committing treason against the West and
it seems to me this is more than
temperamental this is a substantive
difference and difference and another
thing you've done is that unlike height
you have a more sort of comprehensive
political program you've talked a lot in
defense of traditional hierarchies both
gender of class so on though
emphatically not race and so it seems
like I haven't talked about defense of
traditional hierarchies in terms of
gender and class that's not true
well you've talked about hierarchies in
society you've talked yeah that's true I
have done that but I haven't justified
them on the basis of gender and class
you you whatever okay not okay that's an
important distinction but you defend
hierarchies in society in a way that you
talk a lot about the Pareto distribution
yes that doesn't mean I defend it well
okay no not well okay yes
well I mean I think Utah serving that
something exists it's the same as
defending it how in the world people
attack it right thank you don't people
attack it apparently attack the
hierarchies of society is inherently
unjust right well they're they're unjust
yes they're also useful okay so you you
say they're useful so let's look at this
question okay look at it this way you
obviously think that it's worthwhile to
stand up and ask a question yes so you
think that standing up and asking a
question is better than not standing up
and asking a question yes okay that's a
hierarchy yes of values yes okay without
the hierarchy of values you couldn't act
of course no no not of course wait it's
hardly why I'm defending the hierarchy
without the hierarchy right what's that
there is a hierarchy in society no
there's multiple hierarchies in society
right yes and you say that they are
based at you you invoke the lobster
right that they are based in in nature I
said that they were inevitable yes yes
they were inevitable good but my point
is that this is dude you have a broader
point than free speech this is one of
the things you talk about yes yes okay
whereas I think there are some other
activists who focus on more exclusive
not an activist there's some other
individuals who engage in public
political speech okay yeah who focused
more exclusively on free speech whereas
you have other goals in mind
but one of the things that you're more
inflammatory language and fair it's the
substantive disagreement has done I
think is its politicized this free
speech to an extent that someone like
height hasn't I've noticed that when
someone hears the term free speech now
they associate it with a specific set of
thinkers often as viewed as on the
extreme right and I think I I think
arguably that's the problem of all
factions in society because free speech
should be a universal value poles
certainly suggest that it's coming under
increasing threat from both sides but I
suppose the heart of my question in
addition to of course these other
observations is that do you believe free
speech is your primary end or do you
believe these other points you're making
important because I've heard you a bunch
of times defend free speech sort of
contextually like you've complained
about some of the laws in Canada that
you dislike that
they institutionalize false facts into
the law but it gives me that an
absolutist defense of free speech makes
no preference as to true or false the
point is that's something you are being
forced to say something it would be as
bad as if you were forced to say
something that is true because the point
of free speech is that you can say
whatever you want right
no the point of free speech is so that
you can think your way through life
without running like butt headlong into
a brick wall position a versus perfect
position B is just as bad right even if
one is true and the other is not okay
well there was a bunch of questions yes
good job by the way
well actually what can I just ask you
one additional addendum which is I I
think the the politicization of free
speech is by far the biggest threat to
free speech because this is all the
radical leftists are the biggest well
eluded to in previous questions the
substantive threats to free speech in
much of the world in Europe certainly I
think in the United States as well from
the government have come from the
radical right and I think it's fair to
say that on the specific narrow subset
of certain departments on liberal arts
colleges it's fair to say a threat comes
from the left though its scope is in
dispute but my question is do you think
that the way you talk about free speech
the way you link it to specific issues
the way you use inflammatory language
and the way you seem to make it you seem
to defend a specific set of frees
because there's certainly plenty of
instances of free speech attacked on the
other side that you don't mention as
much do you think you risk politicizing
this because it seems to me this okay
and RIT not think that's a far greater
threat because for example the array oh
sorry the NRA is a group in the United
States the defense guns rights right now
you hold it yes we need a question yes
okay like I says you're doing fine it's
just too much like I can't keep it you
think that your behavior risk
politicizing it and do you think that
polarization is justified I think my
behavior risks politicizing it yes I
would rather it not be politicized and
I'm doing what I can to manage that risk
however it's become political in my
country because the government
implemented compelled speech legislation
so I wasn't complaining about that
before it
Kame political now and there are there
is a time even when you're detached in
some sense from the political realm that
you can't be detached anymore well I'm
not happy with the fact that this has
become politicized you could say that I
haven't done a stellar job in ensuring
in every possible manner that this has
remained neutrally apolitical probably
true you know but I'm not particularly
unhappy with the way things have gone so
far so and I'm not happy with the
radical left and so if they're irritated
at me so much the better as far as I'm
concerned so have I conducted myself
perfectly it's like undoubtedly no so
I'm I've got more than my fair share of
faults and a temper is one of them but
I'm muddling through alright I'm almost
well hesitant to ask a question now but
so one thing I was wondering about was a
lot of people I think would argue that
have the values of Western civilization
free-speech the right of the individual
separation between church and state
have developed through not so much in
continues with the judeo-christian
morality but almost in their overthrow
through such things as the Enlightenment
the Scientific Revolution and how these
values would never have come out of just
simply the continuous of the Middle Ages
and that judeo-christian morality but my
understanding of your view would be that
those values are inherent in the
judeo-christian morality I'm just
wondering how you think yeah just what
is the values you take around in my own
world yeah it's a great question
they're not rational values they're
deeper than rational values I mean it
was a surprise to meet going back into
the past let's say to see how deep these
values were but I would say that not
only are they part of the
judeo-christian story let's say but that
they're grounded in phenomena that are
even deeper than that there's been a
fair bit of investigation into the
emergence of fair play let's say among
animals rats primates wolves and so
forth there's an ethos that emerges
behaviorally and and is then perhaps
woven into narrative and then codified
that seems to be isomorphic across these
different levels and I think it's been
well articulated in the narrative sense
in the judeo-christian corpus of stories
and that it's out of that that our legal
systems and and institutions of rights
have emerged people make the case that
that was fundamentally an Enlightenment
issue and it was certainly the case that
the rational clarity that came along
with the Enlightenment increased the
degree to which that was articulated and
transformed into law but I think to
attribute it to that is a great mistake
I think it's I think the time span view
is way too narrow that's 500 years ago
I'm a biologically minded guy it's like
500 years that's nothing 5,000 years
well that's starting to register 50,000
years it's worthy of note 6 million
years now you're getting somewhere
there's the ethic that we're discussing
is way deeper than something conjured up
in like 1500 by some northern Italians
so it's an articulation of a
substructure that's much deeper than the
articulation itself that's what it looks
like to me now I think there's room for
intelligent debate about that but I've
looked at the Enlightenment thinkers and
at the deeper at people who I regard as
deeper and
think the deeper guys Nietzsche
Dostoevsky Jung in particular
Solzhenitsyn to some degree they've got
it right so I don't think it's I don't
think that our rights are an
Enlightenment project their
instantiation into codified law that's
more part parcel of the Enlightenment
now that would be particularly manifest
in a place like the United States you
know so yeah if I can just ask a related
question you mentioned each and because
from what I understand of your work you
just seem to draw from him a lot and
again you said you agree with him so I
guess you know well he thinks a lot of
things yes I guess I I'm wondering where
do you think because I mean I imagine
you imagine he went wrong in his
interpretation of the Christian morality
and how he believes and how he believes
that's kind of a pernicious slave-based
morality so what do you what exactly do
you think it because you agree with a
lot he's really pretty Christian
morality he creates critique Christian
dogma and structures that's not exactly
the same thing so you would agree with
him then well like I said he's a
complicated guy but I think the slave
morality idea the idea that the
oppressed are somehow virtuous which I
don't think is a central Christian idea
by the way
it was something that he criticized as
part and parcel of what was constructed
and and and concretize din in an
institutional Christianity and Nietzsche
also and this is a deeper critique I
think need to really criticized
institutional Christianity particularly
the Protestant and Catholic forms I
would say for insufficient attention
paid to the imitation of Christ and too
much attention paid to the idea that the
work of redemption had already been done
which is something that also divides the
Orthodox Christian types from the
Protestants and the Catholics because
the Orthodox types tend to tilt more
towards the moral demand that you
imitate Christ in your own life and so
Nietzsche's a very it you can't some him
up very easily and I found him
extraordinarily useful in training me
how to think to say to say that you
agree with him I don't think that you
can say with someone like Nietzsche that
you agree with him because you know
Nietzsche had this is one thing that
Nietzsche said that I really got a kick
out of because it was the it's the most
most arrogant statement I've ever heard
anyone make he said I can write in a
sentence what it takes other people a
book to relate and then he said no what
other people can't even relate in a book
and that's exactly right like if you
read Beyond Good and Evil for example
which is mostly a four isms so because
he was a very sick man and he couldn't
write for long periods of time so he
would think for long periods of time and
then write down a little bomb and beyond
good and evil is just sequential pieces
of dynamite and he wasn't trying to be
systematic precisely and so that's why
it's not so easy to agree or disagree
with Nietzsche but you can sure let the
bombs go off in your brain if you read
what he has to say and he he was an
interesting critic of Christianity
because you know if you're all warped
and bent and someone comes along and
tells you how you're warped and bent in
a manner that might enable you to
straighten up it's not obvious that
they're that you're their enemy that
they're your enemy and I think that's
the right way to read Nietzsche with
regards to Christianity so he there was
plenty of rot and that was part of what
was causing let's say the death of God
now it isn't obvious at all that
Nietzsche was antithetical II opposed to
the founding ideas in fact there's many
places where he writes that indicate
quite the contrary so thank you okay so
we're gonna go to Alex and then Sayid is
going to distribute them
thank you for being here I really
appreciate it
so I was watching a few of your
interviews in preparation for this and I
heard you speak about religion quite a
bit and if you look up what religion
means in the Webster dictionary you get
something like a system of faith
centered on supernatural being or beings
or something like that but I've heard
you use religion to describe things like
punk rockers for example that that's a
religious experience so my first
question would be how do you define what
is considered religious and then sort of
as a follow-up to that if say Sam Harris
what's that religious is what you act
out anything you act out everything you
act out is is predicated on your
implicit axioms and the system of
implicit axioms that you hold as primary
is your religious belief system it
doesn't matter whether you're an atheist
or not that's just surface that's just
surface noise so it has nothing to do
with divinity or or it doesn't
necessarily have to do with those no it
probably necessarily has to do with it
too but it doesn't necessarily have
anything to do with your voluntarily
articulated statements about whether or
not you believe in something like a
transcendent deity so I mean what you
act out is much more what you are than
what you say about yourself and what the
hell do you know about what you believe
anyways you're complicated man fair
question well seriously people are
complicated you know like we're we don't
we're not transparent to ourselves at
all that's why we have that's why we
have to go to university and study
psychology it's like you know we're
we're not exactly black boxes but we are
the most complicated things there are
right and we can't even program our VCR
clocks so it's like how the hell can we
propose to understand ourselves and you
know I'm existentially oriented which is
to say that I think that what you hold
to be true
is best determined as an enough as a
consequence of an analysis of your
actions rather than as a consequence of
an analysis of what you purport to
believe now in order to act
you can't act without a hierarchy of
value which I tortured the other poor
questionnaire about you can't act
without a hierarchy of values because
you can't act unless you think one thing
is better than another because why why
would you act otherwise so that means
that you're embedded within a hierarchy
of values whether you know it or not or
maybe multiple fragmentary and competing
hierarchies of value which is all the
worse for you by the way because it just
makes you very confused that hierarchy
of values has an axiomatic it's it's
based on axioms and the probability that
you understand them is very low because
generally people don't understand their
axioms
but that axiomatic system is essentially
your religious system and there's
there's no way out of that as far as I
can tell and you can say well it isn't
predicated on conscious belief in a
transcendent deity it's like okay
have it your way but you know most
people in this room act out a
judeo-christian ethic and not only do
they act it out if they're treated in a
manner that's not commensurate with that
ethic they get very very very annoyed so
for example if I fail to treat you as if
you're an embodiment of a divine
fragment let's say that's characterized
by the ability to the ability to make
free choice and to determine your own
destiny in some sense or if I fail to
treat you as if you're a valued member
valach member of the polity as a
sovereign individual then you'll find
that very offensive and become angry
it's like okay then that's what you
believe well if I ask you if you believe
any of that well that's a whole
different story you might give me some
radical leftist nonsense but that
doesn't come what you that doesn't take
away from the fundamentals of your
action as one final thing so when you
and say sam harris argue about
religion you're arguing about
fundamentally different things it sounds
like his conception of what is religious
is very different from yours yeah well
he tends to think of religious religious
thought the same way that a smart
thirteen-year-old atheist thinks about a
fundamentalist Christian it's like yeah
okay that's just you just not getting to
the heart of the matter you know and I
just finished reading all of Sam's books
in the last couple of weeks and as far
as I'm concerned he doesn't ever get to
the bottom of the issue he doesn't
address the fundamental thinkers there
are some profound thinkers Dostoyevsky's
one Tolstoy Nietzsche Jung's like
they're completely absent from and the
same with Dawkins it's completely absent
all that conceptualization is completely
absent from their corpus of works they
don't even have an understanding for the
psychological utility of religion and
it's a big problem you know you you
don't get to be an atheist with the
people you attack or fundamental like
naive fundamentalists and I have some
some sympathy for the naive
fundamentalist just like what they're
basically saying is something like this
look we have an ethos that's valuable
you scientist types are casually
dismantling it what the hell are we
supposed to do what the fundamentalists
don't know what to do about that so they
say well creationism is science it's
like well no it's not but that doesn't
mean that they don't have a point their
point is there's something valuable here
it's like don't break it casually what
are gonna replace it with the new
atheist Swiss wish that everybody
becomes rational it's like yeah sure
that's gonna happen thank you thank you
dr. Peterson I'm a I'm a student of
religious studies and currently I'm
writing an honors thesis on religious
imagery in an intelligent literary genre
there's a poet philosopher who said the
following which I think you'll like who
by the way was a huge fan of Goethe he
said that in addressing God he says he
calls him the hidden reality and he asks
the hidden reality to reveal its
but using the robe of metaphor because
he thinks that metaphor is the only way
I stories are the only way that human
beings can comprehend
you know the hidden reality I know
you've written a lot you speak a lot
about about the stories I just wanted to
ask you although it may be a very broad
question what is the place of the
religious in stories and religious is
something like the grammatical structure
of stories like if you go down and you
look at what makes a story a story
that's religious yeah it's not a story
otherwise like a story is a particular
sort of thing again in a simplest sense
the story is an account of how to get
from point A to point B it's like a map
but there's a value structure inherent
in that obviously because otherwise you
wouldn't go from point A to point B so
just to make the map means to adopt a
value structure but there but the story
is actually more complicated than that
because as you move from point A to
point B processes of radical
transformation are often necessary and
the the deep stories about the processes
of radical transformation that occur as
you move from point A to B are basically
they're they're indistinguishable from
religious stories now the reason they I
think the reason they they tend to
become religious let's say is because it
has something to do with the gap between
the finite incomprehensible and the
infinite and uncomprehensible it's like
we live in the finite incomprehensible
but we're surrounded by the infinite and
incomprehensible and there has to be a
border between those of some like a
mediating border that's poetry and art
that's narrative that's religion and
it's that it's that strange metaphorical
reality let's say that's not factual and
it's not comprehensible but that's not
infinitely incomprehensible either it's
a bridge between the two so and as you
move closer to the infinite and
incomprehensible across that bridge you
get farther and farther away from what
you understand right but how could it be
otherwise given that you're finite you
are a finite being surrounded by
infinite what's infinite
incomprehensible and that was his
critique of the strict rationalist that
they can't that it's hard for them to
make this - that's what poets come and
that's exactly this is I learned a lot
of this from young because Young's idea
was that rationality is embedded in a
dream like there's the infinite
unknowable and then there's the dream
and then inside the dream is the
rational domain and I believe that to be
the case why else would we dream we have
to dream
if we don't dream we we go insane it
doesn't take very long and so there's
there's an element of poetic
conceptualization that grounds us and it
has to be taken seriously you know them
the rational critics of Dreams think
about them as random neural activity
it's like there's nothing right when you
look at a TV screen that's not on a
channel that's random when you dream
something complex and sophisticated
that's not random so yeah so the
metaphor surrounds us let's say and we
can critique it rationally and we can
undermine it but there's real danger in
that so
take one question from here then take
one on the other end yeah thank you for
talk I like to find out from you what's
your view of institutional racism is it
a thing or is it some other left radical
leftist agenda what was your view of
institutional racism more systemic
racism as some people may call it yes is
it is it a thing is an actual thing is
it a mother agenda that you might
attribute to radical leftists it's a
multivariate problem right
like no society is without its biases
and prejudices and some of them get
built into the system's themselves and
so when you look at unequal outcomes and
you're trying to discover why those
unequal outcomes exist if you have any
sense then you do a multivariate
analysis and you put in prejudice and
discrimination as one of the factors one
of the factors one of many many factors
and we'll the problem with the radical
leftist is that they take the fact that
societal structures are tyrannical to
some degree in arbitrary which of course
they are because they're imperfect and
then they obliterated the complexity
with that claim so there's lots of
reasons for inequality systemic bias is
one of them - what - it's an open
question to what degree systemic bias
plays in in the inequality problem let's
say but it's something that we could
hypothetically address with a certain
degree of detachment and intelligence
so no system is perfect not and
certainly not us
reasonable reasonable answer okay that's
that's wise all right so I think it's
safe to say you're a fervent critic of
post-modernism and there are times where
I don't think you quite give it a fair
shake and I'm no fan of you know a good
amount of the literature or the theory
but if you could point to one or two of
the French theorists and some of their
pieces whether it's their literature
their theory you could point to that's
culpable for this sort of cultural rot
that you charge post-modernism with
causing who would it be
what would it be so and I've done my
best to read LaCount
and I think the reason I can't read it
is because it doesn't make any sense so
because I've read some very difficult
things and I could understand them so
Foucault I think is a ten-part genius I
read madness and civilization for
example it just seems to me to be
self-evident psychiatric diagnostic
categories are in part social
constructions it's like great we've
known that since like 1960 you know it's
just not that big of Revelation and
Derrida well he's a trickster you know
and his critique of the West as fellow
go centric is dead on point male
dominated that's his theory and logo
centric well he thinks that's a problem
well I don't think it's a problem so and
I think as well it isn't even that and I
understand the post modernist viewpoint
like look it is the case that a finite
set of entities is subject to an
infinite number of interpretations
okay that's post-modernism in a nutshell
the AI guys figured that out in like
from 1960 to 1992
it took them that long to wade through
that fundamental technical problem a
real problem the problem of perception
for example it's be very hard to solve
the AI problem of perception because
there are a lot of ways to look at the
world like the objects aren't just there
in any simple sense so okay there's an
infinite number of interpretations no
problem
there's not an infinite number of viable
interpretations okay that's a big
problem okay and a little bit of
thinking through that would have gone a
long ways for the postmodernist so
that's that's number one and then what's
the other one
oh yes then the other problem is okay
there's an infinite number of
interpretations we won't make any one
canonical all right well then how the
hell are you going to act because you
have to make a value system canonical if
you're gonna act oh well we didn't solve
that problem how about we just slip
Marxism in underneath the carpet and not
notice the problem then that gives us
something to do it's like people come
out and criticize me and say dr.
Peterson doesn't understand that
post-modernism and Marxism are in
commensurate it's like yeah actually I
do understand that but the postmodern
neo-marxists don't seem to understand
that so how can you be a postmodern
Isetta Marxist at the same time well the
answer to that is actually to be found
in the historical data the postmodernist
types like Foucault and Derrida were
Marxists before they became post
modernists and the postmodern overlay on
the Marxism was as far as I can tell
mostly a cover story for going about the
same old murderous idiocy under a new
guys so you think it's possible that
there are I'm sorry
know that there are lenses like
postmodern lenses that we can view
culture from under that can at times be
more powerful and useful than than other
lenses like for example boji art the
idea of the the simulator and the
successive phases of the image Joan
Didion no Gerard could at least think
and I mean you can't throw all the
postmodernist into the same jug you know
but I would say it's still Derrida and
Foucault of had the most pernicious
effects well well the problem is they
didn't deal with it seriously it's like
you can't just say no meta-narrative
it's like okay how are we going to unite
ourselves then we're going to use
multicultural
well that's really work to produce a
peaceful world hasn't it so you need a
uniting narrative we have if we weren't
didn't have a uniting narrative we
wouldn't all be sitting peacefully in
this room it's the Uniting narrative
that governs our behavior in this room
and look here we are all peaceful it's
like they're not dealing with the
fundamental issues and to slip Marxism
back in as a backdoor route to having
something to do with your life is
intellectually repre intellectually and
morally reprehensible okay thank you how
are you sir
my name is Steve I just wanted to ask
you about this experience that I had
after watching one of your lectures that
really profoundly impacted me and I was
I was wondering if you could kind of
help me out with understanding this
after watching your lecture on young and
he's talking about his life you started
talking talking about the Lion King and
and kind of connecting what the intro
scene was in the Lion King and the idea
of archetypes and when I you know I
started to understand what you were
saying I had this unbelievable feeling
in like in my stomach in my whole body
there's just this smell like this right
this very intense feeling so warning
never to read you yeah oh no it was just
this powerful feeling and I got so
emotional you know and ask thinking of
how to articulate this question to you a
few minutes ago I was just getting so
emotional it was it was uh it just seems
like you know it scared the hell out of
me that feeling but it was also a really
meaningful so valuable amazing feeling
and I thought you know it's kind of like
would maybe what God is just you know
yeah it was so and I usually get that
that feeling too of after listening to
like a band like the cro-mags or Black
Flag you know some hardcore band or see
like that music is so important to me
like that and and and it just the
question that just made me so emotional
to is like what could my life
you know and and that was something that
I I just found myself asking myself you
know just just what
and I just I I wonder if you could you
know give me some some extra stuff on
that what that really was you know yeah
well you've got to you've got to be very
careful when you're when you're doing
something like reading young yeah
because he'll reorganize your cognitive
structures and that's there's deaths and
rebirths that go along with that
you know there's what you're trying to
do in part is to in a sense as you're
trying to bring what you do and how you
imagine yourself and how you articulate
yourself into alignment so those three
things are the same it's very hard
because there's more to you in your
action than there is in your
articulation and there's more to you in
your action than there is in your
imagination and so partly what you're
what you're experiencing is an expanded
sense of self and possibility and you
might think well that's a wonderful
thing but it's a it's also a very
daunting thing and it it can be a very
dangerous thing i when I was dealing
with all of this material when I was
writing my first book I had to abandon a
lot of the things that I was doing that
were bad habits because it was so
stressful to move through these systems
of ideas that I couldn't afford any
additional mental energy being wasted on
things I was doing that wasn't that
weren't together so so that wasn't very
break wasn't no
on march 9th actually with Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky move on and so I want to
ask you as like the leading because I'm
old yeah so yeah do you think it is to
like to be these intellectuals and do
you think that you are you want oh god I
always hesitate the hesitate to claim
victory like to escape without abject
defeat is a pretty good pretty good
ambition so and plus I think it's rather
improbable that I would win a debate
with a quote bought so some people
thought it was pretty close Twitter is a
weird platform you know it's complicated
it is a complicated platform and I've
I've modified my approach to Twitter in
the last month and a half I would say
I've been trying to selectively retweet
information I I pulled a bunch of people
and asked them if they knew of credible
Twitter sources that were producing
valid good news and I found a bunch of
sites that were doing that and then
whittled them down I really like human
progress org which has done a lovely job
of detailing
well they had they had a great tweet the
other day I really loved it was a
mock-up of a New York Times cover and it
said 127 thousand people lifted out of
abject poverty today you know in like
large-type
and then the tweet was we could have run
this every single day for the last 20
years it's like you know because some of
you know but perhaps some of you don't
that between the year 2000 and 2012 and
this hasn't stopped yet the number of
people in abject poverty in the world
fell by by half right it was the most
rapid period of economic development
ever in the history of the world and
there's lots of things like that
happening there's several hundred
thousand people a day being hooked to
the power grid which is a big deal for
those of you those of you who have power
might also appreciate that
infant mortality has been plummeting you
know we're gonna Plateau in terms of
population at about 9 billion and it's
going to level off and decline pretty
rapidly after that people are getting
access to fresh water in record numbers
like there's so many good things
happening that it's not even funny and
that we that are real cause for
celebration and so I've been trying to
select trying to tilt what I've been
distributing more in that direction and
I've also put a buffer between me and my
use of Twitter so because it it does it
does reward an impulsive 'ti that isn't
always let's say my impulsivity that
isn't always in anyone's best interest I
made an agreement with my son to because
he's been watching I have lots of people
watching what I'm doing and trying to
keep me under some degree of control
let's say and his comment was that if I
was going to if it was serious enough to
engage in a Twitter combat about it was
serious enough to write a blog post
about and so I've kind of made this rule
which is I'm not going to comment on
anything on Twitter in that sort of
manner unless I feel that writing about
it at some length is justifiable and so
I started doing that this week I wrote
three blog posts and that seems to have
gone pretty well so I hope that answered
your question
yep
kind of go on a different topic I have a
personality psychology question okay so
when I did the understand myself quiz I
was very surprised to find out that I
was on the bottom two percentile for
conscientiousness which openness
yes you're not your venereal type I'm
gonna need to partner with someone whose
discipline that's exactly see there
seems to be a real tension between
openness and and especially orderliness
you know who's open people while they
think laterally and they blow boxes
apart and they tend to make a mess when
they're transforming things and they're
all over the place and and they have to
be because otherwise they wouldn't be
open but it's hard to do that and also
be orderly and conscientious and so and
corporations suffer from this tension
all the time right because they're
started by open people but when they get
going and get algorithm eyes they're run
by conscientious people but then the
conscientious people can only go down
one track and if the environment
transforms the whole company disappears
so I would say you take a look at the
conscientiousness score you see if you
can figure out how to discipline
yourself a bit more and see if you can
figure out how to schedule your time not
like a prison but like like a structured
set of opportunities and then you
understand that in order to be
successful in life likely in the medium
to long run you're going to have to find
someone could be someone close to you or
it could be business partners or
whatever that fill in that missing
conscientiousness gap so I guess the
Part B was my boyfriend we've been
together for a very long time we're not
that old it's also very high in
neuroticism and I feel that's where like
our conflict comes and as far as
long-term what are some things that you
know lowly conscientious and erotic
we'll look into that
yeah well I mean the simple I can only
its it high levels of neuroticism are
problematic in a relationship
it's probably why 75% of divorces are
initiated by women because women are
higher in neuroticism than men and I
think the reason for that is that they
have to be more sensitive to infant
distress and so that makes them more
sensitive to distress in general now I
don't know that for sure
it's a supposition but high levels of
neuroticism do tend to make a
relationship volatile and and to put a
fair bit of negative emotion into it now
the question is where what the source of
the high level of neuroticism is it
might be purely temperamental but it
also might be indicative of an
underlying anxiety disorder depression
or or a physiological problem because
they can manifest themselves in high
levels of negative emotion and so
there's always the possibility of doing
something about that what I usually tell
my clients who are high in neuroticism
is two simple things number one get up
at the same time in the morning okay
because that helps stabilize your
circadian rhythms number two eat a large
meal before you stress yourself in the
morning and mostly protein and fat based
because if you're high on neuroticism
and you stress yourself before you eat
you you dis regulate your your emotional
reaction systems essentially and you can
tree regulate them till you sleep again
so other than that goodwill and
understanding is about what you've got
are you doing tonight dr. Pearson
nervous to uh talk in front of you
because you've got to be one of the most
formidable people that I've ever heard
up or ever listen to her ever seen so my
question is again you're one of the best
communicators that I've ever listened to
if I could be half as good at you or at
communicating as you are I would be set
how can I teach myself to do that
practice
you know really like well there's a
couple of things is helps to read a lot
it really helps to write so if you want
to make yourself articulate which is a
very good idea then not only should you
read but you should write down what you
think and if you can do that a little
bit every day 15 minutes maybe you could
steal 15 minutes and do it every day but
if you do that for ten years you really
straighten out your thinking if you're
gonna speak effectively you have to know
way more than you're talking about you
know so if you this is often difficult
for beginning lectures at university
because they'll do a lecture on a topic
but they only know as much as they're
saying in the lecture and they get kind
of stuck to their notes because of it
but you want to know ten times as much
as you are saying in the lecture and
then you can specify a stepping path
through it and elaborate with the other
things that you know but to do that you
have to do a lot of reading but you also
have to do a lot of reading because
that's where the synthesize that's where
the synthesizing comes so that's on the
input side and then on the output side
well there's some tricks techniques
let's say is like if you're speaking in
front of a group you are not delivering
a talk to a group that's not what you're
doing the talk isn't a package thing
that you present to a group there isn't
a group there's a bunch of individuals
and you talk to them so when I talk to a
group I always talk to people one at a
time
and that makes it easier to because you
know how to talk to a person it's like
can you talk to a thousand people well
probably not because it's too
intimidating but there isn't a thousand
people there there's a thousand
individuals and so you just look at an
individual and you say something and you
can tell if they're engaged they look
confused or they look interested or they
look angry or they look bored or maybe
they're asleep in which case you look at
someone else and they give you feedback
about how you're doing and so one thing
is to to have something to say yeah
thing is pay attention to who you're
talking to because unless you're very
badly socialized then that seems
unlikely in your case because you know
you present yourself at least moderately
well you know and well I mean I don't
know you very well but at first but on
first sight you know you're doing fine
so the probability that if you pay
attention to the individuals that you're
talking to that your natural wealth of
social skill will manifest itself is
extremely high and so you don't deliver
a talk to an audience that's a really
bad way of thinking about you're
actually engaged in a conversation with
an audience even if they're not talking
they're nodding and shifting position
and you know looking like this or and
you can you can pull all that in and and
and use it to govern the level at which
you're addressing the entire audience so
the last thing I would say is well
having the aim to be a good communicator
is a good start and you think well I
could bunch us that to some degree well
there isn't anything that you can
possibly this is the whole point of a
liberal education there isn't anything
that you can possibly do that makes you
more competent in everything you do than
to learn how to communicate I don't care
if you're gonna be a carpenter I mean
being a carpenter by the way is very
difficult especially if you're a good
carpenter but if you're good at
communicating as a carpenter you're like
10 times better as a carpenter so the
and this is something that the liberal
arts colleges I think I don't know if
they've forgotten it but they don't do a
very good job of marketing it's like
what's the use of a bachelor's degree a
Bachelor of Arts it's like well you can
think you can write you can speak you've
read something it's like the economic
value that is incalculable the people
that I've watched in my life have been
spectacularly successful are they have
skills clearly that that's a minimum
precondition but they're also very very
good at articulating themselves and so
whenever they negotiate they're
successful well that's kind of like the
different
success in life right you negotiate and
you're six it doesn't mean you win
because if you're a good negotiator if
you're really good negotiator everybody
walks away from the negotiation thrilled
and so then people line up to do things
with you so and that's all that's all
dependent on your ability to communicate
so practice thank you very much
oh thanks sorry I have to stop there's a
section of the book in here that I use
man talk about here confident young man
what's rule 11 in this book here
don't bother children when you're
skateboarders well the small bone to
pick with Lafayette College is that my
brother does get stopped skateboarding
here but um that's not that sir mines my
question today really I have two key
questions you said in one lecture that
Alexander soldier nation basically
memorized all of the rare work to bring
it out and to show the world but I've
had professors have cert to me and ones
that are very you know studied on Slavic
culture and studied on the gulag tell me
essentially
that he was a KGB agent I mean would you
agree with that statement the only way
that he would have been able to get all
that stuff out of there live in there
for twenty years and not die or you know
starve to death
was from that what do you know
anything's possible but probably not
that probably not that know right KGB
agents I don't would tell you that like
what's their evidence for that it's
impossible for him to documented that
that's done so he must have been a KGB
agent so I memorize all that and bring
out a trick yeah you you know I mean you
want with you writing in prison and he
really couldn't he couldn't store
anything yeah you'd be amazed at what
people can remember when they have to
remember so people remember very large
volumes of material when they're when
that's what they have maybe like
preliterate people know all they did was
remember I have a friend who's not
literate and what he can read by two
friends that aren't really very literate
but one of them is really not literate
and what he can remember you just can't
believe our modern people don't remember
much because we don't have to we write
it down and externalize it but our
capacity for memories is far greater
than you realize
the shape from when the Greeks you know
switch from Oracle to a literary culture
is very fascinating but my second
question before I go sit back down with
um how do you feel at the influence of
and I you know with reading Terence
Mckenna think along these lines evens of
psychedelics within our culture and how
that and what that does of human psyche
I know that the guy god only knows I
don't think we own I don't think we
understand we don't understand
psychedelics one bit so and I don't
think we understand the force they be
what you play the role that they played
in our religious and cognitive evolution
so we don't understand them they're an
absolute mystery so and play with them
at your peril yeah yeah
Swiss a pretty strange place for that
emerge from but yeah in a lot of you
talks you speak about the things of the
West dude correct and I'm curious
yourself being a psychologist what your
thoughts are on Edward Bernays and the
impact that he had on Western society
the the guiding of masses are
controlling them and being able to take
control in that way I don't know enough
about am afraid to give you an
intelligent answer so do you have
another question because that's rather
disappointing I imagine sure my other
question would be that it's my
understanding that worker control and
people's control is instrumental in the
idea of socialism and if these countries
that we call socialist and communist are
totalitarian states ruled by a single
party or a single man why do we continue
referring to them as such as referring
them to as as socialist as when they
don't follow the the mean heart of it
which is weird quite worker control it's
a good question I don't I don't really
know the answer to that
it looks like who knows right maybe
maybe the
the inevitable end product of a
collectivist viewpoint is something like
a totalitarian state it seems probable
because most human governments have been
essentially totalitarian states of one
degree of severity or another so the
tribal tendency might manifest itself in
the rigid hierarchy but it is it is a
perverse fact right and you think that
it's one of the mysteries about the
continual apologetics for the radical
left it's like well didn't China just
announced that its president is now
president for life like that's actually
a big problem and then well and despite
the fact that they've moved quite a
distance in the free-market direction
obviously that underlying totalitarian
impulse is still alive then and well and
thriving I mean then what the Chinese
are doing with electronic surveillance
should make everyone's hair stand on end
so yeah thing
yeah hi dr. Pearson okay - are you out
of mic range it's a pleasure to ask you
a question I wrote it down - okay
minimize in articular bility oh yeah so
you you put a great emphasis on truth in
your work so this is you writing in 12
rules for life and above all don't lie
don't lie about anything ever
lying leads to hell it was the great in
the small eyes of the Nazi and communist
states that produced the deaths of tens
of millions of people you've also talked
about how Nietzsche foresaw the nihilism
implicit in European culture in the
1800s that would likely lead to the
authoritarianism and death tolls
mentioned at the end of the previous
quote and I find this interesting for
the following reason so here's Nietzsche
in the will to power radical nihilism is
the conviction of an absolute unten
ability of existence when it comes to
the highest values one recognizes this
realization is a consequence of the
cultivation of truthfulness so in other
words Nietzsche saw the that valuing
truth to its fullest undercuts valuation
itself within a Christian context by the
way it can mean one of the things that
that needs you in his role as Christian
critic pointed out was that the death of
God was a consequence in his formulation
of the Christian insistence on truth so
his his idea was essentially that as
Christianity elevated the truth to the
position of highest moral virtue and
then that truth seeking spirit developed
scientific and rational viewpoint that
the logical consequence of that was the
turning of the spirit of truth on the
metaphysical presumptions of
Christianity itself that's the context
for that right so what I wanted to ask
you is that you appear to care deeply
about meeting and the philosophical
problem of nihilism so I was just
wondering if you could elaborate on this
between nihilism and valuing truth light
of what you're saying and whether
there's a way in which you see your
ideas as elaborated in in your latest as
a solution to the problems nihilism -
the great question I think I think
really that the Jung's work is the
answer to that question because Jung was
profoundly influenced by Freud obviously
and if you read the Freudian biographers
let's say it's easy to conceptualize
Jung as a an acolyte of Freud but it's
not really accurate
I wouldn't say or it's insufficiently
accurate because Freud had a great
influence on you but you know was also
exceptionally influenced by Nietzsche
and you I think you can also view Piaget
in this manner by the way although not
directly as a consequence of the
influence of Nietzsche it be more
indirect but you really regarded what he
was doing as an answer to Nietzsche's
question and the question is something
like well the inquiry inquiring Western
rational mind has murdered or the
metaphysical presuppositions of Western
society now what now Nietzsche's idea
was well we would have to invent our own
values we would have to become a new
type of being but Jung's response to
that especially after world war two was
and after encountering Freud was
something like what makes you think we
can invent our own values Sonia was to
rediscover the values of the past to go
within that was his hero's journey to go
within in the landscape of the
imagination and to rekindle the
archetypes that isn't necessarily
something that has to be done as an
internal voyage but that made it that
made the process something that was more
akin to an archetypal transformation so
if it's the father that's dead then you
go into the belly of the beast to
revitalize the father that's the pathway
forward
and that's been the pathway forward for
human beings for for as long back as we
know for tens of thousands of years
yeah well machiya I think I'm saying
that right some Romanian wrote me the
other day and tried to teach me how to
say it Mirchi I think that's right le ah
de talked about the the death of God as
a recurring phenomena
I mean that's what he that's what he
realized when he did his large scale
surveys of religious belief systems is
that God dies very frequently and then
that's part of a divot that's part of
what you might describe as a
developmental process it's very much
akin to what happens to you when your
dreams die you know we put forward a
hypothesis about a mode of being that
you would like to embody you have a
dream a vision and ambition maybe a love
affair or something like that and it
collapses on you well there's a period
of death that follows that you could
call it psychological death but then
there's a reconstruction of the value
system and a rebirth and that's that's
the eternal human story it really is the
Hirogen now Jung's contribution to
Nietzsche's body of thought and this is
where I think also dusty asked
Dostoevsky surpassed Nietzsche was that
you realized that we didn't invent our
own values we rediscovered those values
that we always harbored within us now
that doesn't mean they that that they
still have to be given new form though
you see this in an old story of the
Egyptian there's an old story of Horace
and Osiris and Horus goes to rescue his
father Osiris who's basically living
like a dead ghost in the underworld he
goes to rescue him after defeating his
evil uncle he goes to rescue his dead
father and when he goes down into the
underworld he has an eye in his hand
that set the evil ones tore from his
head during their combat and instead of
putting the eye back in his head he
gives it to his father and then his
father can see again and then they both
go back up to the surface of the world
and it's their union that constitutes
the spirit of the Pharaoh it's an
absolutely unbelievably remarkable story
because the idea
is well you will be damaged in your
confrontation with life particularly if
you confront malevolence because the
confrontation with malevolence damages
people it will damage your vision but if
you if you take that damaged part of you
and you re United with the dead spirit
of your father then you can revitalize
that that will strengthen you and that
will enable you to move forward into the
future it's like that's just exactly
right and it's one of the deepest
religious presuppositions of humanity
you see it everywhere that idea that's
what you're doing in university if you
take a liberal arts course degree it's
like you're you're you're resurrecting
your dead ancestors so they can live
again in your form but in conjoined
union with you you're the vision that
gives the dead past its its vitality and
spirit and that's the purpose of being
educated that's a that's your initiation
and and partly what you do when you're
initiated properly in that regard is you
develop a comprehensive philosophy of
good and evil a deep philosophy of good
and evil evil and that protects you
against the confrontation with
malevolence and I know that you know I
know that not least because one of the
things that's happened to me as a
consequence of putting all these
lectures online is that I've had many
military people write me and come and
talk to me who had post-traumatic stress
disorder and that's almost always a
consequence often of them viewing
themselves to something dreadful but
sometimes viewing that occurring as a
consequence of other people's actions
until they have a philosophy of good and
evil they can't recover from their
post-traumatic stress disorder
and like you you if you're naive
metaphysically naive and you come in
contact with someone who truly wants to
hurt you the probability that that will
undo you psychologically is very very
high so you have to be wise as serpents
that's the old saying you have to be
wise as a serpent because otherwise you
have no protection against serpents
maybe we'll do two more because I'm
starting to get fuzzy minded and I've
learned to quit at that point mostly so
we talked a bit before yeah before you
started don't know exactly how to phrase
this and I think that this will be like
I do what I like acknowledge that all of
this Q&A has been amazing because it's
basically been a lecture mixed with
reality and that's a good combination
yeah it's a good combination and I don't
think many speakers I go to actually
know how to combine that the way you did
so thank you for that but uh I guess
this question is a bit of a departure
from that and it's sort of going to
something more of a say I don't think
everyone can relate to because it's in
your book you say don't lie and I think
that after living 21 short years I
learned that the hard way but you and
your life and me and my life I feel like
we both a moment where we've had to
confront a sope alienating instance of
nature where there is no path forward
that we really have at our disposal and
there's a point where an unnatural
amount of growth had to come out of us
so I just wanted to know where you drew
that line at your own ability to develop
as a person to where you didn't become
tunnel visioned with trying to face
life's problems on your own earth okay
well we had talked just before this the
second part of this Q&A both my
daughter's illness and about this
gentleman's have illness in his family
too so that's kind of the background to
this well the first part of that is like
if we were going to be pessimistically
realistic about all this I would say
that your best that is truth but that
doesn't necessarily mean that's always
going to do the trick right I mean
sometimes you go fight a dragon and it
eats you and if the if you being eaten
wasn't a real possibility it wouldn't be
a real fight and so you see people like
I've seen people
in my clinical practice sometimes I had
one client in particular who was
undergoing a particularly vicious
divorce with someone who was really
seriously inclined to take him out and
would do pretty much everything at her
disposal to do so and I strategized with
him for about three years and we did
everything like and hyper carefully he
was a very conscientious and diligent
person and he put into practice
everything that we discussed and
strategized and he still pretty much he
got backed into a corner so hard that I
didn't know how to help him anymore so I
would say however that he like he was a
very truthful person throughout that and
one thing he did do was part of it was a
custody battle and he did manage despite
his decline in consequence of being
repeatedly cornered I would say he did
manage to establish what I think was a
lasting relationship with his kids so he
might have got enough out of what he did
to justify it even though the whole
landscape was pretty awful I think that
not lying is your best bet
but life is hard and people get run over
and it doesn't necessarily mean that
you're going to emerge in any obvious
sense triumphant but if you take the
alternative path path especially when
you're facing severe tribulations let's
say and you complicate those with deceit
you can be sure that whatever tragedy
that you're confronting is going to turn
into not only tragedy but something very
much akin to hell and so you might be
able to at least minimize the degree of
suffering even if you can't overcome it
or transcendent and that's something you
know it's something I I'm always
reminded in a discussion like this of
what I watched when my my wife's family
were around the deathbed of her mother
she had frontotemporal dementia which is
like Alzheimer's had quite an awful way
to go and her husband my father-in-law
really stepped up to the plate
like he was quite the man about town
very extroverted partier type and quite
disagreeable but when his wife got sick
man he was there it was something to
watch and so he turned what could have
been absolutely dreadful into just
miserable and then when their entire
family was gathered around her deathbed
like my wife and her sister had both
dealt with dying people before and the
other sister was a pharmacist and they
were attentive to their mother and there
was no foolish catastrophes going on
between the family and they all pulled
together and so their mother died but
what I observed was that their bonds
were strengthened as a consequence and
that they gained something from the
tightening of the remaining
relationships that was at least partial
compensation for the loss of their
mother and that beat the hell out of
squabbling about everything while she
was dying because that's a real
possibility and people certainly do that
so
one more and maybe we'll call it a night
the one thing that has been kind of
going to my mind in this discussion in
general when I watch their videos
personally one of the most interesting
aspects of neuroscience to me is no
robusticity when the brain capacity to
change the adaptive but I think that a
dynamic issue and your toxin you know in
your arguments is that people both on
the left and on the right can be
possessed by it
they all need five key points that will
then be stagnant and not to change their
they don't really understand that maybe
to the one that they should but big plus
sign right and so my opinion is that
that makes a little bit of a paradox
because you know we are wired we're
hardwired essentially become adept to
change we're able to change ourselves to
respond to the thing on our environment
our brain itself James I have to start
behavior though the actual the heaters
at the derivation of what's actually
changing so you're arguing is that a lot
of people will become you know it touch
this and they'll stay stagnant so how do
you explain you know what aspects of
political phenomena or you know just
social discourse what is so powerful
about that that it overcomes our
predisposed to different
well changes changes especially if it's
the more radical the necessary change
the more pain that accompanies it like
the more opportunity as well but and a
lot of what we learn we learn painfully
and so it's not surprising that people
shrink away from learning we learn in
pain and anxiety very frequently
everyone knows that like the things that
really that you really learned in life
it's like there was no joy man like it
took you out and so the fact that people
flee from that is hardly surprising but
it doesn't help that's the thing it just
stores up the catastrophe for later and
so the better the better idea is to eat
a little poison every day so that you
don't have to overdose in a month
it's something like that and it is the
case that I think because you don't you
aren't forced first of all you don't
learn unless you're forced to learn I
know there's alternatives to that
there's the voluntary search for
knowledge and that's a fine thing and
that is an antidote to this but apart
from that speaking more practically you
tend not to learn unless you're forced
to learn and it's and what you tend to
learn by force are difficult lessons and
so people are very prone to not do not
seek that out it's not surprising but
it's because they don't understand the
consequences very well you know you you
it's because maybe it's because they're
convinced that there's some way of for
stalling the necessary learning and
there isn't any way of for stalling it
all you do is make it worse in the
future you make yourself smaller and you
make the lesson harder and so that's why
in so many religious doctrines there's
emphasis on humility you know and
humility is to debase yourself it's to
understand that you don't know enough so
that your life isn't going to be
miserable and so every chance you get to
grab something new that will help you
along your way you should take it as
fast as you can but you have to have a
very tragic I would say view of reality
and also a harsh one because it's not
just tragedy it's also malevolence you
have to understand that those are
waiting for you and that makes you
desperate enough to learn and that might
be make you desperate enough to fall out
of your ideology but that's that's a
hard way of looking at the world it
beats living through it though it was
very nice talking to
[Applause]