https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FItVinw5I_Q
Why do you think that, number one, your profile has become so big of late? And number two, why do you think it is that so many members of the left are so angry about that? Why are they characterizing people who listen to you as angry, enraged young white men? Well, we could look at the characterization to begin with, you know, because I think it speaks to the pathology of the radical left instantly. They’re absolutely incapable of viewing the world except through group identity terms. You know, and so if someone comes out and disagrees with them, then they have to characterize them by their fundamental group attribute, whatever that happens to be. Maybe it’s gender, because that’s a favorite, or maybe it’s race. And so angry white men, young, there we go, sexist, ageist and racist all at once, right? They’re angry, young, white men. Well, it has to be that way if you’re going to be the if you’re going to play the leftist game, because that’s the only way that you can look at the world. And then if you can’t make your opponent reprehensible in some manner, and it’s strange that they would attempt to make them reprehensible on the grounds of race, age and sex, since that’s precisely what they stand against hypothetically. But if you can’t make your enemy reprehensible along some dimension, then you have to contend with them seriously. And so, you know, if I’m not an alt-right fascist like Hitler, you know, or Milo Yiannopoulos, which was how I was characterized in Canada because the radical leftists can’t even get their bloody insults straight, he’s like Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s like there’s no difference between them, right? No obvious difference. It’s just another attempt to pillory, as far as I can tell. And I think that it’s dreadful. I really think it is. There was an article written by the, I believe, the editor of the New York Review of Books that was just republished in the Globe and Mail talking about the emergence of hypermasculinity and how I was somehow responsible for that or contributing to it like Mussolini. And I read that and I thought, yeah, like Mussolini. And I thought, okay, so what are you doing? I see. You’re defining masculinity, you’re conflating masculinity and hypermasculinity at the same time. Then you’re virtue signaling by being against hypermasculinity. But really what you’re trying to do is bring down whatever it is that’s masculinity. And what masculinity is in this frame is something like competence. And so it’s part of the radical leftists’ general war on competence as well, which I think is one of the most pernicious elements of the culture wars. The dissolution of hierarchies, the assumption that every hierarchy has to be based on power and serve the needs of your group, whatever that happens to be, that there’s no such thing as competence. And then the other thing that’s reprehensible about it, because that’s not enough, is that it’s just wrong. Like, I’ve got tens of thousands of letters from people and people come up to me all the time on the street. I’ll give you an example. This is a great story. This is really touching. So I was in LA about a month and a half ago, and I was downtown LA. And downtown LA is kind of rough. And I was wandering around with my wife. And this young guy pulled a car up beside me and hopped out. And he was kind of a stylish looking 21-year-old Latino guy, something like that. He was all excited. He asked me who I was, and I told him. And that’s what he had presumed. And so he was kind of excited about that. And he said, look, I’ve watched all your lectures, and it’s really helped me. And I’ve been straightening out my life and trying to get my room clean. And he laughed about that. But, you know, developing some aims and trying to tell the truth. And look, I’ve really fixed up my relationship with my father. And so then he said, wait, wait, just wait a minute. And I thought, sure, sure. So he went back in the car and he got his father out of his car and he came over with his dad. And like they had their arms around each other. And he said, look, we’ve really improved our relationship. And they’re both smiling away. And, you know, that’s man, if you’re going to target me for that, just go right ahead. Yeah, it sounds real white supremacist. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it’s wherever I go now. And this is one of the things, this is the thing that’s so wonderful about that. All of this, as far as I’m concerned, is that people come up to me all the time. And that’s exactly what they say. They say, look, I was lost, aimless, depressed, nihilistic, anxious, drug addicted, alcoholic, wasting my time, masturbating too much. Although they don’t generally use that particular example. You know, lost, essentially, and hopeless in some sense. And I’ve been watching your lectures and they’ve really helped. And I’ve really been putting my life together. And I’ve been trying to say what I believe to be true and develop a vision. And it’s really helped. And it’s so overwhelming. You know, like if I’m doing book signings after a talk, then there’ll be a dozen people or more who. And these aren’t like I’m only talking to people for about 15 seconds. But you can have a very intense conversation in 15 seconds. And they’ll say, look, you know, like I was suicidal, man, like I was really hanging on to the edge of the earth by my fingernails. And I’m better. And they have tears in their eyes. It’s like little of that goes a long way, man. Well, I think that when I look at your rise and look, I talk to people who love what you do. I mean, every time I go on the road and I’m speaking at a campus, you’re the number one name that gets mentioned at people by people who come to my lectures. And I think that the reason for that that I’ve that I’ve seen is really twofold. One is that one of the things that you really talk a lot about is the notion of self-discipline and purpose in your life and control and the idea that you are in control of your decision making and your decision making matters. That’s one. And the other is that you have you have a unique capacity to say no to things. And when somebody says something to you that is illogical, but popular, then you have the capacity to say no. That’s what happened in that Kathy Newman interview that somebody was saying something to you that made no sense. And you just said, well, no. And then you just stood on that now. And when you stand on that now, I think it gives people a lot of courage. Yeah. Well, I mean, the gender issue is really an interesting one, because one of my professional domains of expertise is individual differences. I’m a personality psychologist. And so I know the gender difference literature. And it’s it’s a very solid literature. Well, first of all, it’s very solid. It has a 30 year history. Once per psychologist got the personality models down. So that would be the big five model, all empirically derived straight statistics, right? Brute force empiricism. Nobody had a theoretical axe to grind with the big five except to say maybe there are human traits. Maybe they’re encapsulated in language. We can use statistical techniques to find out what they are. That was it. That’s the whole ideology. So very, very neutral as far as ideologies go. Five traits emerge. OK. Are there differences between the sexes? Turns out there are. All right. They’re not massive. Although, if you sum them across all the traits, you can separate men and women with about 75 percent accuracy. So it’s not trivial, but you have to sum across all the traits. Then another question comes up. Well, are those differences sociocultural or biological? OK, we can test that. We’ll go around the world. We’ll look at cultures. We’ll rank order them in terms of the gender equality of their sociological policies. We can do that with broad agreement from the right and the left. Then the hypothesis would be if gender differences decrease among more egalitarian societies, then the gender differences are sociocultural or at least more sociocultural. That’s exactly the opposite of what was found repeatedly. That’s pseudoscience. It’s like, no, that’s mainstream psychology. Those papers have thousands of citations. And the average humanities paper has zero citations. And then the next most common one has one. Three thousand. That’s an unbelievable classic. And here’s the other bit of proof. Like you say, well, how do you know that you can trust someone’s judgment about a fact? The fact emerges despite their ideological presuppositions. OK, so it’s well known that the social sciences and the humanities have a left tilt and a lot of that’s temperamental and the tilt has become more pronounced. But as Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, there are no conservatives among social personality psychologists or none to speak of. Very few, yeah. Very few. Vanishingly few. And if the field has a bias, it is definitely and indisputably a left wing bias. OK, so you have to fight that if you’re if you’re a scientist, right? Even if you’re a left wing scientist, you have to fight that because you want to get to the facts. It was these social scientists who generated the data that suggested that the gender differences not only were real, but that were bigger in egalitarian societies. They didn’t do that to grind their ideological acts because their ideological presupposition was no, no, you make the society egalitarian. Men and women get more of the same. It’s like, no, they get more different. Oh, isn’t that something? And so then there’s a corollary there, which is all right. You could still say and they’re kind of pushing in this direction in Scandinavia. Boys and girls are different. Men and women are different. It looks biological, but because people are malleable, you could push the socio-cultural structure harder and harder to minimize the biological differences. OK, well, first of all, maybe and maybe not. Maybe you’d get a rebound and they’d get even like the kids would rebel. That could easily happen. But let’s say, OK, you could. The problem with that is, is that if you cede that much power to the state, like you’re basically giving the state the right to socialize your kids. Right. It’s like you really, really? You really want to do that? I mean, people in Israel couldn’t do that with the kibbutz. It didn’t work. So people aren’t going to give up their children to the state. And thank God for that.