https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=fcqEEx2jGP4
My great great grandfather was a serf. You know, we were people who made good in Russia. You know, often dismissed as kulaks, which is a completely made up thing. Oh yeah, being a kulak, that wasn’t a good thing, man. No. That wasn’t a good thing. Successful peasants, you gotta get rid of them and starve everybody to death. Exactly. And my family, within a couple generations, well actually within a generation of being freed from serfdom was actually doing pretty financially great. You know, like we were a Russian success story and got chased out by the Soviets. And so I have a very, or by the Bolsheviks, was even yet the Soviets. So, you know, I have the family history there, but growing up in the United States, I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of other first generation and immigrant kids. And one thing about, you know, first generation Americans is we, and immigrants, is we feel like we understand the country better than people who take it for granted. And so I grew up around other people who were from China and Vietnam and Korea and from countries where they were also fleeing from totalitarianism. So definitely we had a very natural, you know, belief in freedom of speech as being this uniquely American thing. So I grew up with a lot of patriotism about that kind of stuff, even though, you know, I considered myself left of center. And that was normal back in the 80s. Like if you were left of center, free speech was your cause. Also grew up, you know, started working when I was 11. And so that makes you much more suspicious of what elites want to tell you what you can and can’t say. I’ve never lost that aspect of it. But my second earliest memory was being, was getting a gift that I didn’t like. And my mother is British. So I got this very strong kind of like, be polite, be polite, be polite on one side. And I got the very Russian, be honest, be honest, be honest, politeness is a form of deception for my father. And when I got a gift that I didn’t like, I realized, and this was my second earliest memory that I realized you couldn’t be both polite and honest at the same time. And of course I broke out to tears because I didn’t know how to say I didn’t like this gift. And I realized I ended up being kind of a theme for the rest of my life. I specialized, I went to law undergrad. I was a student journalist and that got me even more radicalized in favor of freedom of speech. Because people always come into your office trying to get someone fired. I went to law school. I took every class Stanford Law School offered on first amendment. When I ran out, I did those six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty. I worked at the ACLU in 1999 as an extern. I could already tell that the political valence of free speech was changing. I call this the slow motion train wreck that essentially it used to be the definitive liberal value and now it’s actually kind of villainized. And you could already see that in 1999 and it was very distressing. So, you know, like I, first amendment free speech has been my life’s passion. And I’m lucky enough to be able to have been at fire first as a legal director, then as president for 22 years now. Okay, so let me torture you with something that I’m being tortured with now in Canada. So there was a Toronto Star journalist the other day. He’s a journalist mind you. And so you think he might care about free speech, but you know, that’s neither here nor there. He said, why should Jordan Peterson think he has a God given right to say things that are harmful, destructive and dishonest, right? So, and that’s a good question. It’s like, if what I say hurts someone’s feelings, then why the hell should I be allowed to say it? And so, Greg, why don’t you respond to that? And then I’ll turn to Ricky and ask you that question that I asked you to begin with. I don’t even know where to begin with that because I love the fact that they actually say God given right, because it’s kind of like, oh, so you’ve run into natural rights theory because actually as Americans, we do believe it’s a God given right. No, they criticize that too. They criticize both of those ideas, that it was God given, that it was a right. And that, yeah, yeah. And meanwhile, even when you get away from natural law theory, I always have to point out, it’s kind of like, oh, you don’t like natural law theory. Do you like human rights theory? Because they don’t seem to realize that human rights theory is essentially just natural rights theory. Well, yeah. People on the left accept. Yeah, you might want to notice that if you had any sense. Yeah, well, I mean, there’s so many different ways to answer this. I’m setting up a sub stack called the eternally radical idea where I’m going to be talking about this. But the most important reason why you should have the rights to say offensive things is nobody wants to silence you when you say things that are popular and inoffensive. But actually, no, more importantly, sometimes the hard things you’re saying are true and important to actually be said. And the idea that there can be someone trusted in power to decide which one is which is just historical nonsense. True and important by whose standards and if it hurts someone’s feelings, why isn’t that indication that, you know, it’s not an appropriate truth for the moment and it’s actually not important? Because any change hurts someone’s feeling, any dissenting opinion can hurt their feeling. Truths that go against the most deeply held beliefs. This is the way I put it. That being offended is what happens when you have your deepest beliefs challenged. So if you graduate from higher ed, having never been offended, you should demand your money back because they haven’t taught you a damn thing. Okay, so you brought up a couple of things, issues there so that are relevant to zeroing in on. One is that any deviation from your cognitive path that you encounter is going to produce hurt feelings. That’s actually what negative emotion is for. And then the second thing you brought up, which absolutely has to be pointed to is that it is absolutely 100% impossible to ever say anything of any meaning whatsoever to any group, let’s say, exceeding a couple of dozen people where you’re not gonna offend at least one person. And so in Canada, for example, I’m in the preposterous position at the moment of being the target of 12 complaints levied against me by the recipient of those complaints, the Ontario College of Psychologists, who are simultaneously in possession of a document signed by 100,000 people supporting me. But their claim is something like, well, you hurt the feelings of 12, no. 12 people said that you hurt the feelings of some other people they didn’t know. That’s actually the claim. I’m dead serious, I’m not satirizing this a bit. I’m laughing because it’s true. Yeah, yeah. Ricky, why are you, why do you care about free speech? And why should people believe you care? I mean, I think it’s a rather less flattering story for me because it was a realization probably like at 19 during the pandemic that I grew up just so tremendously spoiled by being an American in the 21st century who inherited all of these liberties and never really understood what it was like to not have them. And when you’re locked up, I was out in LA living with my mom at the time and we could see surfers on the beach at 4 a.m. going out when it was still dark by themselves with their surfboards on the beach that their taxpayer dollars pay to, we actually still had this like tractor going back and forth raking the beach with our taxpayer dollars, but God forbid the taxpayers go out there with their surfboards alone at nighttime to surf and enjoy the outdoors during the pandemic. And we had thousand dollar fines, tickets being handed out. And I remember watching that and being like, oh my gosh, this is the first time that I’ve actually personally encountered and witnessed someone’s freedom meaningfully being deprived on a systemic level. And that was the catalyst, like watching lockdown go from something that, you know, two weeks to stop the spread to something that just completely distorted into just authoritarian overreach into every crevice of my life. That was a period of time where. I got to ask you about that relationship to this new book. So that’s very interesting. What you brought up there is very interesting. You know, you said you’re, you of course had the benefits of these freedoms that in some sense you took for granted, but your generation actually is the beneficiary of something that Ernest Hemingway commented on. He said every generation needs to have a war to determine what’s important. Now you guys didn’t exactly have a war, but you got locked down. And one of the things I’m wondering about is have you made anything of that in this new book you’re writing? And if you haven’t, have you thought about that using that rhetorically or as something that you would write about? The fact that, you know, you were deprived of your liberties. You saw how easy that could happen. You have a whole generation out there that could be mobilized on this front. Say, look, you could go back to that in a second. Like we saw how easy that happened. Is that how you want to live? And which ideas are pushing you down that pathway? Yeah, I’ve seen a huge surge of like, just not even the right left partisan sort of conservative Democrat, Republican. It’s like this libertarian just allergy that I think a lot of us developed to overreach. I mean, I do think that there is also a large faction of young people who felt that they were being, who might have been the types of people who were susceptible to believing that they needed to be protected from speech. And then the government is protecting them from a disease. And they did kind of, I think some young people were like the largest champions of lockdowns, unfortunately. But there is a large faction of people that I think had that same fundamental experience that I did. And the lockdown did have one benefit for me, which was that I stopped going to school and being told what to read. And I remember when my mom gave me her blessing to take some time off and to pull away from NYU. And she said, I don’t care what you do. I will help float you through one semester if you can figure out something cool to do. And I read like I’d never read before, because it was the first time that someone was not telling me what to think and what to read and how to analyze it and what essay was gonna get me an A on it. And I did two years of a philosophy degree at NYU. I did a full liberal arts education crunched into two years. I had never read John Stuart Mills on Liberty. And I read that and it was just one of those things where it feels so obvious looking back what he’s saying and how these values underpin everything about a free society. But it was such a new novel shocking concept to me. And that was when I realized just how important free speech was, just like how free speech was even at the core of how authoritarianism could branch out into locking us down, because we couldn’t even have a conversation about whether that was actually the right policy or the right thing to do. And we were shutting each other down. And I think that fundamental experience to me made me realize that fundamental classical liberalism is what underpins all those other liberties that I recognized for the first time in my life. And so now I couldn’t feel more personally animated to protect what I realized I’m so fortunate to have inherited. And I’m really afraid that my generation is just abdicating with no second thought. Well, I’d like to apologize on the behalf of educators everywhere. Like I am absolutely embarrassed to be part of the professoriate. I felt that way after interviewing Yeonmi Park, who went to Columbia, and then post-hoc described it as worse than North Korea, which is really saying something, given that she basically grew up on crickets. She roasted with like a lighter, you know. And then to hear what strikes at my heart when I hear that story as well, that experience that you had with John Stuart Mill, that’s actually called education. That should have been happening to you, like with book after book, right? Or the scales falling from your eyes. That’s what happened to me when I went off and essentially pursued humanities. My first degree was in political science, which is, I suppose, a form of humanities. They call it a social science. But I read the great works of philosophy, you know, and we delved into those issues, and it was so freeing and so remarkable. The fact that you had to not be in the philosophy program in order to read, you know, one great work, because that’s the thing about a great work, you know. You actually only have to read one great work and actually delve into it, actually grapple with it, to have that entire golden thread of centuries-long conversation start to open up to you. And like, that’s what turns you into an adult who isn’t a quivering and ignorant and resentful mess. And so it’s so embarrassing to hear you say that, you know, you had to escape from the clutches of the higher ed industry in order to educate yourself even vaguely. And thank God your mother had enough sense to leave you be and that you had not, why did you decide to go and read, you know, with your spare semester? I guess it was COVID lockdown. It was COVID lockdown and I had acquired this like huge stack of books that I had always wanted to read and yet I was very like rule following, academic oriented, wanted to get my best grades. And so I had to put my love of learning aside for the achievement loop, which is really sad looking back. And I’ll tell you, Dr. Peterson, one thing that you’ll hate even more than that story I just told you about academia is the fact that I ran into one of my philosophy professors a couple months after I was back in the city. And I told him that I’d read, we read utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism in our class. And I told him, oh my gosh, like, why didn’t we read On Liberty? Like, I just found that so impactful. And he said, what? And I said, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. And he goes, oh, I don’t know it. Oh, that’s great, man. That’s great. Oh, that hurts. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, that’s wonderful. Now I’m feeling a lot better about dropping out. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]