https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aDRgMUoEvcg
I’d like to welcome you all to this important event. I would also like to apologize to those among your friends, relatives, and colleagues who could not be here today as the auditorium sold out in a matter of hours. My name is Joffrey Clarfield. It is my privilege to be the executive director of the Speaker’s Action Group. And I would like to thank founding president Shirley Ann Haber and our new president Irving Weisdorf and all the volunteers who have worked so hard to make this event happen. I would also like to thank our partner organization, the Mizzou Freedom Foundation, and the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, who are the joint sponsors of this event. The Speaker’s Action Group in particular, and its supporting groups, is dedicated to the fight against anti-Semitism and racism. But without freedom of speech, there could be no fight against anti-Semitism or racism. For we need freedom of speech to defend our rights. And as we will hear today, freedom of speech is most threatened where, ironically, it should be most free in the media, in the colleges, in the universities of this country, as well as in other democracies. I would like to introduce the emcee for this afternoon, Faith Goldy, from the Rebel Media, an organization that is at the forefront of the fight for free speech in this country. I’d like her to introduce our two distinguished speakers, Professor Jordan Peterson and Dr. Norman Deutch. Faith, thank you so much for being here today. He’s been a dishwasher, a gas jockey, a bartender, a short order cook, a beekeeper, a plywood mill laborer, and a railway line worker. But today, Professor Jordan Peterson is best known for his work in the academic world. He has published more than 100 scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality and revolutionizing the psychology of religion with his now classic book, Maps of Meaning, The Architect’s Share of Belief. As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levenson Teaching Prize. Now at the University of Toronto, he is regarded by students as one of their truly life-changing teachers. And I think that I speak for a great deal of people in this room and frankly across the country when I say, you needn’t be one of Professor Peterson’s students to have been enlightened and inspired by that eight-pound universe between his ears, as well as his bravery. Most recently, Dr. Peterson became the center of an ongoing national controversy for refusing to abide by the University of Toronto’s attempt to put very specific words into his mouth when they ordered professors comply with the gender pronouns policy. Dr. Peterson’s vivid dissent over language politics and the political agenda behind it has seen him threatened and shouted down by snowflake students and the academic hierarchy alike. As a result of his public views on how political correctness violates freedom of speech and academic freedom in the West, Professor Peterson has become a cultural icon for liberty lovers and a long-awaited obstruction to the wayfarers on the long march of the institutions. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. So about three months ago, I sat in my office at night. I wasn’t really sleeping very well because my mind was running. And it was running because I had just read some policy documents on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website in relationship to Bill C-16. And at the same time, I had heard that the University of Toronto HR and Equity Vice President had decided to make anti-unconscious bias training mandatory for her staff, which I find appalling and still find appalling. And I would recommend that if any of you are asked or required to have your unconscious biases adjusted, that you might note to yourself that by agreeing to do so, you have agreed that you’re guilty. And I wouldn’t recommend that. Anyways, I was mostly trying to straighten out my thoughts on these issues, you know, and that’s usually what I do when I speak, you know, because I have a good reputation as a speaker. And I think there’s two reasons for that. One is I don’t ever speak to a group. I always speak to individuals. I’m not speaking to the group. I’m speaking to individual people. And I’m not telling you what’s right because I don’t know what’s right. What I’m trying to do is to formulate my thoughts more clearly. And it’s helpful to do that in speech, even in front of an audience, because it’s a dialogue with an audience, you know. the individuals, then you can tell if they’re following you or whether, mostly whether they’re following you, if they can understand the line of the argumentation. Some of them will be shaking their heads and some of them will be nodding and, you know, some of them will be looking puzzled, in which case you have to kind of reformulate. And that’s how to think, you know. And when you’re speaking to people, it’s okay to tell them what you know, but better to show them how you think. And that means you’re going to stumble around like an idiot some of the time because you’re trying to grapple with things. And what I try to do for my students is to model the process of grappling with things because that’s what you do when you think. And you know, Norman pointed out that you can be right or you can try to get smarter. And to be right, then you convince people that you’re right. But to try to get smarter, you find out why you’re wrong. And so I decided a long time ago that one of the ways to deal with my authoritarian tendencies, let’s say, was to make friends with what I don’t know instead of what I do know. And that’s a whole different way of looking at the world, you know. And it’s got its pain because, you know, you’re always trying to figure out more or less why you’re a biased moron. And that’s a very long list of, that’s a very, you have a very long list of reasons for that. And then you have to find out why you’re wrong. And as a short-term mechanism for attaining psychological stability, I wouldn’t recommend it. But as a long-term process where you’re trying to make things work better in the medium to long-term, then it’s the only way. But you know, it’s easy to sacrifice the future for the present, although it’s kind of the reverse of the way you should do things. So anyways, I made these videos, pretty amateur videos, and you know, the lighting wasn’t very good. There was a bunch of things wrong with them. And but, one of the things I’ve been wondering about for the last three months is just what happened? Like, what’s going on here? This is crazy. And you know, I’ve been accused of a lot of things, some of which are no doubt true, but you know, I’ve been accused of being a racist and being a transphobe and what else? Profiteering and I guess the other one was scaremongering. Yeah, that’s the other one, scaremongering. And so, of course, I’ve been wondering if those things are true, because it’s not like, you know, my heart is as pure as the driven snow, hardly, and everyone has biases and all of that. And I also, while this unfolded, had a group of friends who were definitely critics, who were watching everything I was doing and, you know, letting me know pretty forthrightly when I was being arrogant and when I was, you know, looked kind of disheveled and when my arguments were just clear as they could be and, you know, and so on. These were smart people and their comments were very incisive and then, of course, I had all the blowback and I was paying attention to it, you know, because, well, you should pay attention to such things. And I do pay attention to things, you know, that’s the thing. I actually pay attention to things. And if I’m embroiled in a controversy, even if it’s a, like, problem in my home, I try to get to the damn bottom of it. And you know, the bottom of things is not a pretty place to look. And so, you know, when you’re arguing with someone at home, even someone you love, you’ll notice that your argument can get out of hand pretty quick. So if you’re arguing with your wife or your husband, you know, it depends on how volatile you are, of course. But you know, you start arguing about some little thing and then you kind of understand pretty quick that it’s actually not about that little thing at all. That little thing is associated with, you know, a little bigger thing underneath that and maybe that’s associated with even a bigger thing under that and, you know, soon you’re taking each other apart for assuming you’ve been married for 20 years for all the stupid things you’ve done to each other over the last 20 years and doesn’t have to end there. And that’s not pleasant. It’s really hard to bind a conversation so it doesn’t go everywhere, you know. So one thing you can do if you’re talking to someone about something you disagree with, someone you love, you can tell them a bunch of good things about what they’ve been doing, which you actually believe and then just say, well, but there’s this little problem here and I’d just like it adjusted in a minor way and maybe that’ll, you know, sort things out a bit between us and then maybe you don’t fall into that stupid pit, which is really easy to fall into and, you know, which certainly can lead to divorce, among other things. And so a huge part of the issue always is just exactly what is this about? Well, I’ve been asking myself that question for a long, long time because I’ve been interested in authoritarian conflict and atrocity and totalitarianism for way longer than anyone with any sanity should ever be interested in it. And you know, and then this all came up and I thought, okay, okay, okay. It’s like, all right, well, you know, am I a bigot and a transphobe? Well, I probably have my biases because people tend to have in-group biases, you know, and that’s associated, by the way, with compassion, just so you know it, because one of the things compassion does is make you much strongly, much more strongly bound to your in-group. You know, it’s like a mother is compassionate because she loves her baby and she loves the baby more than other things that aren’t the baby, obviously. And so actually, compassion is one of the main sources of in-group bias, which is something for the compassion warriors to think about for like three-fifths of a second. There’s nothing less compassionate to you than a mother grizzly bear protecting her cubs. And so you should think about that when you think about empathy for a minute, because empathy is by no means an untrammeled moral virtue. In fact, it’s responsible and can be responsible for absolutely atrocious actions. It depends on who you’re empathizing with, you know, and if you’re empathizing with someone that you regard as an infantilized victim, then you automatically snap into a frame of mind where everyone who might be oppressing that infantilized victim is a predatory parasite and you’re not very bloody empathetic to them, I can tell you. So that’s a big problem. Anyways, with regards to this scaremongering issue. So yeah, yeah, biased, yeah, probably, and blind, definitely. Like more than you might expect? No, I don’t think so. And one of the things that actually protected me through all this was that, you know, I’ve actually tried to come to terms with the evil that lurks in human hearts, particularly my own, and I have 500 hours of lectures on that online. If anybody, you know, has the bizarre desire to pound their way through them, they can more or less think, figure out what I think, because I’ve said 500 of hours of it publicly, and so I didn’t feel too bad about my level of bigotry or hatred. You know, I think you could probably infer that by watching the video, so it’s kind of protected on that front. And then there was the scaremongering issue, and that’s a good one, that’s a tough one, man, because, you know, if you look at Bill C-16, it just kind of looks like, well, we’re extending protection to another oppressed group, which isn’t actually true, because gender identity, by the way, you know, gender expression, that’s not a group. I’d just like to point that out, because terminological accuracy actually matters. So we’ve extended legal protection to fashion, essentially, and you can say, well, maybe I’m being a bit intransigent about that, but I read the damn policies, and I don’t think I am. And that’s not a group. So that’s an indication of the muddleheadedness behind the legislation, and then the federal government, the Department of Justice, did say on their own website that they were going to interpret that law in light of the policies of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and so, fine, man, go to the Ontario Human Rights Commission if they haven’t taken the policies off yet, and read what they’re up to, and if you agree with that, well, good, agree with it, but I would suspect that if you agree with it, you didn’t understand it, or you’re up to something, and that comes to the next part, what are we really talking about here? Well, so we could be talking about my biases and my proclivity to scaremonger, and, you know, fair enough, but here’s some reasons we’re not, and one is that I have all those lectures online, and, you know, believe me, if there would have been a phrase in any of them that indicated that there was something even vaguely morally corrupt about me, it would have been paraded around as evidence, you can be sure of that, so that’s kind of a relief. You know, I did a lot of soul searching in the last couple of months, and it’s not like I’m without my problems, but anyways. So what is this about? Well, we’ll say, hopefully it’s not about me, because that would be stupid, and so what’s going on, why are all these people watching these videos, these things I made just to figure out what it was that I was thinking, you know, because I couldn’t sleep one night, and because I’m not very damn happy about that unconscious bias stuff, which I regard is absolutely reprehensible, that you could be held guilty for your implicit perceptions, think about that. God, they use that test as a diagnostic test, you know, it doesn’t meet the criteria for reliability and validity that you’d use for a diagnostic test, it doesn’t produce the same results one time after another, and you can use it to target anybody, and so go along with it if you want, and just see what happens. Anyways, so I’ve been thinking about this, like, what’s going on, why the outcry, you know, you think, well, Professor Peterson got his 15 minutes of fame, it’s like, well, I had my 15 minutes of, you know, trivial fame several times in my life, and there’s some good things about it, but I am, despite what you might think, a rather private person, and so it’s not like I’m particularly enjoying it, but I thought something, you know, when I made those videos, I thought, this is something I learned from reading mythology, if you have to fight a dragon, you should go to its lair before it comes to your village, and so people think of what I did as courageous, and I don’t think that’s right, I just think that I can see danger coming, and you get to pick, you get to pick your anxiety, I could either be anxious about speaking, or I could be anxious about not speaking, and so I chose to be anxious about speaking, and that’s not exactly courage, it’s more like common sense, but that assumes that you’re looking into the future, so you might say, well, what gives me any special power to look into the future, and hey, that’s a good question, and my god only knows what’s going to happen in the next few years, you know, I did read today, this is cool, 250,000 people will be lifted out of absolute poverty today, and 300,000 more will be connected to electricity, and we’re knocking poverty rates around the world down faster by a huge margin than we ever have in human history. There was an article in New York Times today called Why 2016 was the best year ever, it’s really worth reading, I concluded the same thing, I worked for a UN committee a couple of years ago, and I was looking at, you know, what was going to happen down the road, and everything I kept reading was, well, wow, we’re getting rid of polio, we’re getting rid of elephantiasis, which you really don’t want to have, we’re getting rid of guinea worm, we’re getting rid of polio, we’re knocking malaria back into the swamps from where it comes, we’re lifting people out of poverty, it’s like, man, we’re doing a lot of good things, you’d sure never guess that by the way we treat ourselves, so anyways, so what’s going on? Okay, so I thought, well, I better think about this, I’ve been thinking about it a long time, so, you know, the right wing is really hard on the Frankfurt School, you know, on the Frankfurt School, where these kind of neo-Marxist guys who combined Marxism with Freudianism in the 1940s, and they were avowed neo-Marxists, so it’s not like I’m making an accusation, and they were kind of anti-system type people, and all of that, but I think to lay what’s happening at the universities and in the broader culture itself at the feet of the Frankfurt School is insufficient, I really think that it’s primarily a consequence of the French intellectuals who, and this is obviously an oversimplification, who emerged out of Marxism in the early 1970s and produced postmodernism, now, the thing about the postmodernist types is they’re nested inside Marxism, they say that straight out, I’m not inventing this, you read Derrida, who’s like the joker at the head of the postmodernist movement, and I mean joker because he’s an intellectual clown, and that doesn’t mean he’s stupid, because he is not stupid, not at all, these people are not stupid, they know exactly what they’re doing, they know precisely what they’re doing, they’re a hell of a lot more educated about what they’re doing than you are, unless you happen to be one of them, and they mean exactly what they say, just like people always do when they tell you what they’re going to do, or they write it down, and they say straight out on their websites, say the women’s studies websites, we think the patriarchy is an oppressive structure that should be broken down to its core, and they mean core conceptions, it’s not just social, it’s linguistic, philosophical, and attitudinal, it should be broken down, wiped out, and restructured from the bottom up, and they mean that, so it’s not accidental any of this, and I know it sounds like a bloody paranoid conspiracy theory, but I’ve always been of the idea, especially from reading Jung, that people don’t have ideas, ideas have people, and these are powerful ideas, there’s a good book called Explaining Postmodernism that I might recommend by a guy named Stephen R. C. Hicks, and his first chapter, which isn’t very long, is a good introduction to political correctness, but so, well so, why do I think this is about that? Well, here’s my reasons, I mean, it doesn’t seem to be about me, I think all I did actually was actually, I made the general specific, which is kind of what you have to do if you really want to make a point, a point, right, that’s one place if you want to make a point, and my point was, I’m not saying made up words generated by postmodern neo-Marxists, because I despise everything they stand for, and so I’m not using those damn words, and that’s that. And it’s not like I have something against transgender people, I’m sure some of them are lovely people, and some of them aren’t, you know, and so they can do whatever they want as far as I’m concerned, as long as they don’t, they can do whatever they want as far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m not forced to go along with the most radical representatives of them who don’t even speak for them. Anyways, I’ve got like 20 letters from transsexual people supporting what I’ve done, and like none opposing it. You know, one of the things that’s kind of cool is I’ve only got three hate letters, I thought three, Jesus, you guys, you guys are trying very hard, and I’ve got like a thousand letters of support, and if you go on YouTube, where I’m radically overrepresented, and you look at the comments and the likes and the dislikes, it’s about the same ratio, it’s like likes to dislikes is like about 100 to 1, and almost all the comments are positive, which could easily be a selection bias, and probably is, but it still means that there’s quite a few people who think that what I’m doing is sort of okay as far as they’re concerned, and so that’s important. So anyways, we need to talk a little bit about postmodernism, okay, so let’s go back to France in the end of the 1960s, and this is of course an oversimplification, and I’m sure I’m wrong about some of it, because it’s not exactly my field of specialty, this sort of sociology, I’m more of the scientist type, and if I read philosophy I tend not to read second rate philosophy, and so I’ve tried to avoid the postmodernists to some degree, because their incoherency is one of the least of their sins, but they don’t care about that, no, no, you’ve got to understand, man, that it’s modernists and enlightenment people and even traditionalists who care about coherency, the postmodernists don’t believe in coherency, they don’t believe in, and I’m not making this up, this is part of their philosophy, they don’t believe in logic, you know, Derrida says straight out that western society is fallow logocentric, by which he means male-centred and privileging the idea of logic, well he doesn’t buy any of that, he doesn’t think that there’s a truth that’s out there, he doesn’t believe that individuals can reach any sort of truth by thinking, he certainly doesn’t believe that we can move towards truth in dialogue, because that’s dialogic, right, there’s none of that, you wonder, well why do the postmodern types keep other thinkers off the campus? Well it’s not because they’re afraid, well although some of them are, but they use their fragility as a mask for their, you know, their underlying philosophical and political interests, they do that fragmentarily, it’s not like every social justice warrior is a, you know, sword carrying postmodernist, but the ideas are fragmented and distributed among them like they’re distributed among a mob, and if you put the whole mob together, you get the whole postmodernist thing happening at the same time, and that’s how ideas have people instead of the other way around. Anyways, forget about logic, that’s out the window, that’s just a construct of western society, and the whole point of the construct was to oppress other people and to take their wealth, and to privilege the people who live within that so-called logic system so that they can justify to themselves and other people their predator rapaciousness, straight and simple, and that’s partly because postmodernism was influenced by Marxism, and of course that’s what the Marxists think about any situation where there’s a, let’s call it a power status differential, the people at the top are only there because they’ve stole everything from the people at the bottom, so the Marxists in France realized by the end of the 1960s, thereabouts, when even Jean Paul Sartre finally figured out that to be a communist probably wasn’t acceptable given that the bloody Soviets had killed like 30 million people between 1919 and 1959, and the Maoists had done the same thing on a greater scale in China, and then we could talk about North Korea and we could talk about, you know, but whatever, you know, we don’t, students don’t learn any of that in school anymore, and even if they did, they wouldn’t want to listen to it. When I tell my students in my second year psychology class about the Gulag Archipelago, hardly any of them know. Well, why is that? Well, it’s because they haven’t been taught it. Why is that? Well, see if you can figure it out. All right, so anyways, back to the postmodern type, so, you know, it got to the point where there’s just no way you could be a Marxist, especially after Solzhenitsyn, because Solzhenitsyn wrote this great book, which is actually out of print for crying out loud, which I’ve actually been able to popularize like mad over the last three months, which is, you know, really mind-boggling, and what Solzhenitsyn did in his genius manner, because he’s up there with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, like man, that guy, he’s a towering intellect and a person of spectacular moral force, you know, like he put himself on the line for that book. He memorized it when he was in the prison camps. It’s about, it’s three volumes that thick, you know. It’s like 2,000 pages of someone screaming, the smartest person you’ve ever met, the wisest person you’ve ever met, screaming in outrage for 2,000 pages. It’s no bloody wonder it’s out there. Anyways, what Solzhenitsyn did was take on this claim you often hear the radical leftists make about communism, about Marxism. They say, well that wasn’t real Marxism. It’s like, okay, well how many countries do you need to disprove your thesis? How many millions of people have to die before you might admit that you’re wrong? Well, obviously more than 100 million, because that’s the approximate total, that’s probably an underestimate, but we’ll be conservative, because adding another 10 million doesn’t really make that much difference. So Solzhenitsyn took that argument apart, partly in his book Lenin in Zurich and then partly in the Gulag Archipelago, but groundwork had already been laid for all that by Nietzsche, who knew exactly what was coming in the 20th century, and by Dostoevsky, who wrote a book called The Possessed back in like 1880, where he outlined in painful detail the precise mindset that would produce the Russian Revolution like 30 years later. Amazing. And Tolstoy as well, he knew what was coming, made him suicidal. He wrote in his confession that when, that the conflict between the ideas of Russia, the traditional ideas and the enlightenment ideas sweeping in from the west, they blew his worldview apart, which was traditional religious, blew his worldview apart so badly that he was suicidal at the height of his fame, Tolstoy knew what was going to come too. And so it’s not like Solzhenitsyn was the only person who could see this, Orwell knew it, Malcolm Muggeridge knew it in the 1930s when he was noting that the Soviets, given their idea of class guilt, which sounds a lot like white privilege to me, or any other form of racism, they used that doctrine to just round up all the kulaks. They were the productive farmers and shipped them off to Siberia, and then six million Ukrainians starved to death, but you know, they had too many Ukrainians anyway, so it didn’t really matter. So anyways, back to the postmodern types. Well, you know, this all came, was revealed in such painful detail that even the kind of closed-minded ideologue that Norman referred to just quite couldn’t, quite muster up the moral courage to keep beating the same damn drum. So what they did instead being highly intelligent individuals was play a game of sleight of hand and transformed these Marxist presuppositions into postmodernism in the 1970s. And the idea basically was, well, the working class isn’t going to rise up and crush the bourgeoisie because first of all, they’re getting rich and that wasn’t supposed to happen. And second, well, it sort of seemed to be a catastrophe when that occurred, let’s say in Russia. And so maybe we won’t do that anymore because the working class actually isn’t buying into this either, which is also a problem. You know, having internalized their own oppression, they wouldn’t buy into this to the global myth of utopia. So maybe it’s because they had some sense, it’s certainly possible. But anyways, the sleight of hand was, oh, well, fine, we’ll just play a different oppressor versus oppressed game and we’ll introduce identity politics. It’s like, okay, okay, you’re not being oppressed because you’re a member of the working class, you’re being oppressed because you’re a woman, or you’re being oppressed because you have an ethnicity that’s outside the main paradigm, whatever that might be, or it’s because of your sexual preference or your sexual identity, whatever, whatever places you in some manner outside the normative culture. And you know, the thing is, the postmodernists, you know, you might think, well, your culture is good for something, it gives you a hierarchy of rewards, competent people, it gives you a direction so you can climb up, you know, because otherwise everything’s level to nothing. And then why do anything? They don’t care about any of that. They don’t believe that there’s any such thing as competence. They don’t believe that there’s any such thing as up. This is all postmodernism wipes all of that out. And so when the postmodernists analyze the text, all they care about is how it privileges the position of the author and who it impresses. And that’s the only thing they regard as real. And they don’t believe in grand unifying narratives. They don’t believe that there’s a Canadian identity. They don’t believe that there’s an American identity. They don’t believe that there’s a Western identity. They don’t believe that value structures exist. Or if they are, they’re irreplaceable with some other value structure. They certainly don’t believe that they have any biological grounding, that there’s any such thing as a human being. It’s all socially constructed, which is really convenient if what you want to do is be the entirely social constructed utopia that you can run. And then when the Marxists say, well that wasn’t real Marxism, what it really means, and I’ve thought about this for a long time, it’s the most arrogant possible statement anyone could ever make. It means if I would have been in Stalin’s position, I would have ushered in the damn utopia instead of the genocidal massacres because I understand the doctrine of Marxism and everything about me is good. It’s like, well think again sunshine. You don’t understand it. You don’t understand it and you’re not that good. And if the power was in your hands, assuming you had the confidence, which you don’t, you wouldn’t have done any better. And even if you had, there would have been someone else waiting right behind you to shoot you the first time you actually tried to do anything good. And that’s what happened to all the old guard who ran the damn revolution. Someone rounded them all up and shot them along with their families and millions of other people. So even if you do happen to be that avatar of moral purity that you claim implicitly, the probability that you’d get to act out your goodness in relationship to those possessed by your ideology is zero. So it’s just… So you know, you think, well why are these postmodernists doing what they’re doing? Why do they oppose the patriarchy? Here’s a question. Why don’t the feminists complain about Saudi Arabia? It’s like… You know, Gad Saad, who’s this guy at Concordia who is in a business school, so he can actually say what he thinks now and then, he tweeted yesterday, well he tweeted to the Women’s March, you know, because there’s a little Twitter thing you could do that, I suppose, for the organizers. And he said, why don’t you go to the Middle East and have a nice march against Saudi Arabia and see how that works out for you? So you think, well why not? Why not? Why are the radical leftists who are so much for rights everywhere that’s what they say? Why aren’t they complaining about Saudi Arabia, for example, which breeds a particularly pathological form of ideologically rigid Islam that basically enslaves their women, to put it properly. It’s like, why not complain about that? Well, how about this? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And so when push comes to shove, you see how much concern there is among the radical feminists for the rights of women. It’s like if pushing those rights forward doesn’t also at the same time undermine the Western patriarchy, then we’ll take the undermining and leave the damn rights behind. And so there’s an insight for you about exactly what’s going on at the bottom of all this. So, okay, so then there’s another weird thing, and I’ve already sort of hit on it tangentially. It’s like, well the postmodernists don’t believe in grand unifying narratives. They don’t believe in narratives at all. They don’t care about value because they never noticed that you have to value something in order to have some hope in life, right? Because when you value something you’re pursuing it, and in the pursuit that’s where the meaning in life is, you know? Because the rest of it’s suffering. If you’re trying to struggle upwards towards the light, it’s like, well, that’s something to motivate you and to protect you against the suffering. But the postmodernists don’t care about any of that, and I would say it’s because they don’t care about suffering. So, all right, so here, but here’s the final question. It’s like, well, if the postmodernists don’t care about grand unifying narratives and they don’t believe in identity, why in the world are they willing to believe in gender identity and sexual identity and racial identity and ethnic identity? And the answer to that is, well they can’t, but they don’t care because coherence isn’t on their agenda. And besides that, when push comes to shove, their postmodernism is nested inside a deeper Marxism, and so when the postmodern narrative doesn’t suffice, say, to push forward the idea that Western civilization should be overturned, they just revert back to the overarching Marxism and say, well, those people are oppressed and that’s a bad thing. It’s like you might say, well, you’re a postmodernist. It’s like, you don’t believe in any of that. And they say, well, yeah, I’m only a postmodernist this deep, but underneath that there’s a Marxism and I can always rely on that to fill in the gaps, and that’s exactly what’s happening. So, that’s what’s happening as far as I can tell. And, you know, so why do I believe this? Well, there’s a little war going on in our culture. Maybe it’s not so little. I put my finger on it and I wouldn’t recommend that, by the way. You know, because, okay, you explain it, man. You explain why like three million people have watched the U of T free speech rally and I think seven million people downloaded the Joe Rogan podcast and it’s like crazy. It’s crazy. There was 180 newspaper articles about this. It was news for four months. Why? Who cares what I think? God, I don’t even care that much about what I think. What about Trump? What’s going on there? What’s going on there exactly? You know, it was interesting listening to Trump’s inauguration speech because I detected elements of national socialist thought in it. You know, and I’m not being dismissive. I’m seriously not being dismissive. But when you radically activate on the side of the left, you call for compensatory forces and they’re not in your control. And like Trump opened his speech, you just read it, he sounds like a 1950 socialist. You know, he’s going to use the power of the state to bring the industry home, to produce a lot of infrastructure. It’s a state business unity with the state in charge. And then at the end of his speech, which is where he stops being at least the international kind of socialist, he says, well, borders are really important and so is national identity. And you know, he does embed that within belief in God, which is probably a good thing, assuming that he’s serious about that. But you know, the fact that Trump was elected and that there was such a fight between him and the Clintonites and that the Clintonites were playing identity politics instead of speaking for the working class, who then Trump co-opted like he should have, there, there’s a war going on there. And then, well, what about Brexit? What’s going on there? And what about France with Marine Le Pen? And what about Holland with Wilders? You know, watch it. We’re in a chaotic time. And you know, I’ve got letters from people all over the world who tell me how they can’t say what they think. It’s like, oh, well, that’s not very good. And they’re kind of happy with me because maybe they think that I emboldened them in some way and so good for that, hypothetically. And most of the people who wrote me, the overwhelming majority were reasonable, so I’m pretty happy about that too. And maybe I’m wrong about my damn diagnosis because like, what do I know? But I do have this proclivity to get to the bottom of things. And what’s at the bottom of this is an ideological war or philosophical war. It’s even deeper than that. It might even be deeper than a philosophical war, which is something that’s more like a metaphysical or a theological war. You know, it depends on how far down you look and the postmodernists know exactly what they’re doing. This isn’t accidental. Of course you shut down speakers you don’t agree with because you can’t have a dialogue with them anyways because human beings can’t have dialogue. There’s no such thing as a human individual. There’s no such thing as truth. Here’s the postmodern world. It’s the Hobbesian nightmare. It’s everyone against everyone else, except it’s not individuals, it’s groups. And you’re stuck in your damn group. And it’s the only thing about you anyways that’s relevant, which is why we might base our hiring on it, for example. And you’re oppressed and even if you don’t know it, it’s only because you’ve internalized it and it’s the only thing that’s real about you anyways. And I can’t talk to you because I’m in my own little silo of privileged belief. And besides, we can’t use logic because that doesn’t exist. And so you’re in a group and I’m in a group and all we can do is have a war. Or we can talk but we don’t get to talk because you can’t talk if you’re a postmodernist because speech is just chatter. So it’s just chatter that supports the people in power. That’s how they think. And so the whole world is this little armed war of identity group against identity group against identity group. And you shut down people who don’t agree with you because why should you let them talk? You don’t believe in any of the reasons why you would let someone talk. So this isn’t accidental. It’s not because they’re afraid, although it’s also because of that. They hijack fear, they hijack compassion, they make anyone who puts forward an alternative view into a terrorist of ideas and someone who’s heartless at the core, which is really incredibly intelligent. It’s such a good strategy. It’s so devious and brilliant and it’s so effective. Because who the hell wants to be labeled a bigot? You probably are a damn bigot just like everyone else. So you know when it’s easy to make people feel guilty about that, maybe they should. So anyways, what’s going on? Well, that’s what’s going on. So what do you do about it? Well, I don’t know what you do about it but I have a theory and that’s one I’ve been working on for like 40 years. So one of the problems with postmodernism, and I’m going to take five minutes and then we’re done. One of the problems with postmodernism is that, and this is a big problem, like this is a fatal problem apart from the fact that it’s incoherent and there’s no value structure in it and it’s fundamentally divisive and destructive. There’s a logical problem with the two that’s even worse. So you might be noticing that the LGBT set of acronyms keeps growing. It’s kind of a form of its own parody in some sense. It’s like, well I’m oppressed. It’s like, yeah, you are. And well, I’m oppressed too. Yeah, you’re also oppressed and maybe I’m even impressing you being part of this other marginalized group but at least we share our oppression. Well, I’m also oppressed. Well, so am I. I’m oppressed too. It’s like, okay, so here’s a problem. There’s a big problem here. The problem is, it’s true. You’re oppressed, you’re oppressed, you’re oppressed, you’re oppressed. God only knows why. Maybe you’re too short or you’re not as beautiful as you could be or, you know, your parent, your grandparent was a serf likely because almost everybody’s great grandparent was. It’s like, you know, and you’re not as smart as you could be and you have a sick relative and you have your own physical problems and it’s like frankly you’re a mess and you’re oppressed in every possible way including your ancestry and your biology and the entire sum of human history has conspired to produce, victimized you with all your individual pathological problems. It’s like, yes, true. Okay, but the problem is, is that it is true and so if you take the oppressed you have to fractionate them and fractionate them and it’s like, you’re a woman. Yeah, okay, well I’m a black woman. Well, I’m a black woman who has two children. Well, I’m a black woman who has two children and one of them isn’t very healthy and then, well I’m a Hispanic woman and I have a genius son who doesn’t have any money so that he can’t go to university and, you know, I had a hell of a time getting across the border. It was really hard on me to get my citizenship. My husband is an alcoholic brute. It’s like, well yeah, that sucks too and so, well, so let’s fix all your oppression and we’ll take every single thing into account and then we’ll fix yours too. We’ll take every single thing into account. It’s like, no you won’t because you can’t. You can’t. It is technically impossible. First of all, you can’t even list all the ways that you’re oppressed. Second, how are you going to weight them? Third, who’s going to decide? And that’s the bloody thing. Who’s going to decide? That’s the thing. Well, what’s the answer in the West? It’s like in free markets, oh yeah, Christ will never be able to solve this problem. No one can solve it. What are we going to do about that? We’re going to outsource it to the marketplace. You’re going to take your sorry pathetic being and you’re going to try to offer me something that maybe I want and I’m going to take my sorry pathetic being and I’m going to say, well all things considered, as well as I can understand them, maybe I could give you this much money, which is actually a promise, for that thing. And you’ve packed all of your damn oppression into the price. And I’ve packed all my oppression into the willingness to pay it. And that solution sucks. It’s a bad solution. But compared to every other solution, man, it’s why 10% of us have freedom. And so there’s a tremendous illogic at the bottom of this. It’s like you have to fractionate the oppressed all the way down to the level of the individual. Oh, that’s what the West figured out. You know, there’s a couple of figures who have the mythological roots of our culture. And you know, people get upset with me because I bring in religious themes, but I understand some things about mythology and religion. It’s not an accident that the axiomatic Western individual is someone who was unfairly nailed to a cross and tortured. It’s like, yes, right, exactly. So what do you do about that? Well, I thought about that for a long time too. It’s like, well you don’t get together in a damn bob. Because all that does is allow you to be as horrible as you could possibly imagine and suffer from none of the consequences. That’s a bad idea. So how about we don’t do that? Well, there’s a deep idea in the West too. It’s like pick up your damn suffering and bear it and try to be a good person so you don’t make it worse. Well, that’s a truth. You know, I read a lot about the terrible things that people have done to each other. You just cannot even imagine it. It’s so awful. So you don’t want to be someone like that. Now do you have a reason to be? Yes. You have lots of reasons to be. God, there’s reasons to be resentful about your existence. Everyone you know is going to die. You know, you too. And there’s going to be a fair bit of pain along the way and lots of it’s going to be unfair. It’s like, yeah, no wonder you’re resentful. It’s like act it out and see what happens. You make everything you’re complaining about infinitely worse. There’s this idea that hell is a bottomless pit and that’s because no matter how bad it is, some stupid son of a bitch like you could figure out a way to make it a lot worse. So you think, well, what do you do about that? Well, you accept it. That’s what life is like. It’s suffering. That’s what the religious people have always said. Life is suffering. Yes. Well, who wants to admit that? Well, just think about it. Well, so what do you do in the face of that suffering? Try to reduce it. Start with yourself. What good are you? Get yourself together for Christ’s sake so that when your father dies, you’re not winding away in a corner and you can help plan the funeral and you can stand up solidly so that people can rely on you. That’s better. Don’t be a damn victim. Of course you’re a victim. Jesus. Obviously. Put yourself together and then maybe if you put yourself together, you know how to do that. You know what’s wrong with you if you’ll admit it. You know there’s a few things you could polish up a little bit that you might even be able to manage in your insufficient present condition. So you might shine yourself up a little bit and then your eyes will be a little more open and then you can shine yourself up a little bit more and then maybe you could bring your family together instead of having them be the hateful, spiteful, neurotic, infighting batch that you’re doomed to spend Christmas with. So then you fix yourself up a little bit, kind of humbly because, you know, God, you’re a fixer-upper if there ever was one. And then you’ve got to figure out, well, can you figure out how to make peace with your idiot brother? And probably not because he’s just as dumb as you, so how the hell are you going to manage that? So then maybe you get somewhere that way and your family’s sort of functioning and you find out, well, that kind of relieved a little bit of suffering although it reduced the opportunities for spiteful revenge and that’s kind of a pain in the neck. And so then you get your family together a little bit and you’re a little clued in then, at least a bit, because you’ve done something difficult that’s actually difficult. You’re a little wiser and so then maybe you could put a tentative finger out beyond the family and try to change some little thing without wrecking it. It’s like our society is complex and we teach our students that they could just fix it. It’s like go fix a military helicopter and see how far you get with that. It’s like you’re going to get a dude, you’re like a chimp with a wrench. Whack! Oh look, it’s better! It’s like no, it’s not better. Things are complicated and to fix things is really hard and you have to be like a golden tool to fix things and you’re not. So, and that’s the other message of the West. It’s like how do you overcome the suffering of life? I’m not saying it’s only the message of the West. How do you overcome the suffering of life? Be a better person! That’s how you do it. Well that’s hard. It takes responsibility. And I think, you know, you said to someone, you want to have a meaningful life? Everything you do matters. That’s the definition of a meaningful life. But everything you do matters. You’re going to have to carry that with you. Or do you want to just forget about the whole meaning thing and then you don’t have any responsibility because who the hell cares? You can wander through life doing whatever you want, gratifying impulsive desires for how useful that’s going to be. And you’re stuck in meaninglessness but you don’t have any responsibility. Which one do you want? Well, ask yourself which one are you pursuing? And you’ll find very rapidly that it isn’t the majority of your soul that’s pursuing the whole meaning thing because, well look what you have to do to do that. You have to take on the fact that life is suffering. You have to put yourself together in the face of that. Well that’s hard. Christ, it’s amazing. People can even do it. I’m stunned every day when I go outside and it isn’t a riot with everything burning. Really? God, you talk to people, it’s like I knew this guy, he’d been in a motorcycle accident and it really ruined him. He was like a linesman, you know, working on the power. He was working with someone who had Parkinson’s disease and they had complementary inadequacies. And so two of them could do the job of one person and so they’re out there fixing power lines in the freezing cold despite the fact that one was three quarters wrecked by the motorcycle accident and the other one had Parkinson’s. It’s like that’s how our civilization works. It’s like there’s all these ruined people out there, they’ve got problems like you can’t believe. Off they go to work and do things they don’t even like and look, the lights are on. My God, it’s unbelievable. It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle. And we’re so ungrateful, college students, the postmodern types, they’re so ungrateful. You know, they don’t know that they’re surrounded by just a bloody miracle. It’s a miracle that all this stuff works, that all you crazy chimpanzees that don’t know each other can sit in the same room for two hours sweltering away without tearing each other apart because that’s what chimps do. So, anyways, so what happened? Well, I made some videos. I made a video about the chimpanzees and I got to the bottom of some things at least as far as I can tell, so I told you what the bottom is and then I got this idea about what you might do about it, which isn’t my idea. It’s like it’s not my idea. It’s an old, old, old, old idea. It’s far older than Christianity. It’s old. It’s the oldest story of mankind. Get yourself together. Transcend your suffering. See if you can be some kind of hero. Make the suffering in the world less. Well, that’s the way forward as far as I can tell if there is any way forward. That’s what’s under assault by the postmodernists. So look out because they know exactly what they’re doing and they know exactly why they’re doing it and that’s what it looks like to me. So that’s it.