https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=L4xnh194cPI
Welcome back to this special edition of Piers Morgan On Central, one-on-one with Dr Jordan Peterson. We left him on the cliffhanger with Rocky Balboa and his address to his son about how to grow a pair, for want of a better phrase. This idea that actually your life is defined not so much by success, because you’re everyone’s friend when you’re successful, but by the knocks you inevitably are going to get, whether it’s through losing loved ones, losing a job, losing a car, whatever it may be, you’re going to get hit by blows in your life of differing magnitude. And I’ve always believed that how you deal with the downside of life really defines how you lead the rest of your life. Well, the clip is very interesting because it starts out with the admission that life is brutally difficult and sometimes unbearably brutally difficult. And you can see the progress of playing with that notion. It’s warped into this sense of victimization, but it does reflect some understanding of the underlying tragic reality of life. And so it’s good to get that right on the table to begin with. Say, well, you’re miserable, you have your reasons. And they might be deep reasons. But if you let the misery demoralize you and make you bitter and cynical and cowardly and make you withdraw, then first of all, that’s a failure in the highest sense on your part. And all it’s going to do is make everything worse. And then you might think, well, what do you have to respond to that? How do you respond to that catastrophe and challenge? And the answer is, and this is what Rocky is telling his son in no uncertain terms, is like, terrible as things are, there’s a lot more to you than you can possibly imagine. And that if you face those things forthrightly and with some faith and courage, then you can have the adventure of your life and prevail even over catastrophe. And that’s true. Right. I couldn’t really get my head around why so many young people feel so anxious all the time compared to when I was young, when it just wasn’t really a big thing amongst my friendship group, certainly. But I reckon it’s two things. One, social media, the constant bombardment of other people having a great time or looking great, often of false imagery and having to live up to false ideals. But also a conversation I had with Dr. Phil in America where his explanation for it was that he said, you’ve got to understand that social media means that young people now are being bombarded all day long and all night long with quite shocking imagery. And he gave an example. He said, when I was young, he said, if a crocodile ate somebody on a golf course in Florida, chances are I would never have heard about it. It probably wouldn’t have made the national news, probably wouldn’t have even made the state news, and I wouldn’t have heard about this incident. Now it’s quite likely that a video of the crocodile eating this person would be whipping its way around social media within half an hour, and young kids would be sharing it, disseminating it and being exposed to constant imagery all the time of quite unsettling and shocking imagery. What do you think about that? That in itself was adding to a sense of everything is terrible. I think it’s a corollary of an information overload theory. One of the advantages to having the computational power we have is that everything is at your fingertips. And the disadvantage is that everything is in your face. And by everything, it might be 40 million pornographic images. That’s a lot, or an endless array of tragic scenarios, and really endless. And so that’s a problem. And the problem, the fundamental problem is how do you handle the firehose of information, and no one really knows the answer to that. But we should also point out that it’s no wonder that young people are demoralized and anxious, because we’re doing everything we can to demoralize them and make them anxious. So on the masculine front, we tell young boys that while the world’s a terrible patriarchal tyranny, and all of that patriarchal tyranny, which is the whole explanation for history, has done nothing but oppress and exploit people and destroy the planet. And so that any manifestation of that masculine impulse on your part is equivalent to the world destroying force. All masculinity now is branded toxic. And I remember, I think the key moment for me came when Gillette had always had these very masculine commercials with the big guy cuddling a baby or whatever it may be. They suddenly switched gears and did a campaign where it started with a lot of me too imagery and basically the assumption that all men are awful until they can prove otherwise. And I predicted in a column, this would be a complete disaster for them, and sure enough, $9 billion later, they did a screeching U-turn and went back to the big guy cuddling the babies. Because actually, two things I think about that. One, most men are not awful, actually. Not all the time. Some men are, obviously. Some women are pretty awful. But not most of them. But if you try saying that, not getting cancelled. But I think also this thing that you’ve got into trouble about, which I don’t understand why, that you believe that most women probably quite like their men to be strong and confident. I don’t believe that. All the data shows that clearly. It’s cultural samples and has for 50 years. Plus everyone needs it. And most women I know I think would absolutely agree. Why is it that you’ve been so vilified for suggesting something which is so palpably true? Well, I think, first of all, that annoys narcissistic women no end. And it annoys people who think that there are no biological or cultural limits on how we manifest our behaviours. And also it frightens a large number of women because many women have never had a good relationship with anyone masculine in their life. And so the notion that they would need to establish a trusting relationship with a man, especially if he’s also in something approximating a superordinate position, which is what they might like to find him maximally attractive, also implies that they’re in some sense going to be under his sway. And if there’s no trust there, well, that’s absolutely terrifying. And I have some sympathy for that because there are no shortage of women out there who’ve never had a positive relationship with anyone masculine. And so they’re very, they’re completely unable to discriminate between narcissistic power and compulsion and confident competence. And so because they can’t distinguish that and they’re afraid, they put all of that in the same category, which is something like the predator category. And that’s not good for them because, well, as you said, all men aren’t predators all the time. And they need to establish a relationship with a man. Right. We’re also in a very strange place where a lot of high profile women will not say what they think a woman is because they are, Potangi Brown Jackson, the new member of the Supreme Court, in her nomination hearings was asked a question. This is what she said. Can I provide a definition? Yeah. I can’t. You can’t? Not in this context. I’m not a biologist. It was a riveting moment because you’re like, you’re going to be on Supreme Court of the United States of America. You’re a woman. You’re the first black woman on the court. And that in itself, I know you’ve raised eyebrows about why did Joe Biden go out there and say, we need to have a black woman? Why not just say we want the best person available? And then if she’s the best person, get her on the court, which I completely agree with. But for her not to be able to commit to explaining what she thinks a woman is. And then I had a moment on this show where Macy Gray, the singer, did stick her neck out. She said this. I will say this and everybody’s going to hate me, but as a woman, just because you go change your parts doesn’t make you a woman. Right. Sorry. You feel that? I know that for a fact. Like, if you want me to call you a her, I will, because that’s what you want. But that doesn’t make you a woman, just because I call you a her and just because you got a surgery. With chilling predictability, Macy Gray stuck to her guns for a couple of days and then the onslaught was so overwhelming against her, she had to go on national television in America, issue a grovelling apology for everyone that she’d hurt with this statement of what many would think is just a statement of biological fact. How have we got to this place where women are terrified of saying what a woman is and women who do say what they think it is, i.e. there are clear biological distinctions between a man and a woman, they get destroyed? Well, we’ve accepted this preposterous hypothesis that your identity is only subjectively defined. And as I’ve tried to point out in some of my lectures, the only people who think their identity is subjectively defined are two-year-olds. And I mean that technically, because two-year-olds are egocentric, which means they can’t bring their identity in alignment with a social norm, which also means that two-year-olds can’t play with other children. They can play beside them, but they can’t play with them. That doesn’t happen until you’re three. What happens when you’re three, if you’re reasonably well socialized or start to move towards that, is that you learn how to negotiate a social identity. And then identity becomes, obviously it has some roots in your subjectivity and in your biology for that matter, but a sophisticated identity is not only socially negotiated, as the constructivists know perfectly well, but it’s also got a dynamism about it because it has to be constantly renegotiated. Like, as we’re having a conversation here, to some degree we’re renegotiating our mutual identities because we learn something from each other, so we transform. We’re also trying to figure out to some degree who each of us is, who we are, who each of us is in this situation, and then we’re also trying to learn can we play together towards some productive end. And you might ask, well, what do you mean play? And say, well, we’re trying to have an interesting conversation.