https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pHe-P7Kx8LQ
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 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. 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 were lots of years probably between 1962 I would say probably and 1985 people were pretty convinced that the probability of a nuclear war was high. Much higher than people consider 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 seemed so utterly insane. And I was curious what was going on exactly. Was this one 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 and 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 extraordinarily large potential interpretations which I think would be essentially a post-modernist 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 lots of times when you talk to people who think or when 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 your 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 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 all the great works of Friedrich Nietzsche and the great works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and most of Jung’s 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. 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 it’s hard it’s complicated because 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 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 knowledge runs out right 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 while it was out of that that all this political controversy arose. I mean I was never focused on political controversy even though I’m interested in politics and I thought at many points in my life about a political career I always put it aside for a psychological and philosophical career I would say. 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 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 a lot 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.