https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1h6UCywKnLs
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. So this is a student writing, Lafayette College, I am utterly disappointed that you’re allowing this to take place on our campus. I thought we went through this last semester with Roaming Millennial. Inviting hateful speakers who make wildly unsubstantiated claims is not going to fly with the student body. I get it. Middle 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 Me Too 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 U.S., 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 is 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 moron. But know that you being pissed is also 100% 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 not entirely predictable. That’s one of the things you notice when you’re talking to people. 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. I’ve had thousands of conversations with people because I’ve spent 20 years as a clinical psychologist. 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 idiosyncratic familial dynamics, like just fascinating personal stuff. It’s the stuff of great novels. This is ordinary people. I don’t really think there is an ordinary person exactly. The facade of ordinariness, but behind that people are very rarely ordinary. So the conversations are almost instantaneously fascinating. 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 all of the interesting elements of it were very, very personal. And so to replace this, and I learned this mostly from Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his detailed analysis of what I would call ideological possession, he talked about people he met in the Gulag camps who were under the sway 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, right? Carl Jung said people don’t have ideas, ideas have people. And 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 too, and this is one that I think has bedeviled me ever since I made my initial videos, which is the radical, 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 oppose 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 happen 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 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 then to immediately make the presupposition that you must be the most heinous example of that entire array of potential objections. It’s like, yeah, well, whatever. You know, it’s just not a viable stance. And so, but it’s convenient, and 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 deeply 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 is. 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 like 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. 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 die 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 100 million. And we risk putting the entire planet, we risk putting the planet into flames. Okay, so that’s the consequence. Alright. 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 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 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, ethnic superiority domain, it’s like, no, you’ve got to be dangerous. Alright, 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 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. Two technical reasons. It’s harder for people on the left to draw boundaries because people on the left aren’t boundary drawing types. They’re boundary dissolving types, temperamentally speaking, so that’s a problem. The second problem 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, 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 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.