https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8ABa4RdNPxU
So I’ve been talking about your cause, I guess, since you started your videos and since you started having troubles with, you know, with human rights tribunals or threats by U of T. And I just think it’s common sense, as I said, that I think that promoting critical thinking, helping people to be able to tolerate subjects that they may not feel comfortable about, but that they should be able to hear and process, not based on emotions, but based on an actual analysis of the facts, the evidence, the reality versus some agenda being shoved down their throat, whether it’s the media, through the professors, and anyone teaching in academia knows that there are professors who have no problem with basically teaching their truths as fact. And so I’ve been promoting this, I’ve been promoting it within my own the Ontario Psychological Association. I got a lot of flak from other psychologists who thought, no, we can’t allow this type of speech to happen, that discussion that you’re supposed to have had, the travesty really, it was October, I believe, when you had those other professors coming in and talking about the issue. Some psychologists wrote pieces in national art, media publications saying this kind of discussion should not happen. And this is from psychologists, the ones who are supposed to be best trained to be able to tolerate the discomfort that goes around, goes along with discussing uncomfortable topics. So I was hoping for you to be able to share with the audience your experience in the last few months in trying to promote this, what you’re basically trying to promote, which I’ll let you describe in your own words. Okay. So let me think about those videos for a minute. Well, I think there were two things that, oh, I should give you some background on the videos, I guess. I mean, I just made them in my office at home. I wasn’t, I had no idea what the consequence would be. I was just trying to sort out my thoughts about, partly about not so much Bill C-16 as the background policies that surround it, especially on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website. Because the bill itself looks rather innocuous. It’s only about two paragraphs long. The only part of it that isn’t innocuous is the insistence that, the insistence on transforming the hate speech codes, including harassment and discrimination based on gender, what was it, gender identity and gender expression in the hate speech codes. I thought, that’s weird. There’s something out there. Anyways, I started digging more into the background on the Ontario Human Rights Commission website. And the policies surrounding Bill C-16, to call them appalling, is barely to scratch the surface. They’re unbelievably badly written and internally contradictory and over-inclusive and dangerous. And, I mean, they do things, for example, like make employers responsible for all the speech acts of their employees, whether they have intended or unintended consequences. That’s completely, the only reason you would write a law like that is to get as many employers in trouble as you could possibly manage. Because there’s no other reason for formulating the legislation that way. And I’ve also, a colleague of mine came in recently at the university, and he’s starting to teach a little bit about the background for this sort of thing in one of his classes. He showed me the developmental progression of the policies surrounding Bill C-16. And in a much more, in a tighter format, but then they were farmed out for what they called public consultation, which basically meant they ran them by a variety of people who I would say are very strongly on the activist end of the political spectrum. And they basically, in order to not bother anyone who they had consulted with, they decided, for example, that gender identity should be nothing but subjective choice, which is, I don’t even know what to say about that. If you’re a psychologist and you have any sense at all, that’s a completely insane proposition. It’s, first of all, predicated on the idea that your identity is your subjective choice. And that’s never been the case for any sort of identity anywhere. You take your identity as twofold. The first thing that your identity is is a functional set of tools to help you operate in the world. I mean, read Piaget, you know, just scratch the surface of Piaget even. And you find out that, you know, children start to construct their identities really when they’re breastfeeding, because that’s when you first start your social interactions. You start integrating your basic biological reflexes from a Piagetian perspective into something resembling a social relationship, because breastfeeding actually happens to be quite a complex act. And then you expand developing identity out into the small microcosmic social world of the family, basically starting with your mother, but then you have siblings and your father and your relatives, you know, conventionally speaking. And your identity is a negotiated game. And you’re not the only one in charge of it by any stretch of the imagination at all. I mean, one of the things that Piaget pointed out was that between the ages of two and four, and I think later research has really hammered this home, that even kids who are hyper aggressive at two, and there’s a small proportion of them that are like that, learn to integrate their subjective desires into a broader social game and become socially acceptable to other children. And they do that through play, you know, and what they’re doing is playing their identity into being. And then once they’re older than about four, and they’ve become properly socialized so other children actually want to play with them, because that’s the critical issue. It’s the fundamental issue. Then the peer community of children helps them bootstrap their identity up to something that will eventually approximate an adult identity. But that’s functional. It has nothing to do with whim. It’s a crazy idea. So partly your identity is the set of tools with which you function in the actual world. And part of it is a negotiated agreement with the other people around you. And that’s all being taken out of the… That’s all actually, as far as I can tell, that’s the line of theorizing is technically illegal now in Ontario. And I’m not even talking about the potential biological basis of identity, because the idea that identity has no biological basis, that’s just wrong. It’s factually wrong. And we’ve written a social constructionist. We’ve written a radical social constructionist view of identity into the law. But even worse than that, we’ve gone beyond social constructionism, because Piaget was a constructionist, into just pure whim. Your identity can be at any moment what you assume that it’s going to be. That’s not a tenable solution. There’s nothing about that proposition that’s reasonable. So I was looking into this and I thought, this is just beyond comprehension that we’ve written that idea into the policies surrounding Bill C-16. So I made that video. I was trying to sort that out and to figure out even what it meant. The terminology is messy in the extreme. First of all, with regards to gender identity, gender identity is not a spectrum. It’s a modified bimodal distribution. And if you’re making law, you don’t get to muck around with the words. You have to use the right words. And so it’s a modified bimodal distribution, because almost everyone who has a biological identity of male or female identifies as male or female. It’s 99.7%. And you could argue that that’s a little tighter than it would be if society was more accepting of gender variation, let’s say. But even if it went down to 99%, which would be an increase of like, what? Well, it would be almost an order of magnitude increase, you still have the overwhelming number of people whose gender identity matches their biological sex. And then you can stack on top of biological sex, gender identity, virtually perfect match, then gender expression. Almost everyone who is biologically male or female, who identifies as biologically male or female, expresses themselves as male or female. And then the vast majority of them have a sexual orientation that’s in keeping with their, you know, in traditional keeping with their biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression. So now we have a law that says those are independent. Guess what? That’s not the definition of independence. And you can’t just play mucky games with your legislative terminology. It gets people in trouble. So it’s not a spectrum, and that’s that. It’s a modified bimodal distribution. And there are obviously exceptions, and I never argued once in the videos that I put out, despite how people reacted to them, that there weren’t exceptions. Of course there are exceptions. And if you look at temperament, for example, you know, the big differences between men and women are agreeableness and neuroticism. Fundamentally, women are about half a standard deviation more agreeable. That’s compassion and politeness. And they’re about half a standard deviation higher in negative emotion. And that’s cross-cultural, by the way. And it also accounts for the reasons why women are about three to four times more likely to suffer cross-culturally from depression and anxiety, whereas men are more likely to be aggressive in prison and to drink. And low agreeableness is actually the best predictor of incarceration among men. Those are solid biological differences, but if you try to segregate men and women using only those two dimensions, you only get it right about 75% of the time. So there’s a substantial overlap, but that still doesn’t mean that it’s not a spectrum. And the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women is such a preposterous claim that I can’t even believe that we would ever have that discussion. I mean, there’s men have wider jaws. Men are taller. They have broader shoulders. Women have more endurance in endurance sports. Women have a subcutaneous layer of fat. The shape is different. The way the arms are placed is different. The voice is different. And that’s just gross morphology. I’m not even talking about genitalia. And then you can look at microstructures. There’s differences between men and women at every level of the human microstructure from the cellular all the way up to the social. So like what in the world are we talking about? What’s going on here? It’s crazy. So that was video number one. Video number two was the bloody Human Resources Department at the University of Toronto has adopted an equity position. Okay, so what equity means is that it doesn’t mean equality of opportunity. It means equality of outcome. And that is the so this is the idea. The idea is that you take us a social institution like a university. And then you look at the organization of that university at every single strata from the executive level all the way down to the student level. Then what you do is you do an analysis of each level by community demography, right? You get to define the demographic characteristics that you’re going to discuss, however, which is actually a big problem. Then you make the presupposition that unless that organization at every level matches the demographic representation of the people at every level, then it’s corrupt, oppressive and discriminatory. And it needs to be changed. Okay, so you think, well, what’s wrong with that? Every level should have 50 50 men and women, let’s say it’s like you’re really sure about that, are you? You’re so sure about that. You don’t think there’s any natural differences in interest between men and women. Well, if you don’t think so, then why are most psychology classes 80% women? And that and that and that differentiation is accelerating rapidly. Like I’ve seen it over the course of my career from maybe 60% men at the beginning of my career to like 80% women now. And men occupy more of the positions in the stems in the stem stem fields, at least for now. It’s the same in bloody Scandinavia. It’s 20 to one nurses, 20 to one women to men nurses in Scandinavia and 20 to one men to women in engineering. And that’s in Scandinavia. And so what’s happened in Scandinavia as they’ve made this society more egalitarian in terms of its legal and social structures is that the gender differences in personality between men and women have got bigger, not smaller. So what that means is that social constructionism is wrong. That’s what it means. Wrong. Disproved. It’s exactly the opposite of what the theory would have predicted because the theory predicted and God only knew how it was going to sort itself out. It’s not like people knew this to begin with. The idea was that as you equalize the social structure that the differences between men and women would disappear. Guess what? That didn’t happen. And it’s not studies of just a few hundred people in a few locations. Those are population-wide studies and they’ve been replicated multiple times. So the funny thing is that there are temperamental differences between men and women. And neuroticism and agreeableness are not the only temperamental differences. So if you fragment extroversion, it fragments into assertiveness and gregariousness. Women are more gregarious, men are more assertive. If you fragment conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness, women are more orderly and men are more industrious. If you fragment openness, which is the creativity dimension, into interest in ideas and interest in aesthetics, you find that women are more interested in aesthetics and men are more interested in ideas. Because you can fractionate the big five into ten. You get gender differences across all of them. And they’re not trivial either. They make a difference. So anyways, back to the equity thing of all the preposterous and idiotic ideas. So first of all, to make gender equity across every dimension of an organization, you have to assume that men and women have identical interests and temperaments. And that if they don’t, the state should intervene to bloody well ensure that they do, which is something for all you women to figure out. Because now there’s many positions in society that women preferentially occupy. So what are you going to do about that? And what are you going to do about the Asians? Because they occupy preferential positions as well. You know, they’re overrepresented in all sorts of professional institutions. And the probability is that that’s going to increase. What are you going to do about that? What about the Jews? What are you going to do about them? Because they’re in the same position as the Asians. You’re going to put quotas on all those people? What kind of stupidity is that? And then it’s worse too, because let’s say you equalize women, just for the sake of argument, across all these different dimensions of society. Well then what are you going to do? Are you going to equalize for black women and Latino women and Asian women? Are you going to subtype black women? Because it’s not like they’re all the same. Are you going to ensure that women from lower classes are represented just as much as women from upper classes? And how many generations back are you going to go to check that? What about intelligence? What about attractiveness? How about height? How about weight? So the problem with the fractionation by group identity is that it’s endless. There’s no way of ensuring equality across groups, because there’s an infinite number of groups. You can fragment group identity all the way down to the level of the individual, which is exactly what you should do, which is what we already did in the West. We figured, well, the ultimate diverse population is a population of individuals, so you let the individuals sort it out. No, no, we’re going to replace that with group. Well, what that means for the bloody social activists is that they’ll be able to play this game forever, because you can continually fractionate group identity ad nauseum, and so the system will never be equal. And you can bloody well be sure that as we implement social policy to make sure that all outcomes are equal, that the amount of space that you personally are going to have to maneuver in is going to shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink. We’ve already seen that happen in many societies. You’d think we would learn from the 20th century. So that’s the equity issue. And then worse even, this is the HR and equity people, they’re actually mucking about with people’s unconscious biases. So this is what we want, right? We want your employers and the state to re-educate you so that your perceptions, because that’s what we’re talking about with regards to unconscious bias, so that your perceptions fall into accordance with their demands. And not even your voluntary perceptions, by the way. Your involuntary, unconscious perceptions have to be retrained. Okay, so maybe that’s not so good, especially when you look at that bloody implicit association test, Mazarin Banerjee from Harvard and Anthony Greenwald from the University of Washington. So Banerjee is an avowed Marxist, and Greenwald and Banerjee, both bloody well know and have written that their implicit association test has neither the reliability nor the validity to be used as an individual diagnostic test. They know it. Sorry, I just wanted to say something. I’ve lectured about that in my class, but not everyone is aware of that. Do you want to just give it? I can bring up a PowerPoint slide or do you want to just give it? Yeah, why don’t you do that? Do you want to do that? Yeah, so I’ll let you take over when you do that. So despite the fact that… Sorry, this will forget all of it. It’ll take a few minutes, so… Yeah, well, despite the… Okay, so the implicit association test in principle is this word association game. It’s actually predicated, I would say, on psychoanalytic ideas, most particularly on Jungian ideas, because Jung developed the association test many, many, many years ago. But it purports to investigate whether you are unconsciously biased towards one group or against another group. Could be gender, could be ethnicity, could be race, could be attractiveness, whatever. But the problem is that when you give the same person the damn IAT twice, they don’t get the same results. So there’s a rule for diagnostic tests. And the rule is the reliability, test-retest reliability, has to exceed something like .8 or .9, .8 at least. So the big five does that, IQ tests do that, but there’s a damn few tests that pass that reliability criteria, and the IAT is only reliable… I don’t remember precisely, but I think it’s about .5, which isn’t even… It’s not even near close enough to be used as a diagnostic test. Plus, it’s not valid. So what does that mean? Well, let’s say I assess your unconscious bias and give you a diagnosis. Well, there’s no evidence that it predicts your behavior. So what good is it? What good is it? Well, it’s good if you want people to send you to retraining exercises so that you can have your perceptions adjusted in the direction that your organization and the state thinks is proper. And that’s happening everywhere. I got letters this week already from people at CBC. It’s becoming mandatory there. St. Mike’s Hospital, same thing. And they’ve decided that all of their micro-institutions within the hospital will be equitable. There’ll be 50% women and 50% men at every single level of the organization, or the organization is corrupt and oppressive. It’s like it’s spreading so fast you can’t believe it. I wrote Masur Binagy and Anthony Greenwald yesterday and sent it off to some of my colleagues saying, are you going to come out and make a public statement about the fact that your damn test is being used by pathological people for nefarious purposes? It’s like, well, we’ll see what they have to say about that. I was a bit more polite in my letter than that. But there’s no excuse for it. There’s absolutely no excuse for it. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s part of the broader corruption of social psychology. You guys may know or may not that social psychology has been rife with controversy and scandal over the last three or four years. And a big part of the reason for that is it’s damn corrupt discipline. And the use of the IAT for political reasons is a perfect example of that. There is no excuse for it. And the people at St. Mike’s, they say, well, this is scientifically validated. It’s like, no, it’s not. And worse, let’s say you do have unconscious bias, just for the sake of argument, and you could measure it reliably, which you can’t, and that it was valid, which it isn’t. Let’s say all of those things were in case. There’s no evidence whatsoever that those damn unconscious bias training programs, retraining programs, have the effect that they’re supposed to have. And there’s some evidence that they actually have the reverse effect. And maybe that’s because people don’t really like being marched off to re-education by their employers after they’ve been diagnosed as racist, even if there’s no evidence that they in fact are. So it’s an absolute misuse of psychology. And it’s politically motivated. It’s politically motivated. It’s an assault on freedom. Anyways, I made those two videos, and I tried to take the HR and equity people at U of T to task, because they made that training mandatory for their HR people. I thought, you don’t have the right as an employer to invade the unconscious structures of your employees’ minds and alter their political perspective, even though you can’t do it. You don’t have the right to do that. And to think about it as something you should do as a matter of course, as part of your ethical duty, is… You really want that? You really want that? That’s what you want your employers to be able to do. Figure out, independently of your behaviour, whether or not you’re a racist, or a classist, or a misogynist, or whatever that happens to be. And you really think that the bureaucrats at the university, for example, or bureaucrats anywhere for that matter, are actually capable and qualified of doing such a thing properly, you know, doing far more damage than any possible good. Well, so anyways, I made those two videos trying to sort this out and to investigate it, and then for whatever reason, you know, the proverbial, well, you know what happened. By within two months, there was 180 newspaper articles written about it, and I don’t know how many millions of people have watched these things online now, but it’s plenty. And so what that also means is I put my finger on something, because who cares what a dim-witted professor from the University of Toronto does with his spare time at midnight? No one should care. I should have had my 15 minutes of notoriety, if that, but that isn’t what happened. It was major news in Canada for three months, and I’m still talking to people all over the world about it. I get 100 letters a day, at least. I can’t keep up with them from people who are being cornered in all sorts of ways by their idiot employers and these safe space propositions at universities and the restrictions on their speech. They tell me constantly, well, I really agree with you, but I’m afraid to say anything about it. It’s like, oh, good, that’s a wonderful position for us to be in, where people are afraid, they’re afraid to speak their minds. What the hell? And it’s not getting better. And if we don’t do something about it, it’s going to get a lot worse. You saw what happened in Berkeley. That’s just a taste of what’s to come. You know, one day there’s going to be an anti-fasc demonstration with a little bit of violence, and the bad guys on the other side are going to come out. And we’re not going to like that very much. So maybe we should get our acts together and stop that from happening before it actually happens, unless that’s what you want. And I wouldn’t recommend it. We have a pretty sophisticated society and it wouldn’t take much to put a spanner into the spokes and flip everybody on their forehead. So wake up, for Christ’s sake. This is not good. And the fact that the fact that, you know, the bloody federal government has decided that they won’t let people pick the judiciary anymore unless they take unconscious bias retraining. Right? What the hell? It’s crazy. So anyways, that’s what happened. In addition to, you know, this ideologically driven, just to that, do you think, and I’m always quite cynical, do you think it’s also a make-work project for a bunch of people that they figure, you know, we can create these tests that aren’t valid, aren’t reliable, but we’ve got an industry, you know, that’s going to keep going forever now. You’d never expect social psychologists to be careerists, would you? Yes, yes, definitely. Well, I mean, it got out of hand, too. It’s not, you know, people don’t necessarily plan these things. I’m sure that the Ontario Human Rights Commission, when they were talking about preferred pronoun use, had no idea whatsoever that, you know, within four years of introducing the policies, that there would be 71 different gender identity categories. No one saw that coming. How could you possibly see that coming? And I don’t think Banerjee and Greenwald had any idea that their test would be transformed into an implement of public policy so rapidly. Right. Okay, and just for those who are interested, the implicit associations or implicit attitudes test, my students, I always give a link to that, and if anyone’s interested, I can give you a link where you can go to the test and actually do it yourself and find out. Because the assumption is that if you are implicitly racist, so explicitly racist, you would say, I hate blacks, let’s say. Implicitly racist, oh no, some of my best friends are black. But when you do this test, the idea is that if you’re shown a black person’s face, okay, versus a white person’s face, you’re more likely to associate that black person with, let’s say, violence. So you’re basically being primed unconsciously. So when you see a black face, if you subsequently see a weapon and you’re asked to decide whether this is a weapon or a tool, you’re more quickly going to say weapon because you’re already thinking dangerous violence weapons because you have this negative association of blacks with weapons. And you’ll do that faster than when you see a white face, because the white face should be more neutral. So whether you see after the white face a gun or a weapon, in theory, should be about equal, it should take equal time to determine whether it is one or the other. Things like that. This is the kind of test that they do. And they’ve associated, or they’ve done this test, as Dr. Peterson said, with countless other types of constructs. And again, the reliability, the validity is not just suspect, it’s just it’s non-existent. And as I said, if you’d like to try it out, if you’re stooped, check out on the Brightspace page. If you’re not, email me, Facebook me, and I’ll give you the link. And they’ve done it to like, I think, 50 different at least, you know, Democrat, Republican, you know, vanilla, strawberry, there’s all these different things that you can do and see where your implicit or unconscious biases are. And as Dr. Peterson is saying, it’s getting out of hand. And it’s all I get with the gender pronouns, because during the debate that you had, or whatever that was, at the U of T, one of the people that I think she was a lawyer, very condescendingly. Cosman. Sorry? Brenda Cosman. That’s right. She’s like, oh, this kind of thing would never happen. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Well, first of all, on the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal page, they specifically say that gender, you know, that you have to identify people by their preferred identity or expression, which includes pronoun usage. It’s there on their page. It’s not explicitly stated in Bill C-16, but the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, who will, in fact, enact any type of action against somebody who’s, you know, who’s violated these policies, okay? It’s on their very page. And I know you spoke about your own experience. I hope that not everyone saw the debate. Can you just talk about that part where, speaking to other professionals who don’t seem to be ideologically driven like Cosman, what they said about the risk? Oh, no. This is so important. Well, Cosman was interesting. I mean, she’s definitely not looking at this the same way that I do. But, you know, one of the things she said in a rather condescending manner was that I wouldn’t be sent to jail even though I wanted to be. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s roughly what she said. But that, you know, the Human Rights Tribunal could take away my property and my wages and all of that. But that seemed to be okay for her as long as it didn’t extend to jail. But that’s also nonsense because if you’re, if you’re found guilty by the Human Rights Tribunal and you don’t pay, then that’s contempt of court and that goes to a different court and then they put you in jail and that’s already happened. So it’s, it’s, it’s crooked lawyer hand waving fundamentally. And it’s an attempt to play down the, the significance of the law. You go read about, you go online and read about the powers of the Human Rights Tribunal and then see how safe you feel. So here’s one of the things they can do. This is section 1.6. It’s in a document about powers of the, powers of the tribunals. They call them social justice tribunals in Ontario. They actually call them social justice tribunals. It’s mind-boggling. They can suspend precedent, legal, normal legal precedent, and jurisprudential tradition in the pursuit of their aid. So that’s one of the, it’s actually documented as one of their powers. Think about that. Like we live in a society that’s essentially bound by the restrictions of English common law. And English common law is one of the most remarkable developments of civilization ever, period. Because what, see in the English system basically the presupposition is that you have all the rights there are. They’re not enumerated. You just have all of them. Except when one of those rights imposes a restriction on someone else and then they get irritated at you and take you to court. And then the judge sorts out who has which micro-right and then that’s laid out as precedent. And so English common law is this tremendous body of evolved doctrine about how the infinite number of human rights that each individual has interacts with everyone else’s rights. And like back when Trudeau, when the first Trudeau brought in the human rights code, the Bill of Rights, the Canadian Bill of Rights, there were lots of people who were upset by it because it’s a different form of legal reasoning. The Bill of Rights says here’s the rights you have that the government is granting you. That’s not how it works under the English code. The English code is you have all the rights there are but they rub up against other people’s rights so we have to sort that out. We do that with court and precedent. And that’s what the Human Rights Commission and Tribunal in Ontario can dispense with if they want. And the reason there, I know the reason that they put that line in there, because the social justice hypothesis is that the legal structures of Western civilization are oppressive and patriarchal and so it’s perfectly reasonable to toss them over if you’re in pursuit of something like social justice. It’s like that’s fine people, sure go ahead and do that. But if you think that you can transform what we have already now into some kind of utopia, then you’re dangerous because that isn’t how the world works and utopians have been more dangerous than any other people for the last hundred years. That’s for sure. Like there’s all sorts of things wrong with Western society, always and there always will be, but compared to 85 to 90 percent of the rest of the planet, this is bloody heaven and that’s why people want to move here. So you can say well it’s corrupt compared to my imaginary utopia. It’s like yeah that’s for sure, it certainly is. But if your imaginary utopia was realized in hardcore politics over a 30-year period, everyone would be out in the streets starving to death. We already know that because it happened multiple times throughout the 20th century in societies that were, well they weren’t as sophisticated as our society is now, but they were plenty sophisticated for their time. And you’ll hear the neo-Marxist types, this is the most annoying argument anyone ever makes, they say well what happened in the Soviet Union? That wasn’t real communism. It’s like first, oh yes it was, that’s why it also happened in China, which was a very different society. But what they really mean when they say that is, well you know that’s Stalin character, he wasn’t such a good guy, he didn’t really know how to implement the Marxist doctrines. But me, I’m pretty pure of heart and if you would have made me dictator for 20 years, then the utopia would have arrived as promised. It’s like first of all, if you think that, there’s something wrong with you, you’re dangerous. And second, let’s just say for a minute that some saint did get a hold of the tools of power and try to implement from each according to his ability to each according to his need, and actually did that in a pure and saint-like manner. Here’s what would happen, the next people in the revolutionary string, like Stalin, would come along and stab them in their bed in the middle of the night and that would be the end of that. So there’s absolutely no excuse whatsoever for that sort of thinking. And if you read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which you should do, like everyone should, because it’s like the definitive document of this sort of thing that emerged from the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn laid out with extraordinary clarity, first in his writings on Lenin and then in his writings on the Soviet Union more broadly, exactly how the pernicious and pathological Marxist doctrines were transformed logically and systematically into the sorts of laws that killed millions of people, millions of people. There were people starving so badly in the Soviet Union by the 1920s that they had posters telling them not to eat their children. So we’ve been down that road already, so what the hell are we doing? We’re going down that road again under the guise of equity, right? And equality. Well that was the doctrines that promoted those laws to begin with. Not good. Okay, so when Dr. Peterson, when you talk this way, some people are going to say either you’re blowing things out of proportion or you make a huge leap from where we are now to where we should be, and so I think there’s a lot of room for misunderstanding for people, especially if they have certain ideologies that they’d like to protect. So one of the reasons I want to invite people over was to be able to ask questions. You’ve heard some of Dr. Peterson’s tenets that he’s trying to convey, and he said, and I don’t know how many videos each person has watched, but you have an opportunity right now, if that’s okay, if someone has a specific question, either from something that Dr. Peterson has said today or things you’ve heard in the videos, it’s been nagging at you, you go like, I really want to ask him face to face, what do you mean by this or what is your solution to that? Please, I’m opening up the floor. Just talk really loud, please, let Mike pick it up and then everyone can hear. Does anybody have a specific question that you’d like to ask? Okay. Oh, sorry, all right. No, no. Sure. Okay. Barbara Kaye? Okay, it’s a little bit of a sidebar, but I’ve watched several of your videos. They’re brilliant, and some of your longer ones, and I’m intrigued by your, I know that Solnitzen is one of your heroes, I know that Solnitzen was a great man, but I’m a little disturbed, and I would love to know, why was he antisemitic? You know, the book that he wrote in which he was accused of antisemitism has not been yet translated into English. You mean it was only one place where he was? Well, one of the things that he did, he certainly, there’s certainly no sign of antisemitism in the Gulag Archipelago, not as far as I could tell, and I don’t think, in the other books I’ve read, I haven’t seen that either. He did write a book near the end of his life on the role that Jewish intellectuals played in the establishment of the Soviet Union, but you can’t get it in English, so I don’t know what to say about that. I know that it’s been criticized from both sides, I would say. One side saying, well, this was a story that needed to be told, and the other side saying, well, this spheres into antisemitism. So, but you would ask that question. That’s a really hard question, man. Okay, so, I’m going to venture out on a limb, because I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Am I going to venture out on a limb? No, I’m not. I haven’t got my thoughts formulated well enough. The leftist doctrines tend to be very attractive to intellectuals, and so any group that’s overrepresented in intellectuals is likely going to be overrepresented on the leftist end of the spectrum, and there are temperamental reasons for that. We know that if you lean left, it’s because you’re higher in openness and lower in orderliness, and that seems to be associated with IQ, at least in part, but I don’t want to go into it any more than that, because I haven’t thought it through sufficiently, but I also haven’t been able to get a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s last book, because you can’t get it in English. It hasn’t been translated for one reason or another, so, but I don’t think you’ll see anything like that in the Gulag Archipelago. Okay, thank you. There’s another question before. We’re going to ask, I’ll have you ask the question, but afterwards, I want to get back to this, because you mentioned a number of times about the correlates between IQ and the left, and that the people who believe in, who support thought police are not actually just, they’re not leftists, they’re a whole other category. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s such an important distinction, I’d like you to turn to in a few minutes. Okay. But first, this question, please. So, if the current proposition is too extreme, do you have a theory with regards to how we do expand equality without going to such extremes? I think we’re doing a good job of that right now. I mean, how fast do you think things, how fast could you even hope for things to change? Look at what’s happened to the situation in women since, like, with women since 1970. That’s changed so fast that people can’t even keep up. It’s not obvious, by the way, either, that it’s been particularly good for women. Now, you could make a case that was good for society, maybe. It’s a tough one, eh? Because the birthrate is plummeted. And so, you know, maybe you don’t care about that, maybe you think there’s too many people on the planet already, whatever, but, you know, it isn’t that easy to figure out when something is working properly. One of the things we do know, we seem to know, is that to the degree that rights are extended to women, economic prosperity follows. So, you can see worldwide that the societies that have extended the rights to women most extensively are also the societies that seem to be flourishing economically, and there does seem to be a causal relationship. But women have paid a big price for that. So, what’s happened in part is, first of all, for, say, women who are middle class or lower, their lives have essentially fallen apart, because marriage is now restricted to the rich, which is also something to think about for those of you who think marriage is an oppressive, patriarchal institution. Okay, then, why are only the rich people getting married? They’re oppressing themselves? I don’t think so. And so the women who are in the lower socioeconomic stratus are suffering, madly. And so are their children. And they have terrible jobs most of the time, like jobs in retail, where, you know, they’re called in every day for the next day, they don’t have a schedule that’s set out ahead of them, they get paid very badly, they’ve got kids to take care of, and so they have no free time. It makes them really easy targets for useless press. And so, women are much unhappier, if you look at national polls, than they were, say, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And I think that’s partly because freedom and happiness, those are not the same thing. They’re not the same thing. And I see young women all the time struggling to figure out what to do with their lives, because they have no idea how to have a job, slash, career, and a family. So, and there’s no answer to that. It’s a really difficult problem. You know, and there’s all sorts of ideas, like I did a lot of consulting for law firms for a long time, about a decade, and I had a lot of clients who were extremely high-functioning female lawyers, younger ones, trying to figure out how to balance their career with their desire to have a life. And you know, you hear all the time about women being denied access to positions of power, and that’s the consequence of prejudice and oppression. It’s like, yeah, yeah, everything is caused by the same thing first. Right. You’ve got one causal principle, wonderful, now you’re a philosopher. You can figure out everything with it. It’s like, the law firms cannot keep their women in their 30s. They cannot keep them, the big law firms. They all leave. Why? Because the women hit 30, they’re brilliant, conscientious, intelligent, they were deadly in high school, deadly in university, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college They were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college, they were deadly in college and I’m pretty good at it. So these people who are running things, there’s corrupt people obviously but the vast majority of them first are self-made and second they’re so bloody efficient and smart you cannot believe it and they work 80 hours a week and most of them happen to be men and why is that? Because there are a small number of insane men who will do nothing but work 80 hours a week and no matter where you put them, if you put them in the middle of a forest with an axe, all they would do is run around chopping down trees. So the issue isn’t why aren’t there more women in positions of power, it’s why are there any men insane enough ever to occupy those positions. You know, because we also know, and the data on this is very clear, what’s the relationship between money and well-being? Once you have enough money to keep the bill collectors from your door, so once you have enough money to stave off misery, which is sort of lower middle class, something like that in our society, maybe a little lower than that, extra money does not help you, it does not improve your life. So why bother with it? Well that’s what the women in the law firms think, it’s like most of them by the time they’re in their 30s are married, almost all of them are married to men who make as much money or more than they do because that’s what women go for cross-culturally, four to five years older, equal or higher in the socioeconomic status. So their husbands already make 100 million right now. Or we’ll find someone else to pay 200,000 very good. Well, there’s that too. Yeah. Well, and the universities are in for a big shake-up because they don’t know what’s going to hit them with YouTube and online lectures. They’ve got no idea what’s coming down the pipes. So, because online lectures are powerful beyond belief. And someone who’s going to sort out the accreditation problem in the next four or five years and cut the universities off at their knees. So, it’s certainly going to come within the next ten years. My question for you is, as a training therapist in a postmodern corner, how do you think that that might affect the process of therapy? Well, it puts you in there with all sorts of a priori axioms. You know, one of the things… I really like Karl Rogers. And one of the things Rogers does is listen. That’s what you do as a therapist. The better you are at listening, the faster your compliance will get better. And you have to listen without prejudice. And I mean that in the technical sense. It’s like, okay, so I’m listening to you. It’s like, I don’t know what you’re going to say. And I don’t know if you’re right. And I’m not going to tell you what to do because I don’t know what you should do. And that’s something about being a therapist. It’s like, you do not want to tell people what to do because that’s their life. And you might screw it up. So, what you want to do is listen to them very, very carefully and let them unwind their story. And most of it, they’ll take care of themselves. You know, because no one’s listened to them. And so they don’t even know what they think. Their head is full of jumbled mess of thoughts and experiences. It’s like a tangling of knots. And maybe the person needs to talk for like three years to sort it all out. And what you should do is listen to them from a different culture or whatever. Like, there’s going to be friction because of that. Because you’ll come at it, at least to some degree, with different assumptions. But read the damn therapists. Those people were smart, man. They tell you things about… It’s like each of them gives you a different toolbox. They’re not scientific theories exactly. But as a clinician, you’re not a scientist. You’re an engineer of the soul. That’s a better way of thinking about it. Because it’s like engineering. It’s an applied science. So that makes it not a science exactly. You can use scientific knowledge. But you’re still aiming at the good, right? That’s what you’re doing as a therapist. With the other person, you say, Look, you already know that things aren’t as good for you as they need to be. We’re going to work on that. And you’re here to make things better. And I’m here to help you figure out how to make things better. Then I’ll listen to you. And we’ll move towards some place that’s lighter and better. And then you have tools that you can use in that kind of analytic and listening process. And the great psychotherapists, man… Most people have their 10,000 hours. They all come at it from slightly different temperamental perspectives. Like Jung’s work is really useful for dealing with people who are high in openness. So his whole philosophy is, you have an open client, Jung works. If you have a conservative client, forget it. It’s a whole different thing. So what I’m hearing from you is that the postmodern stance is helpful for the field of psychotherapy. From what you’re saying is to listen and that you’re not giving an absolute truth to these clients. Yeah, but the problem is that the postmodern thing works out pretty well. But they keep nesting it in Marxism. It’s like, oh yeah, but their primary identity is like sex or gender or ethnicity or race. It’s like, no, sorry. We’re not going there. And it’s not exactly postmodernism. Because the postmodernists are misinformed about the nature of scientific theories, I think. They don’t really see them as tools. But I see them as tools. And so you can have a diverse range of tools. Each one doesn’t have to claim epistemological or ontological priority. But that means that you have to view those sorts of theories as tools. That makes you a pragmatist, not a postmodernist. All right. And speaking of patients, I’ve got to go see some in an hour or so. A few things I want to wrap up. Now, just to that point, I said this earlier today. And first of all, one of the reasons I really wanted to have Dr. Peterson come. And first of all, Serena, thank you very much for arranging that. She did. She said that a few months ago, she said she’d have you come in. I said, yeah, sure. And she did. So I really appreciate A, Serena, and B, especially Dr. Peterson for spending time. You know, I would have preferred to have broadcast this widely and then have said, look, you know what? I want all the Peterson haters to come in. I want you to have a chance to be able to actually face to face, confront what you’re afraid of. Don’t be ignorant. Don’t just impose your own beliefs and your biases and everything onto what you’re saying. But actually hear it, process it, come to a reality and fact-based conclusion about the things that you’re trying to promote. Because in today’s society, truly, everybody’s trying to do what they can. I don’t think this is hyperbole. I think that we are going down a dangerous path. We’re seeing the consequences of it. And I mean, all my students know this. I have been promoting this in therapy, in my classes, in my family, this idea that you need to be able to expose yourself to things that make you uncomfortable, that you’re not aware of. And again, that’s kind of a ground rule of good psychotherapy. It might be the ground rule of good psychotherapy. That is speaking honestly. I’m being honest. Honest is the best way to do it. Honest about yourself. Honest about your biases, your fears, your flaws. You can’t grow without that. So this to me was a metaphorical, metaphorical, I guess, manifestation of that desire I wanted to bring you here. And I really do appreciate you taking the time. I know you’ve gotten many speaking engagements. I do appreciate that. And I’m glad that so many people had very poignant questions that you were able to address. What are you going to do with the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? What’s the plan for the video? I have a stadium now every time I talk, which is weird, man. It’s very weird. Right. Well, we’re definitely going to be uploading it, and I’ll send it to you, and we’ll take the arrangements. So thank you very much again for coming. Thank you, everybody, for coming. All the good stuff. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.