https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_UL-SdOhwek
So how are we going to do this? Are people just going to ask? Alright? Yes? You have said that speech brings order out of chaos. That’s why free speech is important. But why does it appear that speech brings chaos out of order? So you would ask that. The question is… The question is, speech brings order out of chaos. That’s what I said, but it appears that speech brings chaos out of order as well. And the answer to that is, it does. There was only so many complications I could address in the talk simultaneously. If you look at the most archaic of archetypal heroes, those heroes confront something that represents chaos. It’s usually a monster that bears a treasure of some sort. And that’s a symbolic representation of the class of all unexplored things, right? Because things that we have not yet explored are threatening and destructive, but also offer us infinite potential. But more elaborated hero stories, let’s say, also reverse that and say that, well, there are times when the order has become so corrupt and rigid that free speech fragments it into its parts so that it can rejuvenate itself. And so, I mean, actually in the gospels, that’s the hero that Christ is basically represented as. He’s not so much the dragon confronting the dragon slayer who gathers the treasure, so that’s implicit in the juxtaposition of Christ with the figure of like a serpentile Satan. But Christ is the thing that stands up against the corrupt state and rejuvenates it through speech. And so, technically speaking, free speech, the logos, is the thing that mediates between chaos and order. And you can think about this is represented in many cultures, this idea. You can see it most specifically, I would say, in the Taoist conceptualization, because in the Taoist world, being is made out of chaos and order. Yin and yang, masculine and feminine. Fundamentally, it’s chaos and order. And order is the fact that wherever you go, there are things you understand. And chaos is the fact that wherever you go, there are things you don’t understand. And so the idea is that being is made out of the things that you understand and the things that you don’t understand. And it’s always that way, which is why Tao is the symbol of being per se. And it’s the case. Your brain is adapted, in fact. It’s partly why it has two hemispheres. For the world that you understand and the world you don’t understand, the world you understand, roughly speaking, being handled by the left, and the world you don’t understand, roughly speaking, being handled by the right. Well, it’s that line down the middle that’s Tao. That’s meaning. And if you have one foot in chaos and one foot in order, you’re maximizing information flow and rejuvenating yourself at the same time that you’re maintaining your structure. And you will report on that internally as engagement in the world. It’s the most fundamental orienting sense that you have. And it’s deeply instantiated neurologically, unbelievably deeply. And so it really is the case, from an evolutionary perspective, that reality is chaos and order. It’s that to which you’re adapted. And so sometimes you’re speaking on behalf of chaos, and sometimes you’re speaking on behalf of order. It’s more complicated than that, too, though, because when we have a dialogue, say, and we’re mutually attempting to climb towards the truth instead of convincing each other that we’re right, say, then what we’re doing is engaging in the simultaneous fragmentation of old and archaic belief systems, and they’re updating. And you can experience that because someone will say something that sets you back, and then you’ll get what they’re saying, and it’ll click together. And what you’re experiencing is the death of an old conceptualization structure. It’s disintegration, and then it’s reconfiguration in a tighter order. And people love that. They live for that. Really, it’s what keeps you alive. And you can experience that in a deep conversation, a truthful conversation, a meeting of the minds and soul. And people love that. It’s curative. All psychotherapists know this, because what you do in psychotherapy, as well, in addition to helping people face the things that they’re most afraid of so that they can overcome them, is to allow them to tell someone the truth. What happened to you? All listen. So they tell you, and they take themselves apart and put themselves together while they’re speaking the truth about what happened. And it puts them together. It’s that the two fundamental elements of psychotherapy are let’s find what you’re afraid of and avoiding, and help you confront it, so that you can gather the information that’s there, and let’s allow you to lay your story out in all of its catastrophe and detail, so that you can straighten yourself out through speech. That’s exactly what happens in psychotherapy. So it should happen in every real relationship. It’s the spiritual purpose of a marriage, fundamentally, right? Because you face someone who’s different than you, that you’re tied to, and cannot run from. And so you can reveal yourself. Really, really, it’s a critical part of marriage. Because if you can run from someone, they will never show you their true face. Because if someone shows you their true face, you will run. And so you say in a marriage ceremony, I will allow you to show me your true face, and I will not run. And unless you mean that, you’ll never be married. You’ll never understand what it means. And you’ll never reap the benefits of it, which are practical, obviously, but also spiritual and psychological. There’s a reason for the vow, but it has to be a vow. Because otherwise you have a back door open, and you’ll never really tell the person what you’re like. And no bloody wonder, because really, who wants to know what you’re like? Not even you, that’s for sure. So I’m not surprised. I want to thank you, because what was surprising about your lecture today was this concept of altruism. I think you’ve been able to just put everything together, and at the end come with a higher value of altruism. And to me it was a surprise, you know, coming here. And I have a relationship with altruism, and the one that I find that’s difficult for me is that there’s an evolutionary process of my brain that’s in a organ, it’s developed, you know. And I’m amazed at how often I think of three people, me, myself, and I. To the point where I’ve actually written down, counted all the iterations of me, myself, and I in either my thoughts or my speech or even in someone else’s, and you’ll get a page. And seldom do we think of we. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, it’s because I have to expend energy to think about someone else. And yet I’m addicted to ease and comfort, because my natural evolution is one of ease and comfort. And you hear it in alcoholics and onyms, well booze ain’t the problem, you’re addicted to ease and comfort. How do I overcome my, what I think is my sense of ease and comfort to be able to make altruism a more natural state of being? Good, good, good question. So the question is, the first was a comment about the emphasis in my talk today on altruism, and the second is how do people overcome their proclivity to only act on their own behalf? Okay, so the first thing I will say is that I don’t believe that what I spoke about today was in favour of altruism. And that’s not a negative comment on your question. But, so there’s a, here’s a primary religious injunction. Treat the other person like you would like to be treated yourself. That does not mean be nice to other people. It does not mean sacrifice yourself excessively for other people. It means think about the other person as if they were you. And figure out how you can mutually interact to better both of you at the same time. You have to build yourself into the equation. It’s an equation. It’s not that others are more valuable, it’s that we’re all valuable, we’re equally valuable, and then you think, well how do you remind yourself of that? And the answer to that is through terror. Because terror is the genuine motivator. So they say, fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom. Well, what does that mean? It means first that you don’t get away with anything. And it’s really useful to know that, because if you really know that, you won’t try to get away with it, well you still will, because people are stupid. But at least it will mitigate the possibility. So, here I’ll tell you something that Jung said. This is quite profound. And it’s, I think, the right answer to this question. So Jung believed he was interested in the emergence of higher morality. Something that the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was also interested in. Piaget thought, we started out as individuals, then we learned to play games with other people, kids, children. Learned how to play games with other children, and that made them social. Our society is a game, it’s a giant game, that we’re all playing together voluntarily. And so children first learned how to play the game, and only later did they learn the rules of the game. They learned how to play the game first, and then learn the rules. How to speak the rules. And then at some point they realized that they were also creators of the rules. And so that’s moral development on a continual, on a, it’s not a continuum, it’s a fractured staircase upward. But Jung was interested in elements of moral action that were higher than that, and so he conceptualized it symbolically. So imagine this, he did this in the last book he wrote called Mysterium Conjunctionus. So imagine that you exist so that your conceptual structures and your emotions are in uneasy relationship with one another. So you’re sort of a house divided amongst yourself. And so what you have to do is you have to put together your mind and your emotions, so that they’re working as a unit. And you do that in part by actually being forthright about what it is that you want for yourself and to other people, and to learn how to negotiate that. So that inner tension disappears. And so now you’re a unified entity of emotion and thought. They’re not conflicting with one another. And then what you do is you take that entity, which is still in some sense separate from your body, because you’re not acting these out, and you bring those two together. And he thought about that as the psychological equivalent of the incarnation. It’s integrated spirit integrating with the body. And what that means is that you take your emotions and motivations and capacity for thinking that are now one thing, and you act out those things. So you embody them in the world. And that’s another thing that brings integrity. And then there was a step past that, and the step past that is to understand that there’s no… so you have the integrated spirit, mind, and body in opposition to the world. And the next thing you do is realize that there is no opposition with the world. Is that what you are is a… and this is very, very complicated. You’re walking down the street. Bloor Street is a good example of this in Toronto. And they’re decimated alcoholic schizophrenics littering the landscape, so to speak. You walk around them. You say, well, that’s not me. It’s like, yes it is. It’s you in so far as your tendency is to react in a negative way. And to sturt the territory. It’s a disturbance in your field of being. It’s you. Now, you don’t know what to do about it, and I wouldn’t recommend that you do anything, because you’d probably just make it worse. It’s a very big problem that’s lying there on the sidewalk. And it may be well beyond your capacity to fix it. But in so far as it’s a disturbance in your field of being, it’s you. It’s you. And all the problems that are in the world that you experience, they’re you. And so you stop thinking about things in terms of an opposition between what’s good for you and what’s good for the world. Because there’s no difference. There’s no difference between the two. And that doesn’t mean that the pathway from what’s good for you in your more limited domain to what’s good for everyone is an easy one to compute. It’s very, very difficult. But there is no technical difference between them. You know, so if I’m engaged in a psychotherapeutic dialogue with my clients, when I’m doing it properly, it’s not like they’re learning from me. It’s that we’re learning together. And every time I solve one of their problems or help them solve one of their problems, I help myself solve one of my problems. You know, because people bring to me, bring into my sessions, the terrible things that go wrong with people in life. Their partner has cancer. Their father has Alzheimer’s. Their suffering with alcoholism. Their career is collapsing. These aren’t things that are happening to them. These are things that happen to everyone. And to figure out how to solve that for someone is to figure out how to solve it for yourself. There’s no difference whatsoever. And so there’s to know that, to think of that, and certainly works in an intimate relationship. If you think that you’re somehow different than your wife, well, certainly she’s going to remind you otherwise constantly. But it’s an error. It’s an error. Because you’re tied together so tightly that whatever happens to one inevitably happens to the other. And that’s true in the networked reality that we all inhabit. So then the terror thing emerges when you start to realize that those problems that you don’t address, that are maybe magnified by your impulsive and foolishly self-centered and instrumental behavior, you’re manipulating the world on behalf of your own narrow interests, those will come back to haunt you. And so it’s a terrifying thing to think through. But once you think it through and understand it, then what happens is you’re more afraid of acting selfishly than you are willing to do it. You think, no, I’m not doing that. Why? Because I know all hell will break loose if I do that, and I’m not going there. And so the terror element is a huge one. It fortifies your… Because you can’t just act properly. You don’t have the moral fortitude for that. You can aim at the good and run from what’s terrible. Then you’re motivated. So… So if I’ve understood you, I just want to recap and try to get it. You’re suggesting a sincerity with your environment, not the view of reaching out to your environment as an expenditure of energy, but rather as an investment. Yes, it’s an investment. That’s a very good way of putting it. Yes. I was wondering if it’s possible to trace an archetypal or narrative origin for some of the intellectual tenets of false modernism, to completely deny the structures of language and its correspondents to reality, deny the psychotip of the individual. I think you’ve done some of that in your talk today, but do you think it’s possible from a psychological perspective to trace the narrative origin of false modernism in human behavior, or is it so unnatural? No, no, it’s an archetypal reality. I mean, there’s always a force, so to speak, that opposes the logos. Always. That’s the Hostile Brothers. It’s a classic archetypal story. There’s always Cain and Abel. There’s always hostility between the two primary modes of operating in the world. So… And this is the modern manifestation of that. And it’s partly a good thing, in some sense, because it’s useful to be deeply challenged. It’s good to have an enemy, because the enemy makes you think. The enemy tells you things that no one else will tell you. It’s the adversary that stops you from being merely inert. And so, postmodernism plays that role. It’s extraordinarily critical. But things can go too far. And the motives… And things can go too far. When they go too far, they reverse. That’s what happens. And hopefully they’re reversing now. Hopefully. You talk about totalitarianism. Totalitarianism that we’ve seen in the past has been mainly associated with men, has been masculine. We seem to be seeing something that has a different form today, that might be more associated with the feminine. Can you speak to that? And also, what is the nature of its power over men, that it seems to be able to silence us? Okay, so the question is, the totalitarian forms that we’ve seen primarily in the past have been male. But maybe we’re seeing something different now. I really don’t think it’s different. I think it’s of a common kind that’s expanded in its dominion. So you imagine that there’s an essential feminine pathology. Just as there is an essential masculine pathology. And the essential feminine pathology, Freud mapped out. It’s the Oedipal mother. And the Oedipal mother is the mother that gets too close to her children. Right? And intermingles herself with them to too great a degree. That in her attempts to protect them, undermines them, fatally. And so, there’s a classic representation of the feminine in the West. And the classic representation is Mary. And here’s one of the representations. It’s lovely. And it’s derived, at least in part, from the story of Mary and the snake in the Garden of Eden. And so Mary has her foot on a serpent. And she’s holding Christ off to the side, like this. Well, that’s exactly what mothers have always done. It’s a biological portrait of human women. Is they hold their infants out of the reach of the terrible serpentine predator. Obviously. That’s what we do. Well, that’s fine. But adults aren’t infants. And neither are children. And if you treat them like they are, you undermine them. You pathologize them. You turn them into old infants. That’s an ugly thing. And that’s the Freudian nightmare. You know, and this happens in therapy very frequently. I mean, you can be tangled into a terrible relationship with your father. That’s often either because he was absent, abusive, or tyrannical. Something like that. But the standard pathology with mom is, she did everything for you. Well, what’s left for you to do? Nothing. Including never leaving. Right. And that’s the motivation. You know, for the woman who’s nothing but protective mother, there’s no role outside of nurturing, of nurturing, of nurturing, of nurturer of infants. Well, you just keep them infants. They’ll never leave. They might kill you one night in your sleep. But they’ll never leave. Sure, sure. I mean, it’s so comical watching the feminists, postmodernists in particular, rattle on about the absence of gender reality and act out the archetypal devouring mother at exactly the same time. For them, the world is divided into predators and infants. And the predators are eating the same food. And the mother is divided into predators and infants. And the predators are evil and need to be stopped, and the infants need to be cared for. Well, that’s what the mother does. But adults are not infants. And all you do is destroy them when you treat them that way, especially when they’re adolescents and just starting to develop. You know, there’s a rule that I attempted to abide by when I had small children. The rule was, don’t do anything for your children that they can do themselves. That’s annoying, that rule, because it takes you like 15 seconds to dress a two-year-old, but you let the two-year-old dress himself. It’s like 15 minutes, or 20 minutes, or half an hour. You chase them around the house. But if you let them learn to dress themselves, then you don’t have to dress them anymore. And they can do it. And you do that with setting the table. And you do that with everything. It’s like, no, it’s okay. You do that now. Well, I care for you so much. Let me do that for you. It’s like, I don’t care for you at all when I say that. I don’t care for you at all. I’m going to stop doing everything I possibly can for you as rapidly as I possibly can. Say, well, that’s great. That’s how you work in an old age home. Do not do anything for the inhabitants that they can do themselves, because you rob them of the last vestiges of their independence, right? It’s what you do when you’re a manager. If you’re a good manager, you make yourself superfluous by extending autonomy and independence to the people that you manage so that they can take over the whole job. You don’t do that by doing everything for people. And you certainly don’t do that by dividing the world archetypally and uncritically into predators, those who have more, and victims, infants, those who have nothing, and acting like all you can ever do is protect them. You don’t protect, first of all, you can’t protect people. You can only make them strong. That’s it. You cannot protect them. You can make them strong, and then they can protect themselves. But then they don’t need you. Right. And there’s the underground pathological element of the devouring mother. It’s like, never leave me. Here’s the deal. I’ll do everything for you. You just never leave. Right. That’s sleeping with your mother. Right. That’s the Freudian nightmare. Right. You don’t invite your child into your bed. Right. You distinguish between them and you. You distinguish between them and your husband. And you facilitate their independence. A part of the reason why it’s useful to have a mother and a father is because the mother has to fall insanely in love with the infant or she’d throw it out the window. Right. Because they’re insanely demanding and they’re always right. Right. Because the right way to treat an infant, especially before nine months, is I’ll do everything for you and you’re always right in your needs. Take priority over everyone else’s. And anybody that threatens you is terrible. Exactly right. But once the kid is ambulatory and starting to be independent, that’s the wrong attitude. The attitude then is, you know, get the hell on with it. And men who are less prone to negative emotion and less compassionate are much better at fostering that kind of independence. And so it’s usually then when they step into the family and start playing with the kids. Rough and tumble play. And pushing them forward and saying, you know, get on with it. You can do it. You can do it. And it’s very hard for a mother to play both those roles because she has to fall so in love with her infant that it’s difficult for her to be a universal caregiver and disciplinarian at the same time. You know, because the roles run contrary to one another. So now women have entered the political sphere. Right. En masse. And so they’re going to bring their essential nature with them. All the while saying, there’s no such thing as essential nature. It’s like, yeah, there is. Can we revive the state of Western civilization using the Nietzschean idea that God is dead? Well, it’s the wrong question in some sense because I think it’s too diffuse. To me, the issue more is, do you have problems in your life that you’re not addressing that you could solve? And the answer is yes. And it’s an easy thing to figure out. You sit on your bed one morning and say, OK, there’s some things that need to be done that I don’t want to do, that I could do, that would make things better by the end of the day. What are they? Well, your conscience will deliver those suckers no time flat, man. And then you might have to say, OK, well, how do I entice myself into doing a few of those? And if you ask, instead of trying to force yourself to do it, like you’re a tyrant and a slave at the same time, you can usually negotiate with yourself so that you’ll start to sort those things out. Sort them out. Put your house in order. And then move out. Move on. And out. Yes. That’s a Freudian slip, by the way. Yeah. So it’s important because the thing is you have a practice domain, right? There are things that are within your grasp that you could fix. Fix them. And you’ll learn. You’ll learn because it’s harder than it looks. Fix them and you’ll learn how to fix things. And then something else will beckon as another problem that you could fix. You know, you all have your problems. What does that mean? Like there’s an infinite number of problems in the world. Some of them happen to be yours. Why is that? I don’t know exactly. But you have your problems. Great. Solve them. You know, one of the things I learned as a therapist, every therapist has to learn this, is because one of the things you wonder when you’re first starting to be a clinician is how do you not take the catastrophes of your clients home with you? And the answer to that is because it’s immoral to. They’re not your problems. They’re their problems. Like they’re their life. You know, your problems are your life. You don’t want to solve someone else’s problems for them because you take away the deep meaning that’s to be found in having them work through the problems on their own. And then you steal the credit. Well, I can help you with that. It’s like, well, yeah, maybe, but I don’t help you with the next problem then. So in any case, you sort out the problems that are right in front of you. And it will make you grow very, very rapidly. And then you’ll be able to sort out more complex problems without making them worse. So. So you mentioned that through discussion and dialogue, we can order the chaos of the world together, but do you not think that there needs to be a higher creator and essence of grace for that to be possible? Like, how can we each being flawed still even working together create meaning or something good? We don’t understand what we are. We don’t understand our own consciousness. It has a quality of some sort, and it manifests itself within us. It’s an orientation towards the good. That might be one way of thinking about it. Freedom to do evil, but an orientation towards the good. And so you participate in whatever that transcendent element of you is while you try to speak the truth and sort out the world. It serves as a guide. So I know that you’re making a query about some transcendent reality, maybe the transcendent reality of God, but that’s the best answer you’re going to get out of me. Okay. Yes. What is your opinion on the alt-right and cultural appropriation? Okay, two questions. What’s my opinion on the alt-right and what’s my opinion on cultural appropriation? The idea of cultural appropriation is absolute nonsense. So that’s that. There’s no difference between cultural appropriation and learning from one another. They’re the same thing. Now that doesn’t mean that there’s no theft between people. There is. And it doesn’t mean that just because you encounter someone else’s ideas, you have an immediate right to those ideas as if they were your own. But the idea that manifesting in your own behavior some element of another culture, the idea that that’s somehow immoral is insane. It’s actually one of the basis of peace. You know, one of the things that the various groups of human beings that exist have to offer each other is the tremendous value of their culture. You know, it’s been really interesting to me, for example, to watch the response of the people who are in the same group. It’s been really interesting to me, for example, to watch the response of, well, of everyone, but for this argument, for young Caucasian males to hip-hop. You know, there’s an aggressiveness about hip-hop that’s really attractive to young Caucasian males. And there’s something absurd about the spectacle of the young Caucasian males taking on the persona of inner-city black gang members. You know, but I’m sympathetic to it because there’s an aggressiveness to that art form that’s a necessary corrective to the insistence that the highest moral virtue for a modern man is harmlessness, which is absurd. Women don’t even like harmless men. They hate them. They like to claw them apart. You know, what women want are dangerous men who are civilized. And they want to help civilize them. That’s beauty and the beast. So, you know, I’ll tell you a funny story, and only engineers could have come up with this, because they are the only ones that have the unparalleled blindness to social convention that would allow them to discover it. So the Google engineers, I like engineers by the way, because they’re very straightforward. The Google engineers wrote a book a while back called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which was a study of internet searches, billions of them, literally. And they were looking a lot at pornography use. And well, there’s lots known about male pornography use, partly, and it’s easy to understand. I mean, males are, you know, pretty visually oriented, and what attracts them to pornography is fairly straightforward. You can tell that if you look at graffiti in a men’s washroom, you know, it’s like two circles in a triangle, and the men are absolutely transfixed by it. So, for women, the story is more complex. They use pornography too, but it tends to be literary, because women tend to like words more than they like visual stimuli. So the Google guys tried to track down the archetypal structure of, oh they didn’t use those words, of female pornography use. And so, some of you know, how many of you know what a harlequin romance is? Okay, good. So those are archetypal stories, right? That’s the taming of the wild man, essentially, by the desirable and virginal woman. And if you think women don’t want that, then you better bloody well come up with an explanation for Fifty Shades of Grey. Right, which is the most rapid-selling novel in human history, and emerged at exactly the same time that all of this noise about the absence of gender roles is being produced en masse. It’s like perfect female fantasy. It’s exactly archetypally correct. It’s Beauty and the Beast. So what the Google guys showed was the structure of Beauty and the Beast, although they didn’t use that as a referent, that the female pornographic fantasy was wild guy, you know, somewhat careless about the wants and desires of others, attractive to everyone, therefore high status, tamed by the magic of a single woman and brought into a relationship with her. Okay, so, but here’s the comical part. This just made me laugh, man. It was like, what were the five categories of most desirable male entity used most broadly in female pornography? Oh, it’s so embarrassing. Women, you have to cover your head while I say this. Vampire, werewolf, billionaire, surgeon, and pirate. Okay, another question? Yes. Oh, yes, the old right, yes. It’s incomplete. It’s incomplete. I mean, it’s identification with the father, and that’s necessary. But the purpose of identification with the father is to become the son, right? And I mean that in all of its symbolic manifestation. And the problem with nationalism is that it forgets that. It forgets that the purpose of the nation is to give rise to the individual. And so, and what’s happened now, because our identities have become fragmented, is that there’s a call to reconstitute the father. And that’s at the core of the alt-right thinking. Well, that’s the benevolent part of the alt-right. I mean, there’s a downside, there’s a negative side to everything. I mean, one of the things that’s quite disturbing about the alt-right is its continual proclivity to degenerate into anti-Semitism. And I see that in the comments, for example, on my videos, continually. So, it’s oversimplified. And there’s also no true recognition, or not sufficient recognition, that the state is also a pathological monster. And the alt-right should understand that, because of course that’s what the left continually claims, right? The state is a pathological monster. They’re trying to produce, sorry, the left is trying to produce. I got that wrong. It’s the basis of the alt-right’s criticism of the left. The alt-right says the left is always trying to expand the dominion of the state. And the state is a pathological monster. Yet, what we should do is become nationalists. It’s like, sorry guys, there’s a bit of a paradox there. And, well, so that’s basically what I would say about that. It’s not surprising. And as long as the radical left keeps pushing the way they keep pushing, then the alt-right is going to continue to grow. Although it’s also very difficult to tell now to what degree, how large the movement is, or how serious it is, or any of those things at the moment. So, just to bring you back to cultural appropriation. Is it possible that that plus about half a dozen other similar things have appeared in the last ten years, rather than be kind of like an empty or ridiculous baseless philosophy or in fact tactical, tactical constructs by postmodernist and Marxist think tanks, the evidence for that would be the fact that they are always selectively enforced in a way which is the most destructive possible to our current system. Okay, so that kind of opens the broader question of conspiratorial action among political groups, let’s say. So here’s a way of thinking about it. And I think this works. So, in any coherent philosophy, there’s an impetus to action. That’s partly what makes the philosophy coherent. And postmodernism is a coherent philosophy. It has an impetus to action. Now, it’s very difficult to describe the entire structure of postmodernism because it’s fuzzy at the edges, it bleeds into other things. But imagine that there’s a core of central concerns. Now imagine that most people who are nominally postmodernists only understand fragments of that core concern. And so, if you take the typical indoctrinated social justice warrior third year women’s studies student, you might say, well, she’s only 15% postmodernist and 85% still human. So, but if you get 10 people like that together, 20 people like that together, there’s enough of the postmodernist doctrine that fills the room, because it’s fragmented into different people, that you have a coherent spirit that animates the group. And it will act as if it has the intelligence of the philosophy. And it will manifest itself as if it’s conspiratorial. Now, there are elements that are also conspiratorial because people do things consciously as well. But you should always assume stupidity before you assume organized malevolence. Right, right. It keeps your thinking clear. Because it’s not like there’s no such thing as organized malevolence. But it’s rare and it requires a lot of skill. Whereas sort of distributed stupidity, that can act conspiratorially without having to have a central agent. And so, look there first and then, and only with great evidence, make the next set of presuppositions. Hi, so I first found out about you on 4chan, which I just want to know who here uses it or is not. Okay, so people are admitting it. So it’s an anonymous chat board. And I think because of that reason, people feel like they can say anything. Maybe something is lost because on Facebook, when your reputation is tied to all the opinions that you feel like you might want to test out. But on a place where it’s anonymous, it’s not. It’s dark. And you have an international appeal. You have this, if I start a Jordan Peterson thread, within five minutes I’ve got people from ten different countries, countries that don’t have English as their main language, are joining in and talking about you. The man who yells out that the emperor has no clothes. And we talk about how archetypes seem to manifest. What are you? You know, the best person to answer that is actually not me, it’s my wife. Because she knows what I am. And you know, it’s not all that great, all things considered. So from an archetypal point of view, what has manifested? What are you embodying that seems to? I mean, we don’t need to see your real ugly face. Jesus. That’s a good one. Look, I told you the story at the beginning of the lecture. I’ve been trying to solve a problem. And I’ve really done everything I can to try to solve that problem. And I’ve been talking about what I learned, and who I learned it from, for 30 years, you know. And that’s had a positive impact, as far as I can tell, on the people to whom I’ve taught it. And so, I’m someone who’s tried to solve the hardest problem that he could find. That’s all. Do you think individuals today should have a more renewed relationship with religion and God? To kind of rebuild the moral authority that you’ve talked about that’s been lost? Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think the question was, do I think that modern people should have a renewed relationship with religion and God? It’s like, yes, absolutely. But it has to be predicated on higher consciousness, so to speak. And I mean that very technically. So this is what happened. This is how our religious systems developed. I’ll give you the very brief version. So if you look at the structure of a chimpanzee troop or a wolf pack, there’s an ethic. And there has to be, because otherwise the wolves would tear each other apart. And so would the chimpanzees. So the chimpanzees, in their dominance hierarchy structures, learn how to act out of society, just like the wolves do. So here’s a rule for a wolf. Wolf A wants to be top dog, and wolf B wants to be top dog. And so they snarl at each other, and they puff out their fur, and they look big and ferocious, and they turn sideways to scare each other. And then one of them chickens out, rolls over, and shows his neck. And basically that is the acting out of, well, I’m a useless supplicant, and your majesty can do what he will with me. And then the proper wolf king says, yeah, well, I might need your useless carcass to haul down a moose tomorrow, so I could tear out your throat, but I won’t. And then they both get up and go along in the pack. And so the reason I’m telling you that is because there’s an ethic there. Here’s another ethic among animals. So if you take juvenile male rats, they need to play. They need to engage in rough and tumble play. Or they develop attention deficit disorder, by the way, which is quite interesting and something to think about for your little rats in school that are developing attention deficit disorder. So if you take a juvenile rat, and he knows he’s going to be able to go into a space where he can play, he’ll work to open a door to enter that space. So that’s how you know he’s motivated, because you can’t ask him, because you can’t speak rat, and neither can he. So you let the rat go in the play space, and you let another rat go in there of about the same age. Imagine one rat’s 10% bigger than the other. So what happens first is the rats wrestle. It’s not aggressive. They wrestle just like Worldwide Wrestling Federation guys wrestle, you know, and for many of the same reasons. And the rats will pin each other, and if you pin the other rat, you win. So if you’re 10% bigger than the little rat, then you can always pin him. You can always win. Okay, so then what happens is the big rat becomes dominant, and the little rat becomes subordinate, and they have a wrestling match, and then they part. The next time they meet, because it’s an iterated game, the next time they meet, the little rat has to ask the big rat to play. And he does that the same way that you ask a child to play, you know, you do your play stance, just like a dog does. You can understand when a dog does that. And so the little rat, you know, gets playful with the big rat, and then they play. But if you pair them repeatedly, the big rat has to let the little rat win at least 30% of the time, or the little rat won’t invite him to play anymore. Right, that’s cool. That’s so cool, man. Jack Pinksepp discovered that. He also discovered that if you tickled rats, they giggled, but they do it ultrasonically. So you have to, like bats. So he discovered the play circuit. It’s a major, major neuroscience discovery. And so there’s an emergent ethic in play, a fair play ethic. And, now hell, I can’t remember what your question was. Oh yes, okay, so what happens is that there’s an ethic that emerges out of social interaction. And then, because human beings are conscious, we watch that ethic emerge, and then we start telling stories about it. We tell stories about the honorable person. And the honorable person who doesn’t just win today’s game, but wins it in a way that makes everyone invite him to play games infinitely into the future. Right, so that makes you the meta-player. That’s what you’re trying to be. And that’s the hero who goes into the unknown, right? It’s the person who acts in proper interactions with other people. It’s truly an emergent, it’s an emergent ethic. It’s real. It’s more real than anything else. We map that, and that’s somehow associated with our consciousness. Well, we need to understand these sorts of things in order to put a biological structure underneath our religious thinking again, and to tie it into our scientific knowledge, and to become awake and aware of these sorts of things, so that we can reestablish the foundation underneath our culture. And it’s a terrifying thing to do, because it does place a burden on people, right? But you want a burden. And it’s so interesting. It’s really… One of the things that’s also so cool about what’s been happening, I don’t understand this. I commented on this at the University of Toronto debate. The first thing I did, which was unexpected to me and everyone else, they didn’t know what the hell I was doing, is I looked around and said, hey, you know, 80% of the people in this room are men. It’s like, why is that? Something’s going on here. And it’s an indication that men and women have different interests. 91% of my viewers are men. What the hell? Why is that? Look at this room. It’s almost all men. And men don’t come to these sorts of things, generally speaking, right? Maybe because they’re stubborn and ornery. But… So there’s also something specifically in this for men, and by implication, for women, because what do you want? Useless men? No. You don’t want useless men. That’s for sure. Although, if you have a useless man, you get to dominate him. And so maybe that’s not such a big price to pay for having someone around that you can treat like an infant. So that’s the downside of the war between men and women. But a woman with any sense wants a man who’s dangerous but tame. So maybe that’s part of… Well, we’ll leave it at that. I had a question regarding a remark that you made in a recent lecture where you characterized your classroom as occupying the space of the cognitive elite. Where they would have a general IQ of, say, 120 to 130. I just wanted to know if you could substantiate on that, given the fact that there is an extraordinary diverse range of disciplines which require different kinds of broad skills in the university. Also, with the kind of confounding variable that the university may not be considered by some people to be the most exclusively… the exclusiveness of what it once was as a representation of the enlightened cognitive elite. Okay, well, I could talk… Let me talk about the situation at the Ivy League universities first. The question, broadly speaking, covers the question about intelligence and about its diverse manifestations and about its role in selection for universities. If you go back and look at the records at Harvard, for example, in the early 1960s, the typical IQ for a Harvard student was about 105 to 110. Not much above average. But that’s because they were finishing schools for the rich, roughly speaking. And, you know, if you had a rich father and he made his money, he was probably well above average in intelligence. But if you were his offspring, there’s regression towards the mean, so there’s no reason to assume that by nature of your position you were going to be particularly intelligent. Anyways, the average Ivy League student was bright, but not outstandingly so. Now it’s like IQ of 145. Three standard deviations above the mean. The reason for that is because they’re selected by the SAT. Scholastic Aptitude Test. It’s an IQ test. They won’t say it’s an IQ test, but that doesn’t matter. It isn’t tech… It’s an IQ test. It’s as simple as that. Any test that contains a sufficiently diverse range of problem-solving questions that’s rank-ordered in accuracy among people is an IQ test. The correlation’s like .85. So, and what has happened… There’s two things that have happened. I mean, the Ivy Leagues have got more and more selective because they can, and so the average IQ of their students has just continued to move upwards. And then the average IQ of the population has actually increased to a substantive degree too over the last 50 years, partly because… partly, perhaps mostly, because of improved nutrition and information exposure among the more deprived members of the culture. It’s better to watch TV than to sit alone in your crib, for example, and isolate it. And people have enough food now, so the really low end of the intelligence spectrum has been truncated, and the general population IQ has increased. So, with regards to institutions like the University of Toronto, say, the average IQ at the University of Toronto was somewhere between 120 and 130. And we know that because we’ve tested it. And it’s not surprising because you’re basically selected for cognitive prowess, right? Because grades are a rough marker of intelligence. Conscientiousness, by the way, also matters. Independent trait. Because the best two predictors of university grades are conscientiousness and intelligence. Not creativity, by the way. Zero correlation with creativity. So, yes? I’m very interested in your comments on this phrase. Western culture is committing suicide. Why is that happening? Guilt. Yes, what guilt? Expand please. Who’s guilt? What guilt? Well, there’s lots for people to be guilty about. You know, I mean, you might say, to what degree should you bear the horrendous guilt of your ancestors? And that’s a really hard question. I mean, because the radical left answer would be, to the degree that you’re privileged by your ancestry, you should bear their guilt. And what, commit suicide? Well, yes. The question is, then, what do you do? Well, what you should do is, what I suggested today, I would say, is take responsibility for your lives. And understand that what you have came at a terrible cost, and that you have an ethical obligation to use it properly. And that would be sufficient to pay for the sins of your ancestors, so to speak. I think it’s absolutely reprehensible that the radical left dares to attribute to ethnically identified groups collective guilt. There’s absolutely no excuse for that. It’s completely murderous. And that should be rejected out of hand. So, but that’s independent of the issue about what you should do, given that part of your wealth is a consequence of historical catastrophe. So you should try to sort that out, roughly speaking, and for everyone’s benefit. But not necessarily because you’re any more guilty personally. You’re guilty as hell personally, but so is everyone else. That’s the critical thing. So is everyone else. Okay, I would like to answer that question, but I can’t. And there’s two reasons for that. The one is that there’s a large element of the answer that has to be legal, and I can’t do that. And the other part of it is because I’m actually too tired to formulate a coherent response to that. And I don’t want to formulate an incoherent response, so I’m sorry that I can’t be… I mean, obviously I believe that people’s right to communicate should be as untrammeled as possible. But to bridge the gap between that and your specific concern requires a feat of mental energy that I can’t do at the moment, and maybe ever. At the back? Now, two quick questions. I want to get your view on the social construct of a safe space that universities like Miami, or U of A have tried to push on us. And as well I want to understand what your view on this whole white privilege thing is that universities like U of A, U of T, Ryerson, Yale, all these other universities are trying to cram down on us. I think the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it’s not because white people aren’t privileged. You know, we have all sorts of privileges, and most people have privileges of all sorts, and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them, I would say. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group, there is absolutely nothing that’s more racist than that. It’s absolutely abhorrent. I can’t… I mean, that… if you really want to know more about that sort of thing, you should read about the KULAKS in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. K-U-L-A-K-S. Because they were farmers who were very productive. They were the most productive element of the agricultural strata in Russia. And they were virtually all killed, raped, and robbed by the collectivists who insisted that because they showed signs of wealth, they were criminals and robbers. So… and one of the consequences of the prosecution of the KULAKS was the death of 6 million Ukrainians from a famine in the 1930s. The idea of collectively held guilt at the level of the individual as a legal or philosophical principle is dangerous. It’s precisely the sort of danger that people who are really looking for trouble would push. So… and just a cursory glance at 20th century history should teach anyone who wants to know exactly how unacceptable that is. With regards to your first… okay, there’s the safe space issue, but you also said something right at the beginning. You announced your sexual preference at the beginning, and I understand exactly why you did that, but I have a comment about that. And this is something for people in the audience to think about. I’ve received at least 25 letters from transsexual people. And that’s quite a few, because there aren’t that many transsexual people, right? So they’re rare. They’re very rare. And every single one of them, but one was supportive. And the one that wasn’t supportive was mildly critical. And they said exactly the same thing that you said, roughly speaking. And so one of the things we want to remember is that just because some noisy activists stand up and say, because I’m a member of this group, or even worse, because I say I’m a member of this group, I am therefore an advocate for that group’s interests, is we should just dispense with that self-identification as a worthy representative instantaneously. Because it’s predicated on the idea that one dimension of a person’s identity is sufficiently, what would you say, broad and all-encompassing, so that you can infer their political stance, for example, which you can’t. And so the trans people that have written me, they all say the same thing. A. Those people do not speak for me. B. We’re not all the same. C. Most of us think that the enforced pronoun issue is doing nothing but drawing negative attention to us. D. Most of us just want to be referred to by the other pronoun. That’s the whole point. So this has been very, very reassuring to me, because one of the things I presumed right from the onset was that there was no evidence whatsoever that this nonsensical legislation and the postmodern idiocy behind it is in fact demanded by this community, or that it will in any way be in anyone’s best interest. No. I don’t buy it. I think it’s rotten right to the core. And then the safe space issue. It’s like if you need a safe space, see a therapist. Really. University is not a safe space. If university is done right, it is a radically unsafe space. If you want to go somewhere and get yourself taken apart intellectually, and then hopefully put back together, then you go to university. Everything you believe should be challenged in every possible way. But not in a destructive sense, right? Like when you’re renovating a house, you don’t just burn it to the ground and walk away. That’s what the postmodernists do to adolescents, by the way. You dismantle it in consultation with its occupant, attempting to build something more beautiful and functional on the foundation. It’s not a safe space. You know, in my classes, and I tell my students this right at the beginning, I’m trying to get them to understand why they are Nazis. Right? There isn’t anything more unsafe than that. And all of them, virtually all of them, write back to me afterwards and say, this was the most worthwhile class I’ve ever had in my life, and it changed my life. It’s like, well, I’m teaching you the worst possible thing about yourself. And your response is, oh, that was so useful, and I’m way better than I was. But it’s in keeping with the idea that you need to be exposed to things that you fear and hate, because that’s where salvation lies, roughly speaking. So, yes? You mentioned how humanity seeks certainty, and also how the good we need to attain is essentially achieved through an act of faith, which is speaking the truth the best we can. And what I’ve been thinking about is, how can we have confidence in the existence and the good of the logos? Is there anything to ground our confidence in? That’s a great question. So, is there anything to ground our confidence in the logos? Yeah, sure. Two things. One, the testimony of the ages. Two, practical experience. Try it. Try it. You know, you start by, while doing what I suggested earlier, which is fixing the things around you that you can fix. Because that’s like the embodied manifestation of the logos. That’s, by the way, why Christ was a carpenter, archetypically speaking, right? Because he fixed things. So, and, you know, if you’re a bad carpenter, the things you fix fall apart. So there’s truth in being a carpenter. But then the next thing is, you probably can’t speak the truth because no one can. But you cannot say things you know to be lies. And that’s a really good place to start. And, you know, you can learn to pay attention to that very rapidly. You kind of know already. But it’s a consultation with your embodied being. When you say something you know to be false, you won’t be able to stand up straight. You’ll get weak. You’ll feel a physical division take place inside you. It’s partly shame. Because what you’re not, you’re failing to bear the burden of your existence, and you’re revealing that to yourself by your use of deceit. Stop saying things you know to be false. And then watch what happens. And this is the existential element of it. It can’t be proved, as far as I can tell, the same way that you would prove a scientific hypothesis. It can only be proved in the confines of your life. And you actually have to sacrifice your life to the logos in order to find out. Because the only way you’ll test it is by acting it out and see what happens. You don’t get to do it twice. But I think the consequences will reveal themselves relatively quickly. My experience has been that, because I’m always working with my clients, and I see clinical clients 20 hours a week, roughly speaking, and we’re always working on stating things more clearly. Trying to make things better, you know. And it almost inevitably at least makes the horrible things bearable, which is a lot better, you know. And sometimes makes mediocre things way better as people’s lives expand and they get more confident and straighten things out around them. So it’s the testimony of the ages and your willingness to test it existentially in the confines of your own life. You’ll find that there isn’t anything more interesting than you can do. Because it takes the stultifying predictability out of your life. You never know what will happen if you say something that’s true. It’s a miracle. Miracles will happen. And that’s very interesting. It’s crazily interesting. And so that’s good. Crazily interesting. You’ve got that to set against tragedy. And so, well, you can try it. Thank you.