https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=cGkQil14LPQ
Dr. Peterson, you mentioned these ideas of responsibility, of virtue, of respect. You’ve detailed what you think students shouldn’t do in these examples of protests and these examples of certain types of activist tactics. What advice would you have for students? How can students make the changes that they want to make? Particularly, do you have any advice for students here? Yeah, read great books. Really, man! You’ve got this four-year period that has been carved out of your lives by society. It’s given you an identity, like a high-quality identity and freedom at the same time. You’re not going to get that again in your life. You’ve got a respectable identity, university student, and complete freedom associated with that or as near as you’re ever going to get. You’ve got these unbelievable libraries that are full of the writings of people who are intelligent and articulate beyond comprehension. You can go there and you can learn all this. You might think, well, why should you learn it? Well, you learn it to get a job or you learn it to get good grades or you learn it to get a degree. That’s all nonsense. It’s nonsense. The reason that you come to university to be educated is because there is nothing more powerful than someone who is articulate and who can think and speak. It’s power. I mean power of the best sort. It’s authority and influence and respectability and competence. You come to university to craft your highest skill. Your highest skill is to be found in articulated speech. If you’re a master at formulating your arguments, you win everything. Better than that, when you win everything, everyone around you wins too. To transform yourself into, let’s consider your transformation into something approximating the logos. It means you shine a light on the whole world. Well, there’s nothing more exciting to do than that. There’s nothing better you can possibly do. To think that you’re coming to university to be trained to have a job, it’s like great. That’s a hell of a lot better than being unemployed and covered with cheeto dust while you’re snacking away in front of your video game in the basement. I don’t have anything against video games, by the way. It’s hardly a triumphant call to being in the world. That’s what universities should be calling for. It’s like, God, you people. I know what Harvard students are like. I taught here for five years. You people are spectacular. You’re spectacular. You’re all capable of being world beaters. You transform yourself into something that’s articulated and sensible and grounded in history and knowledgeable and wise, man. You can do anything you want and hopefully anything you want for good. Because if you have any sense, everything you want to do would be for the good because there’s nothing more compelling or meaningful or useful in combating the tragedy of life than to struggle with all your soul on behalf of the good. The universities have forgotten that. It’s why everyone’s bailing out of the humanities. They should. The humanities are corrupt. They’re corrupt because they’re not telling students this. It’s so bloody obvious. It’s like, learn to think. Learn to speak. Learn to read. It makes you a superpower. An individual superpower. I don’t understand why that isn’t just told to students. It’s not that hard to understand. Everyone wants to hear it. It’s like, really? I could do that? I could do that? It’s like, yeah, really, you could do that. The whole society around you has labored for really thousands of years to provide every single one of you with this spectacular opportunity that you have while you’re undergraduates and graduate students here. That’s just praying that you would come here and manifest everything that you could manifest. That’s what you should be doing instead of waving placards and complaining about how you’re oppressed, for God’s sake. You see these Yale students complaining about their oppression. It just leaves me aghast. It’s like, well, we’re against the ruling class. It’s like, no, no, no, you’re baby ruling class members. You’re young. The only reason you’re not rich is because you’re young. That’s the best. Really, if you look at the 1% even, the dreaded 1%, most of those people are old. Why? Well, when you progress through life, if you’re reasonably successful, you trade in your promising youth for your wealthy old age, but you’re still bloody old. Would you trade it? Would you trade your youth for that? If you factor age out of the economic equation, things look a lot different. Well, of course older people have more money. If they have any sense, they’ve been collecting it for their whole life. Is that somehow unfair? It’s not unfair unless you want to be poverty stricken when you’re 70. You don’t want to be poverty stricken when you’re 70. I just don’t understand what’s happened to the universities. I can’t believe that you’re not told when you come the first day, look, man, you’re here on a heroic mission. You’re going to take your capacity to articulate yourself to levels that are undreamed of. You’re going to come out of here unstoppable. You’re going to be able to do anything you want. That’s what you’re here for. Instead, you’re taught that, well, the world’s a pretty oppressive place and you’re probably the bottom of the victim pile and there’s virtually nothing you can do about it except deconstruct the patriarchy. It’s so weak need and so pathetic that universities should be embarrassed that that’s what they’re peddling to students. I’m embarrassed by it. I’ve gone on public record telling parents, bloody well send your boys to trade school because at least they’ll learn something useful. That’s a terrible thing for someone like me to say because I do believe that being articulated and educated in the highest possible manner is there’s nothing that’s better for you and for society. Why have the universities forgotten this? That’s postmodern neo-Marxism for you. And the philosophy of intense resentment and oppression and group identity and God, it’s just pathetic.