https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AKHuxVvA7T8
So, back in February I received the following letter from a student at Linfield College, and according to its website, With campuses in McMinnville, Portland, and a prestigious online program, Linfield College is a premier choice in the Pacific Northwest for a high-quality, traditional liberal arts education. Want to learn more? Contact us for details about our degree and certificate program offerings. A student there, who I won’t name, sent me the following letter. Dear Dr. Peterson, I’m an undergraduate student at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. The International Students for Liberty conference recently granted me a small sum to organize pro-liberty events on campus, with an emphasis on the importance of free speech. I’m writing to ask you if you’re accepting speaking invitations at this time, and if your schedule sometime between now and May would allow it, to help narrow down my options. I would like to offer you 750 and any excess funds will go towards his research. So moving on, I’d like to talk a little about the club. When Kiefer and I started this club back in February, we didn’t know what to expect. We did have a vision, however. Given recent political events, not just the Linfield, but college campuses across America have been split, volatile. Many people are afraid to speak out over fears of fast-grids to them. Our goal as a club is not to indoctrinate libertarian values, but to engage the public in the community in open, free debate for the sake of intellectual advancement, being able to debate, being able to reach conclusions with sanity and respect to one another. I’d like to thank the leadership that I just introduced for all the hard work towards accomplishing this goal that I truly believe in. And finally, I wish the best for next semester’s chapter president, Kiefer Smith, for a takeover next semester after I graduate. More importantly, there is something I need to address to the Linfield community. On behalf of the club and the leadership, I’d like to take this time to publicly apologize for any unintended harm that has occurred over these past two weeks. It is not within the club’s intentions to generate any harm or create an environment where people feel unsafe. We just want to make that clear. We want people to be more open. That’s our intention. And I’m also going to ask the public to not raise any pitchforks at my school. I love my school. I really do. I didn’t move all the way out here from Florida just to trash it or anything. I love my school. And beyond that, the situation behind the scenes is a lot more complex than what’s been released to the public. This club itself has made mistakes too. And I just gotta say thank you for your cooperation on these matters. Now, I’d like to introduce the main coordinator of this event. He has done far more work than any of us. You know, he spoke with Peterson far in advance. He spoke with the media. He found his venue last minute. Such a beautiful venue, by the way. And he handled most of the paperwork and more. I can’t thank him enough. Please welcome event coordinator Parker Wells. Hello, everybody. My name is Parker Wells. I’m a senior at Linfield College. And I’m overjoyed to see the response. Considering this event had some major complications just last week, it’s overwhelming that the response has been so positive here. So thank you for that. I have to express my gratitude to Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty. For students who are unsure about how to get involved on your college campuses, I highly recommend the Network of Liberty-Minded Organizations because they’ve been very supportive throughout this whole audience. So thank you to them. Lastly, I’d like to frame tonight’s talk as an opportunity for us to open our minds and make an honest effort at understanding each other. And on that note, all the way from the University of Toronto, please welcome Dr. Jordan Peters. Thank you, Dr. Peters. Thank you, Parker. And also thank you for your persistence. The first thing I’d like to say is that Parker told me ten minutes before the talk that he has very much enjoyed going to Linfield College, which I just had the opportunity to stroll through. It’s an absolutely spectacularly beautiful little place. It looks like everyone’s dream of a classic liberal arts college. So he wanted me to let everyone know that he’s had a great time there and that he didn’t want to bring any disrepute on the college. And so I thought I’d do that because it’s important to know that. It’s easy for things to be made black and white because that’s simple, but certainly things aren’t the least bit simple. It’s useful to keep that in mind. So I’m going to start this by reading you something that I wrote specifically for this talk. I want to, I always want to do something different in each talk because, well, I’ve already done the previous talk. And partly the reason that you talk is to get things clear in your mind. It’s a good way of thinking. It’s the best way of thinking. So I suppose in some sense it’s a, I don’t know if it’s a poem, maybe that’s what it is. It’s what I hope to cover tonight. So what I’m going to do is read you the outline first. I guess it’s an outline. And then I’m going to go through it line by line and see if I can clarify to you and also to me what I mean. So I’m going to orient the talk tonight around the ethics of free speech. We’ve talked a lot about or thought a lot about, let’s say, the right to free speech and something you might want to also consider the obligation to free speech because I actually think it’s deeper than a right. I think you’re obligated to speak freely because otherwise people don’t have the benefit of your whatever wisdom you possess. And at least you possess the wisdom of your own experience. At the very least you have that. And that’s as valid a form of truth as any other form of truth. And it’s often a truth that can be usefully communicated to other people. And so it’s to the community’s benefit that you say what your experience has taught you because there isn’t anyone who has experience like you. And one of the things that I’ve learned from being a clinical psychologist, but I would say more specifically from being a very careful listener, is that if you listen to people and they can talk to you, they tell you the most amazing things. My typical week I prepare my work. Even today, I was speaking to four different people. They’re supporters of mine online. And I meet with some of them. And I had four conversations that were just absolutely profound. And it’s so interesting because if people are loud, encouraged to express themselves and that’s something that you can do by listening to someone, they open up and they’re as interesting as a Dostoevsky novel. People’s actual lives are extraordinarily interesting. And it’s important that they can speak freely about them because then they can tell you all the things they know that you don’t know and then you get to know them and that’s such a good deal. So, I’m going to tell you some things that I believe to be true and that will constitute the backboard of this talk. So the first thing is that life is suffering. And then I would say that this is an attempt to, this is my attempt to reconcile the existence of multiple transcendent virtues. Transcendent virtues are the lights that guide you through your life essentially. The principles by which it’s necessary to live if you’re going to have a life that’s meaningful and profound and beneficial. And there are multiple transcendent values and it isn’t clear how they relate to one another. And this is my attempt to understand how they relate. And so I started with the truth that I believe to be supreme, which is that life is suffering. And then that love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated. And that truth is the handmaiden of love. And that dialogue is the pathway to truth. And that humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn. And that to learn is to die voluntarily and be born again in great ways and small. So speech must be untrammeled so that dialogue can take place. So that we can all humbly learn. So that truth can serve love. So that suffering can be ameliorated. So that we can all stumble forward, so to speak, to the kingdom of God. So I’ll try to unpack that. Well, I think the idea that life is suffering comes as no surprise to anyone. In my estimation, there’s two reasons for that. One seems to have to do with the structure of being itself. And by that I mean there seems to be something about limitation that’s required for existence. And it’s a difficult notion to make clear, but I can tell you a little story about what I thought when my son was young, when he was maybe three years old. I thought he was a remarkable creature. I thought the same about my daughter. There’s something remarkable about little kids. They’re little beacons of enthusiasm and wonder, I suppose. Although it takes great effort to care for them, they repay you, partly by their enthusiasm and partly by the fact that they look at the world as if it’s a new thing. And that allows you to do the same thing when you’re around them. So they refresh the world for you. And that’s a great thing. Now, of course, if you’re a parent, one of the things that’s frightening about your children is that they’re vulnerable. And that’s part of the burden of responsibility that’s associated with being a parent. And you might think about that vulnerability as a liability, I suppose. That’s one way of thinking about it. But then I thought, well, that’s an interesting way of looking at it, that it’s only a liability, because maybe you would like your child not to be vulnerable. And then I thought that through. In a practical manner, I suppose, I thought, well, because I was worried he’d go out in the street and a car would run over him, or he’d go into the playground and some bully would knock him over, a dog would bite him, or something like that. And of course, little kids are always blocking themselves and falling down the stairs and that kind of thing. I thought, well, what would you have to do to have a little being that didn’t have those problems? Well, I thought, well, you could give him a superhuman intelligence, that would be a start. He could be 20 feet tall instead of 3 feet tall, and he could be encased in titanium, and he could be made invulnerable or near invulnerable. But the problem with that is that you have to replace what he was piece by piece until there was nothing left of him. And so that was partly when I realized, because realizations like this of course unfold over time, that when you deeply care for someone, you don’t care for them despite their vulnerability, you care for them with the knowledge that their vulnerability is an intrinsic part of them. You care for the remarkable fact of their weakness and specificity, just as much as you care for them for whatever abilities they bring to bear, whatever capacities they have. And so to love someone is to simultaneously accept their vulnerability as a valid part of their being. And that’s a necessary thing to do in life, because life is suffering. But without it, without the vulnerability that brings suffering, there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of individual existence. And so to me it seems that in order for us to exist as individuals in some fundamentally real sense, we have to be limited in precisely the manner that we are limited, and that being in some sense requires that limitation and that vulnerability. There’s an old idea, I don’t remember where I read it, it was many years ago, I think it was from Jewish commentary on the Torah, it was like a Zen cone almost, the question was, what does it mean with the classical attributes of God, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, what does it mean like that lack? And it’s a very interesting question, because of course obviously the obvious answer is, well nothing. But that’s the wrong answer, the right answer is that a being like that lacks limitation. And the commentator was putting that argument forward as a justification for the creation of man. And I thought that was a spectacularly brilliant insight, that there’s something that lacks nothing, lacks, and that’s lack itself. And I read something about Kierkegaard, something written by Kierkegaard, where he said the same thing, he said that he knew himself as someone who was never going to be able to make life easy for people in the way that the great inventors of the late 19th century had made things increasingly easy for people. And so that his task was going to be to determine how it was that he could make life more difficult for people, and that he knew he would be thanked as one of the benefactors of the age for doing precisely that. And Kierkegaard attempted to, I suppose, lay a heavy moral burden on his readers, and he knew that that was perhaps not something that people would appreciate immediately, but perhaps on reflection they would find that that was exactly what they wanted. And one of the things that’s been very remarkable to me, as I’ve been speaking to people recently, is that because I think that I’m doing something similar, I’m trying to lay a burden on people, and by all appearances I’m trying to lay a burden on man, and at least that’s who’s responding to it. I mean, you look at this audience, it must be 95% man. It’s very, very interesting to me. But there’s something about responsibility that’s associated with the transcendence of suffering, and that’s absolutely necessary for life to proceed properly. So life is suffering because we’re vulnerable, and it’s also suffering, I would say, because we’re evil. And I’ve tried to define evil. The tragic part of life is the fact that our vulnerability is built in, and we have psychological problems, and we have physical problems, and we all die. That’s part of the structure of existence. It’s the same structure as the life of the human being. It’s the same structure that brings about tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and natural catastrophes of all types. It’s the impartial brutality of reality, and that contributes greatly to human suffering, although it may, as I said, also be a precondition for being itself. But then there’s the other kind of suffering that we bring upon ourselves, and I would categorize that under the heading of malevolence. Malevolence is the desire to increase suffering, in some sense, for the sake of suffering itself. It’s like an art form. I think that’s the best way to conceptualize it. It’s something aesthetic. It’s the same aesthetic that drove the Nazis to put that terrible joke above the gates of Auschwitz, which was that work would make you free. Of course, the freedom that was being offered in the Nazi camps was death, but it was a great, terrible joke. It’s a very malevolent spirit that would dare to joke in that manner, but that’s a spirit that we all have to contend with, because there’s part of each of us that, because of the suffering that life entails, is bitter about existence and would wish, in some sense, to see it eradicated. That’s something I learned from reading Goethe’s great play Faust. He has a character in there, Mephistopheles, who’s sort of the intellectual version of Satan, I suppose. And Goethe has Mephistopheles attempt to explain the reason for his existence, or at least the reason for his mode of being. And Mephistopheles basically says, and Goethe hasn’t said this twice, that because existence is characterized by such dreadful suffering, it would be better if it never existed at all. And that’s what he’s working to bring about. And that struck me in a very deep manner, because I had recognized by that time that life was difficult enough so that it was challenging to walk through it, without becoming embittered and resentful, let’s say. And then to become arrogant because of that, and then to become a judge of existence because of that. And if you ever wonder, and of course you do, what is going through the minds of people who do such things as shoot up elementary schools full of school children, knowing the things that I just described is very useful in developing some understanding because the people who do that are resentful and bitter, and they’ve brooded upon it for, well, not hours, but weeks and months and years. And they conclude that existence itself is evil and that it should be taken revenge upon. And the way that you take revenge upon existence most precisely is to find the most innocent people and punish them the most dreadfully. And that’s the motive behind shooting elementary school kids in a playground, let’s say. And that’s a very dark place to go. But that’s a place that people are perfectly capable of going. And the terrible thing is that we have the motivation to go there. And you can make a rational case for going there, but that doesn’t make it the proper place to go. And that brings me to the second point, which is that love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated. Love is a very difficult word to use because in some sense it’s being moused to death. You know, it’s such a common place. If you’re attempting to affect virtue, then the first thing you do is speak about love. And it’s very difficult to speak about love without feeling, I would say, self-contempt, really, because it is a word that’s misused so badly. But I’d like to offer a technical definition of it and then put it into relationship, into proper relationship with what I already discussed. If hatred is the desire to see being eliminated because of its catastrophe, then love is the desire to see being elevated, maybe even because of that suffering. And to say that the proper orientation in life is to work diligently for the alleviation of unnecessary suffering. And to make that the core element of your being, your actual aim, because you need an aim. Everyone needs an aim. We’re creatures who are evolved to aim. We’re hunters for that matter. And we need a target to aim at. We’re not ever oriented properly without an aim. And then you might say, well, why not choose a name that is everything that you could possibly want it to be? And I would say that that is what you want to do, because first of all, being miserable and vulnerable and subject to catastrophe and decay, it’s easy to sink into self-contempt and misery, self-conscious misery. And I think the only way out of that is to voluntarily shoulder a burden that the shouldering of grants you some respect for your own existence. And so then you think, well, the way forward confidently is to find the biggest load that you can possibly lift and then lift it and then walk forward with it. Because then you can see that there’s something to you that transcends your vulnerability and ennobles the world and works against the very terrible problems of both suffering and malevolence And that might drive you to despair to begin with. And so when I’m working with my clinical clients and I think when I’m speaking to people in general, when I’m properly oriented, this is a development of thought that was originally laid down in part by Carl Rogers, although he was deeply influenced by his Christian background. He’s a very famous psychologist. He said that the way to treat people in therapy is with unconditional positive regard. And I would say that that’s a noble formulation, but it’s erroneous because that isn’t exactly, in my estimation, what you should do with people. And I don’t think it’s what I do with people. What I do with people is to try to find the part of them that is striving towards the light and that would like being itself to be elevated and ennobled and suffering, ameliorating, especially the unnecessary suffering, and then form an alliance with that and communicate with that and encourage that, which is what I think you do to people that you love. And you can’t do that if there’s bitterness in your heart because that’s actually the part that you want to destroy if you’re bitter. As the story of Cain and Abel tells us in a terribly brief period of time with terrible power, you replace contempt for being and resentment and hatred for being with love. And that’s the desire to see the good flourish in you and in others. And I don’t mean the good in that smarmy and contemptible manner that it’s often presented. I mean the good as the culmination of brilliant awareness and courage and strength that it really is. And that you would wish to bring forward in everyone, to encourage in everyone, if you were oriented properly in the world. And to seek that kind of orientation is to ground yourself in love instead of Mephistophilia and hatred. And you have nothing better to do than that. And you might as well do the best that you have to do because what do you have to lose? You’re going to lose everything anyways. So in the process of preparing to lose everything, you might as well risk everything you have doing the best thing that you could possibly conceive of. And there’s no loss in that for you. There’s nothing but gain. There’s nothing but gain for everyone around you if you do that. So why would you not do that? Except for bitterness and resentment and perhaps a lack of confidence. Perhaps because you haven’t been encouraged properly. And that’s too bad because that’s a lot different than being empowered by the way to be encouraged. It’s a much better word. So then I wrote that truth is the handmaiden of love. And what I meant by that, because I’ve always wondered, knowing that truth and love are perhaps the cardinal virtues, what is the proper way of conceptualizing the relationship? And it seems to me that truth has to be oriented towards something. It needs a context. There’s no such thing as, not in the way that I’m thinking of truth, there’s no such thing as context-free truth. Not in the moral domain, not in the domain of action. And that’s the, I’m talking about truth in action. Truth is the handmaiden of love, I suppose, because having oriented yourself to the highest good that you can conceive of, like Geppetto wishing on the star in Pinocchio, then you speak truth with that orientation in mind. Having the faith, I suppose, that because being is good, articulating its nature as clearly as possible is the best way of continuing to encourage that good to spring forward. Otherwise, you’re presuming, if you use deceit and falsehood, that being is essentially corrupt. Because otherwise you wouldn’t have to falsify it in order to operate in the world. So you could say, well, you could make the courageous assumption that being is good, despite, I suppose, some evidence to the contrary, and then take the great risk of speaking truth in relationship to that, under the assumption that whatever speaking truth produces, if it’s oriented properly, is good. You have to make decisions like that in your life. I mean, I can give you a simple example, I suppose. A while back I was speaking at McMaster University, and there were a lot of protesters there, and that made me nervous because you never know when someone is going to do something unforgivably stupid. And so far I’ve been fortunate that in the controversies that I’ve been embroiled in, that no one has done that. They’ve pushed the edges of that, but they haven’t done it. And truly thank God for that. But having said that, I wasn’t upset by the presence of the protesters, because I couldn’t tell if the fact they were there was a good thing or a bad thing. It could be a good thing, it could be a bad thing, it was a consequence of what I had been speaking of, and that’s what happened. And so I thought there was no reason not to let that play itself out, because the end of the story had not yet been reached, and the meaning of the events could not yet be specified. And sometimes in your family, if you tell someone the truth, and I hope I’ve coined this, I don’t mean black truths. There’s white lies, and a white lie occurs. But to preserve a higher moral virtue, you continue to get lower moral virtue. Perhaps you don’t tell a child dying of cancer that they’re going to die. I don’t know, because it depends very much on the particulars of the situation. You can understand that you would have mixed motives in a situation like that. You can also speak black truths, and a black truth is when you say something that’s normally true, but you’re using it as a weapon for another purpose. And that’s not a truth. That’s really a more profound and evil lie than any other one that you could possibly manage, because you’re using the truth in a way that corrupts it, corrupts the truth itself, and that’s really reprehensible. But barring the use of the black truth, you know, if within your family you say what you mean, you say what you think, that can often cause tremendous upheaval, because many relationships are cobbled together by various alliances of willful blindness, and things left unspoken, and that’s a very bad long-term strategy. I’ve seen people who are embroiled in the death throes of a relationship that perhaps accrued a hundred thousand lies over its course, and became so unstable because of that that there was no hope for it. Each of those lies was a forestowed opportunity to address something difficult with truth that was foregone, and all that does is make those unsolved problems accumulate and multiply, and they eventually take form and attack, and generally when you’re least expected. And so, if you speak the truth in your family, cautiously and carefully, and knowing that you could be wrong, you will cause upheaval and conflict, but it’s conceivable that that’s the least amount of people in conflict that could exist to make things right. And I believe that that is the case, and that one of the things that I tell people who are too agreeable, let’s say, and who don’t like to cause conflict, and I actually don’t like to cause conflict, because I’m more agreeable than I should be, is that the ethical requirement to tell the truth trumps any desire to avoid conflict. And it’s partly because you only forestall the conflict and magnify it. There’s no escaping it, and it’s better to engage in it directly when the necessity first arises than to forestall it. And so, for people who are only too willing to make peace at the expense of themselves, let’s say, I try to encourage them to generate conflict by telling the truth, and I would say inevitably, that has nothing but beneficial medium to long-term consequences in their life, even though it exposes them to more conflict in the short term. It also alleviates their resentment, because if someone has made you resentful, or if you’ve become resentful because of someone’s actions, then there’s only two real reasons why, and one is that you should pull up your socks and quit complaining, and quit whining, because you’re being required to shoulder a responsibility, or you’re being oppressed and tyrannized by someone who doesn’t know where their proper limits are, and in the former case, then you should get your act together, and in the latter case, you should stand up and stop that person from approaching upon you. So you speak truth in your family, let’s say, and perhaps even to yourself, and that’s the reason why we value free speech, because the wisdom of humanity and the wisest people that we know, that would include those people who were intelligent enough to found this country on the principles that it is founded on, knew that whatever conflict free speech might produce, and the wisdom of the people who are the most intelligent, and the wisdom of the people who are the most intelligent, knew that whatever conflict free speech might produce, pale in comparison to the conflict that was generated by tyranny and repression of the exchange of opinion, and so it’s never a matter of picking a safe path, because there’s no such thing as a safe path, it’s only a matter of picking the path that produces the least catastrophe possible, and it’s an inviolable principle, I would say, and also the fundamental principle of Western civilization, that speech freely exchanged is the best pathway to peace and redemption that we have identified, and so it should remain untrammeled under all circumstances possible, subject to very infrequent restraints of the sort that are already encapsulated in law, such that, for example, you cannot incite someone to a criminal activity, humility, sorry, dialogue is the pathway to truth, well, to understand that, you have to understand why we think, and the reason we think is for the same reason that animals, including us, act, and the reason that animals act is so that they can survive in the world, they do things so that they can survive in the world, but the problem with doing things in the world, the problem with acting in the world is that you can act in a manner that causes the cessation of your being, you can act in a manner that gets you killed, you can act in a manner that makes you sick, you can make a mistake, and you pay for that, and that’s the danger of acting, and so human beings have replaced mere acting with thinking, and what you do when you think is you produce variants of yourself, and you walk them through an imaginary time and a place, and you note what happens to those imaginary variants as they act out those particular patterns of behaviour, and you note which ones get into trouble and which ones succeed, and you let the ones that get into trouble die, and you let the ones that succeed grip hold of your behaviour and act them out in the world, it was a brilliant innovation, you might say, on the part of our ancestors to grow cognitive resources, sophisticated enough to produce variants of ourselves in a fictional space so that our thoughts could die instead of us, and so that’s why we think, so that our thoughts can die instead of us, and then the reason that we speak is to learn from other people’s thoughts, but more than that, it’s that thinking individually is a very limited process, because you’re ignorant, which means you don’t know everything, and not only that, you’re biased in many, many ways, you’re biased by what you know and what you don’t know, you’re biased by what you assume, you’re biased by how you deceive yourself, you’re biased by your temperament and your locale and your position in history, all of these things make you a very limited observer of the world, and so think as you might, you can never think sufficiently, and so what we do because of that is talk, and so if I talk and I’m speaking truthfully, which means I’m telling you how things appear to be to me, that does not mean that I possess the truth, it means that I am saying in an articulated manner as I possibly can, how things appear to me, then you can tell me how things appear to you, and I can listen to you, and maybe you can tell me some things about how things appear that I don’t already know, and that’s such a good deal because the purpose of thinking is to let our thoughts die instead of us, and if you can kill one of my thoughts because it’s stupid, then I don’t have to act it out and die, and so that’s like a really good deal, and so the reason that we engage in dialogue is so that we can take the thoughts that protect us from our own mortality and improve them, and perhaps improve them radically, and there’s just no loss in that, and so what that means in some sense is that you can view everyone who disagrees with you as a source of potential wisdom, because if you talk to someone who agrees with you, all you’re going to find out is what you already know, and you already know that, and if you talk to someone who doesn’t agree with you, maybe one out of ten things they say, or maybe one out of a hundred things, or God only knows, maybe they’re as wise as you in their perverse way, and you can discuss something with them, and they’ll tell you something you never really thought of before, and that’ll just make some potentially miserable event in your life that much less likely, and how good for you can that possibly be, and I do believe that I’ve learned that, and I’ve talked to a great variety of people, and I don’t care if people agree with me, in fact, generally speaking, I find it more interesting if they don’t, and I don’t try to convince people, because I don’t believe that I have any right to determine their destiny, and I don’t want to determine their destiny, because I don’t know what’s best for them, and so I do listen to all sorts of strange and unlikely people, and they tell me things that I don’t know all the time, and that is just a spectacularly good deal, and I decided a long time ago that one of the fundamental choices you make in life is whether you’re in love with what you know, or in love with what you don’t know, and I would say there’s a lot more of what you don’t know than there is of what you know, and so it would be better to be in love with what you don’t know, because you don’t know so much that if you could make friends with what you don’t know, then you’re going to be continually enlightened, and to be enlightened is to be engaged in the process of being enlightened, and you don’t want to be enlightened in any final sense, because that’s just not possible, so it’s to act in a manner that continually enlightens you, and a huge part of that is humility, and that’s another word that’s very difficult to use, I would say, like love, because it’s another word that’s been mouthed to death in some sense, and it sounds like a kind of cringing cowardice-ness that has that connotation, but that’s not what it means, what it means is that you know that there isn’t enough to you, and you can tell that there isn’t enough to you, because your life isn’t everything it could be, that’s the evidence, right? If your life is everything you could imagine it to be, well then perhaps you don’t need humility, but since your life is not everything you could imagine it to be, then you’re deeply wrong about a lot of things, and so since you’re wrong, then you should be looking around for the opportunity to correct those errors, because why wouldn’t you, except to protect your territory, and that territory by definition, given the existence of your own suffering, is insufficient, so why are you clinging to it so desperately? It doesn’t provide what you need or what you want, and a transformation of it, and an expansion, and a re-figuring of it might be everything that you could possibly want, and so then you start to envision yourself, instead of as the holder of a piece of territory, as the person who is attempting to expand their capacity, to act within all sorts of territories, and exposure to more people and to more viewpoints, especially if those people are telling you the truth, which they will do if you actually listen to them, then you get to have your cake and eat it too, that’s a great deal, and it’s another way of reducing unnecessary suffering in the world, by certainly reducing your suffering, and then perhaps learning how to be of greater use to people around you, which again seems to be nothing but for the good, so humility is recognition of personal insufficiency, and the willingness to learn in order to overcome that insufficiency, and then to learn is to die voluntarily, and be born again in great ways and small, that’s an archetypal idea, at the basis of western civilization, is the idea that the logos, which is the capacity for truthful speech, is somehow associated with the act of death and rebirth, and there’s multiple ways of interpreting that idea, and because I’m a psychologist I tend to interpret it psychologically, I don’t claim that the psychological interpretation exhausts the concept, because I don’t believe it does, but you see you are a certain way, and some of that way is in error, and then when you learn that an error has taken place, you have to let go of the conceptions that produce that error, and that can be very, very painful, for example you may have entered into a relationship that was pathological, and you know it’s pathological, but you’re hooked into it, and your emotions are hooked into it, and you’ve configured your life around it, and then in order to move forward, you have to let go of that, you have to admit to all the errors you’ve made, including the time that was wasted, and you have to allow a large part of yourself to die, let’s say, and you experience that in grief and misery and sorrow, and anxiety and sleepless nights and all of that, but it’s better than dying completely, and what that indicates is that every time you learn something, large or small, the part of you that was in error prior to obtaining that bit of information has to deteriorate and disappear, there’s pain associated with that, but then there’s the possibility for regrowth and transformation, and one of the most fundamental decisions that human beings make in their lives is whether or not they’re going to identify with what they are, or with what they could be, and if they identify with what they could be, then they have to continually let what they are die so that what they could be can come forward, and so to learn is to die voluntarily, and to be born again in great ways and small. So then I wrote that speech must be untrammeled so that dialogue can take place. I think of the discussions that I’ve had with my wife, and my kids, but primarily with my wife, who’s a very honest person. In fact, I’ve been married for 28 years. I’ve known her for 45 years, and I’m 55, it’s a very long time, we’ve been friends a very long time, and when she first came to be with me 30 years ago, I was learning some of the things that she said, I was learning some of the things that I’m talking to you about tonight, and I told her that if we were going to be together, that she would have to tell the truth, because if she didn’t tell the truth, then I wouldn’t know who she was, and I wouldn’t know where we were, and I wouldn’t be able to solve any problems, and neither would she, because we’d be living a fictional relationship with one another, that struck me as a very bad idea, and so she took that to heart, I would say, I would also say, is likely a more honest person than me, and I’m not complaining, claiming to be spectacularly, morally virtuous in any particular manner, and I’m quite aware of my multitude of faults, but the fact that she has gripped so tightly onto the truth, means that if I ever have a problem, that I can talk to her, and I know what she thinks, she doesn’t tell me that she’s right, we’ve learned that, you know, because to tell someone the truth does not mean to claim that you’re correct, it only is to claim that you’re trying to communicate the way things look to you as clearly as possible, and that you’re open to the possibility of correction, because if someone can tell you how you’re wrong, precisely exactly how you’re wrong, that’s such a gift, but if someone is willing to tell you the truth, then you have the possibility of learning from them, and then you have two brains instead of one, and that’s a good deal, and that’s actually the spiritual purpose of marriage, let’s say, is to produce a union between two people that’s predicated upon the truth, so that the information flow between them can maximize, and so that they can both be elevated above the restrictions of their own solitary bias existence, and that facilitates, that produces the proper environment for children, because then the children don’t face the father or face the mother, they face the union of the father or the mother, and that’s an inviolable force, and the children will attempt to play one person off against the other, because they’re tricky, because they’re human, and they’re full of trouble, and they’re very good at poking and prodding, and manipulating, and investigating, but they want to hit a wall, they want to hit a wall that doesn’t move, because that makes them secure, and if you have a relationship that’s based on truth, then you can talk about how it is that you should be with your children, for example, and you can agree upon it, and then when the children push the limits, as they inevitably will, they don’t find something spongy, and decayed, and weak, they find something that’s strong, and sturdy, and it’s a wall, and of course they can’t move through the wall, and that’s frustrating, but then they’re protected by the wall, and that stops them from being anxious beyond their capacity to bear, and so that structure that’s brought about by truthful communication, builds the walls around children that allow them to play freely, and expand themselves, and exist properly in the world, and so speech must be untrammeled so that dialogue can take place, it means that, well if you talk to me, I want to know what you think, I don’t say I’ll agree with it, and if you disagree with me, I’m going to fight with every bit of power at my disposal to determine who is correct, while simultaneously recognizing that it’s possible, that it’s you, and not me, and I’m not going to risk undergoing the small or large death that I have to undergo if I find out that you’re right, without being convinced that you’re right, so I’m going to hit you with everything I’ve got, but part of that is also in hope that, if I’m wrong, you will provide me with a better argument than the one I already have, and that will make me better armed to go out into the world, and so there’s utility in being defeated by a skillful opponent, and my wife is precisely that sort of opponent, and also has the additional remarkable talent of being able to string together a list of vicious insults one after the other, like no one I have ever encountered in my life. It’s quite comical because sometimes when we’re embroiled in conflict, she’ll start to do that, and she’ll say something so outrageous, so absolutely beyond the pale, that it’ll make me laugh and crack up, and then, of course, that’s very useful, because if there is something ridiculous about fighting, and that always brings it back to mind, and when she does that, then I’m reminded why I liked her so much back then and still do, because it’s something to see someone with that kind of combative spirit, and so, hooray for that. So, speech must be untrammeled so that dialogue can take place, so that we can all humbly learn. Well, that’s the other element of humility, is that humility is a precondition for learning, right? And you have to be open to the possibility that you don’t know what you need to know. That’s the thing. It’s not that you don’t know everything, because obviously you don’t know everything, but it’s more specific than that, is that you may not know what you need to know. Sometime in your life, there’s going to be a piece of information that’s crucial. It’ll be in a negotiation, or maybe in a medical decision, or maybe in a relationship decision, or in a complex, in a complex and tense situation of emergency and danger, and you’ll need a tool at hand then and there, or things will go badly for you, and you won’t have it, because there was an opportunity at some point in your life where had you been slightly more humble, you would have learned, you would have learned how to formulate and utilize that tool right then and there, and you didn’t, and that left you unarmed. And the thing is that your most powerful arms are your words by any measure, and the opportunity that you have to sharpen your capacity to use your words through combative dialogue, which is why spaces cannot be safe for any length of time. It’s because the safer the space is made now, the more dangerous the space is made in the future, and that’s something that people are unwilling to understand, because they don’t want to face the fundamental truth that life is suffering, that there’s no real escape from it, and so they make artificial spaces where people could delude themselves temporarily in their naivety, that life can be made safe, when in fact the best you can do is arm people to move forward, and the best way you do that is to test them with combat at every opportunity that you have, and you do that with the most carefully crafted arguments at your disposal, and to teach them to stand up and defend their thoughts so that when they enter the real world and their challenge, they know how to stand up forthrightly instead of crying and running home. Thank you. APPLAUSE So that we can all humbly learn, so that truth can serve love. Well, that’s the goal, is to inform yourself. Inform yourself. And that’s a good word, to inform yourself, it’s of course the short form of information, and I really like that word because it breaks into in-formation, and something in-formation is formed properly and in order, it’s in-formation, right? Everything is aligned and moving in the same way, like an army in formation, and so if you expose yourself to information, you get informed, and you get informed, and you put yourself in formation, and then you’re crystalline in your structure, and difficult to contend with, and that’s what you want to be, that’s the thing to be, and you do that by learning humbly, and then once you are informed, then your capacity to speak properly, and to formulate your arguments, and to negotiate, and to formulate problems, and to formulate solutions, and to seek consensus, and to be able to speak properly, and to seek consensus makes you powerful enough, not so much that tragedy stays away from you, because it can’t, but so that when tragedy does come along, and perhaps even when malevolence comes along, that you’ll be maximally prepared for it, and will be able to deal with it, which is what you have to do as a human being, because there is in fact no avoiding it, and so what you do with someone that you love is you make them strong, you do not tell them that the world’s safe, and that they’re secure, and that they’re safe, and that they’re secure, and that there’s nothing there to get them, because there is everything there to get them, and so the best you can do is strengthen them, and that’s what a college is supposed to do, and that’s what a university is supposed to do, and I would say that the colleges and the universities are increasingly failing on both of those fronts, and it might be said that that’s isolated only to the colleges and universities, but we should remember that those are the store houses of our cultural knowledge, and the generators of the new leaders, and if the universities falter, and that’s particularly true of the humanities, then that faltering undermines the entire culture, and perhaps the entire civilization, and I do believe that we are in the process of doing precisely that now, and I don’t think that what I did six months ago, in the creating of these two little videos, complaining about a rather obscure piece of legislation in a rather tiny and insignificant country, would have attracted the attention that it did attract if it was only about pronouns, it’s certainly not only about pronouns, in fact, it’s not about pronouns at all, so that truth can serve law, well, you want to articulate yourself, and you want to be information, so that you can formulate your existence, you can generate your narrative, you can take your position in the world forthrightly, and with the capacity to intimidate when necessary, with the capacity to be a monster when necessary, and to be civilized when necessary, and there’s nothing in that, that making yourself sharper won’t improve, to make yourself sharper is to carry a sharper sword, and of course, in these days, when the highest virtue is harmlessness, a message like that seems positively perverse, but it’s completely wrong, and this is partly why I think my talks attract so many men, is that a woman who hates you wants to castrate you, and make you safe that way, but a woman who loves you wants to make you incredibly powerful and wise, because then your capacity for destruction is regulated in that manner, and you’re still good for something, and so that would be the optimal solution, rather than merely weakening and destroying, and I think we’ve had plenty of that, we’ve had more than enough for that, and I know as well that women who have their souls intact would rather have monstrous men who were civilized than cringing milk soaps who were harmless but good for nothing. Most women already have enough children to take care of. So that truth can serve love, so that suffering can be ameliorated, well, obviously, that’s the goal, and, you know, I hear people all the time who are possessed by a certain nihilism of spirit, and that’s not surprising. The understructure, the foundations of our culture, the understructure, the foundations of our culture have been severely assaulted, I would say, and they’re under tremendous assault now. That’s a process that has been unfolding for very many years, perhaps since the development of empirical science, which is one of the contributing factors, because it’s undermined our faith in our traditional religious viewpoints, and those structure our moral behaviors and our decisions about value. There’s many other reasons why the foundations upon which Western civilization rests are under assault. And because of that, it’s easy to be uncertain and to say, well, what is the meaning of life? There’s nothing to life, there’s, we’re all insignificant and there’s nothing but suffering, and why should I do anything in the face of all that? And I would say, well, we can take that, part of that as a fundamental truth, is that the fact that life is suffering is a meaning, and it’s a meaning that no amount of rational argumentation will rescue you from. In fact, the more nihilistic you become, the more the fact that life is suffering becomes self-evident. It’s almost as if it was trying to teach you something, and it is trying to teach you something, it’s trying to teach you that you can’t argue your way out of suffering, and so then you might as well do something about it. And then I would say, well, that’s where you can find the meaning, it’s very straightforward, there’s suffering in the world, and much of it is abhorrent and unacceptable to anyone who attends to it, anyone looks at it, and the right answer to a child who’s being beaten and abused is not who’s going to care in a million years, but what can I do to stop that right now? And the nihilistic response that everything is insignificant means that the pain of children, for example, is insignificant, and that seems to be, to me, close enough to self-evidently wrong so that it’s an argument that can just be dispensed with, and so I might say to people who are wondering where to look for the meaning in their life is to take the self-evident phenomena of suffering seriously and to orient themselves as rapidly as possible towards its amelioration and to work diligently towards that end for a number of years, and then to reevaluate their life at the end of that and see if they think any differently about the world, because they certainly will. And so the nihilistic argument, to me, seems remarkably weak, both on its face and in depth, because there are things to be done. And the things that need to be done are obvious to anyone who will open their eyes and look at them, and so then I would say well, open your eyes and look at what needs to be done immediately around you and do it, and keep doing that, and keep doing it, and then you’ll find that the answers to the questions that you have that have been paralyzing you for so many years will manifest themselves to you clearly enough so that you won’t have to believe them because they will be self-evident. So that suffering can be ameliorated, so that we can all stumble forward. Well, why stumble? Well, that’s because we stumble when we move forward because we don’t know everything, and so we move forward in error constantly, which is why we need to speak with other people and listen so that we don’t stumble and fall and be unable to arise. And so we stumble forward because forward movement is necessary to human beings, and forward movement implies that there is something better to go to. And there is something better to go to, and that is at least a world where there is the least amount of suffering that is commensurate with the existence of the world. And I would say that we have ameliorated a substantial amount of suffering in the 20th century. We’re doing a very good job of doing such things as combating absolute poverty. You may or may not know that every single day about 150,000 people worldwide are lifted out of absolute poverty, and about 300,000 people are attached to the electrical grid. And that we have been enriching the bottom segment of the world’s population for the last 15 years at a rate that’s absolutely unprecedented in human history. And that makes me wonder just how well we could do if everyone really put their shoulders to the wheel and pushed. And so if we did that together, then perhaps we won’t degenerate into absolute chaos, which is certainly something that lurks now and is a real threat. We’re at a crisis point as far as I can tell. And we need to determine whether we want everything to go to hell, which it certainly could. And I would recommend that, or whether or not we can work together. And that brings me to the last line, which is that so that we can all stumble forward to the kingdom of God. And why do I put it that way? And the reason I put it that way is because, well first of all, everybody does really know what that means, even though they may not believe in it, but that doesn’t really matter. I think that to believe is to act, and not to spout a set of statements. And it is certainly possible to act as if what you were attempting to do is bring about the kingdom of God. And I would say that doing so is something that will radically justify your miserable existence. And that’s really what you need is radical justification for your miserable existence. And because human beings are so powerful, really powerful beyond the limits of our imagination, we have no idea what our ultimate destiny might be. That it’s not clear what our limits are, and that if we decided to improve the place, let’s say, and I would say starting with ourselves, because that is the safest and humblest way to begin, that there’s no telling where we might end up. And since we’re all fragile and vulnerable creatures, and we’re going to lose everything anyways, we might as well risk everything to obtain the highest possible good, and then that will make the misery that constitutes our life bearable as a consequence of our intrinsic nobility. And there’s nothing in that except the good. And so then why not do it? And so that’s what I would enjoy and encourage, encourage everyone to do, because there’s nothing better to do than that. And we might as well all do that which there is nothing better than. And so I’ll repeat the outline of an end. Now I was talking about the boundaries of free speech. And I believe that speech should be untrammeled, because it’s too dangerous to encapsulate, but that does not mean that I believe that speech free speech comes without responsibility. And I believe quite the contrary that free speech carries with it the highest responsibility, because if you wish the right to speak, and wish to shoulder the responsibility of speaking, then you have to contend with the fact that your words are the force that shapes the world, and that with every word you utter, things tilt slightly heavenward or slightly hellward, and that responsibility rests firmly on your shoulders, and it’s inescapable. And that’s a terrible thing to realize, although it is a very meaningful thing to realize. And people say that they would like their life to be meaningful, but that’s a questionable claim, because to recognize your life is meaningful is to understand that everything you do matters, and that what it means for things to matter is that you’re deciding in some sense between heaven on earth and hell on earth with every decision that you make, and that the decisions that you make echo far beyond you in ways that are almost incomprehensible, and that the destiny of the world is determined by the collective decisions of all the individuals that make up the world, and that we’re all locked together, deciding in which metaphysical direction our little planet will go. So free speech carries with it heavy responsibility, but the responsibility is something you want, because it justifies the suffering of existence. So life is suffering. Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated. Truth is the handmaiden of love. Dialogue is the pathway to truth. Humility, that’s recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn. To learn is to die voluntarily, and to be born again in great ways and small. So speech must be untrammeled so that dialogue can take place, so that we can all humbly learn, so that truth can serve love, so that suffering can be ameliorated, so that we can all stumble forward towards the kingdom of God. Thank you for inviting me to McMinnville. Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Well now we’d like to take the opportunity to open things up for question and answer. And what we’d like to do is have a line for one right up here and I’ll be sitting there with the microphone and we’ll pass it to each successive person in the line. And Dr. Peterson will answer your questions. I am alive. I am all of a staff. First, I’d like to thank you for everything you said. Excuse me if I get emotional. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever had the opportunity to see so many people and hear the words you’ve said. And you have just validated my whole existence. Thank you. My question to you is, we’re working in Portlandia. And we’re alone. And we don’t know how to bring people together. It’s like a death trap up there. Bringing people together is a monster building. What is it that people are resonating to, that we can use, that will bring people together so that we can talk about solutions? You know, I watched this Netflix special with Russell Peters. And Russell Peters, for those of you who don’t know, is a Canadian Comet. He’s of Indian descent. He was raised in a suburb in Toronto, which makes him, I would say, peculiarly Canadian. And he’s very assimilating to the Canadian culture. And Russell has made his living insulting every racial and ethnic group that he could possibly insult. And it’s so interesting because he filled up an entire arena in London. I think it was the most people that had ever gathered together to see a comedian before. And it was the United Nations in the arena. The Arabs were there, and the Jews were there, and the Russians were there, and the South Americans were there. And every group was waiting with their tongues out so that Russell could insult their particular ethnicity. So that they could feel finally that someone was saying something that was truthful and not hiding. And to say it openly in some sense and to make light of it. And I would say, you bring people together by telling them what you think without manipulation and without care for the outcome. And people can have very rough truths if they trust who’s stating them. And Peters is trusted by everyone because he’s, I suppose, non-discriminately prejudiced. He hates everyone equally. There’s nothing behind his assaults except the desire for everyone to come together in recognition of their idiocy and vulnerability. And people very much enjoy that. And so I would say, you unite people to the degree that they can be united by saying what you think without trying to manipulate the outcome. And that’s a better way to live anyways because you don’t have to keep track of anything that way. That’s so nice. Say what you think, carefully. You observe the response and adjust your behaviour. And everyone likes that. And so I don’t know of a better way of doing it than that. I’m afraid I’ve got a bit of a complicated question which has been bugging me for many years. I’m an author and a biologist and I was researching Irish alcohol themes for something else writing back. And I came across a very disturbing, a paper that I found very disturbing. It was written by a Loporn in academia. And the Irish Elf, it’s a peculiar creature. It’s extinct. It’s neither an Elf nor an Island. But it went extinct because the theory at the time was because it devoted so much of its energy to its antlers that it could not be made. And the author took this and compared it to the human brain. And her proposition was that the human brain was growing so big, the human intellect was growing so big, that we are now capable of basically, she goes on the adage of alcohol, but she looks on the destructive potential. And her theory was that the brain, human brain doesn’t exist in this life. And I found that disturbing is a name that I found pretty cool and disturbing for some reason. But I was very difficult at articulating it and I was not good at voxing that. Well, that’s a cool question. I think that you just retold the story of the fall of Genesis. You see, and I mean that because as far as I can tell what that story means is that at some point in time, people became conceptually sophisticated enough to understand their own vulnerability, to realize their own nakedness, to discover death, to discover the necessity of work, and to be blown out of that pre-conscious paradise into the tragic domain of history. I believe that’s what that story means. And you can read that as a tragic catastrophe with no solution. And I would say though, however, that since that time, and God only knows when that was, the human race has been collectively attempting to address that problem. And the solution that’s emerged is something like, although a little bit of excess consciousness demolished us, a lot more consciousness could save us. And I think that that’s the case. There’s no going back, right? Alcohol makes you unconscious, for example, and that’s part of why people like it. But surprisingly, sedatives do that. The things that people do to themselves to destroy their consciousness, by distraction, do that. They alleviate the terrible catastrophe of being more awake than is easy to bear. But it’s the wrong solution. The right solution is to be even more awake and to pay even more attention. And there’s a way out of the problem that way. And so the fall, the idea of the fall indicates that there’s something about people that’s irredeemably damaged. Well, perhaps not irredeemably, but seriously damaged, right? There’s a schism in being, let’s say, that’s not easy to rectify. That’s what the story indicates. And I think it’s tightly tied with the kind of evolutionary process that you were just commenting on. The Irish Elk was actually developed its excess antlers, the theory goes, as a consequence of female sexual selection. Of course, female human beings are very choosy, maters, unlike chimpanzees, let’s say. And there is reasonable evidence that one of the factors that propelled our cortical evolution forward was female sexual choosiness. And that’s why, perhaps, that it’s Eve that tempts Adam into self-consciousness in Genesis. And maybe that’s why there’s been eternal enmity between men and women ever since, because women certainly do make men self-conscious. It might be the primary effect that women have on men. That’s advantageous in that more conscious men are better, but it’s disadvantageous for the man in that self-consciousness is generally a very unpleasant emotion. So I would say, however, that self-consciousness is the guideway to transcendence and development. So the best thing for human beings to do is to bear up underneath their self-conscious tragedy and to transcend past that by becoming even more conscious. And I think that’s the hope that we have. And I think that that’s what the great religions of the world constantly dangle before us, is that if you are suffering in your half-awake state, then it’s time to wake up completely. And then perhaps that would go away. Well, we don’t know, but we don’t have a better option. The other option is annihilation. And that seems a bit premature, shall we say. Given that we’re not all we could be, it seems a bit premature. In some of your YouTube videos, you talk about the ancient mythology of Babylon in Egypt, and you describe it as a way that they acted out what they sensed to be true, but even because they couldn’t articulate it. Is there a modern-day equivalent of acting out the truth? And if so, can you describe it for us? Well, I would say that in large part, Christianity is an example of that. It’s fundamentally a description of a pattern of being, an optimized pattern of being. And the way that it was generated, and again, this is a psychological interpretation, and I don’t claim that it’s exhaustive, not in the least, is that you can imagine that as people move through time… This is akin to the idea that the figure of Christ is implicit in the Old Testament, which is also a psychological idea. Imagine that as people progressed through time, they observed that some people were handling existence better than others, and those people attracted attention and admiration, and stories were generated about them. And so you might say that out of a hundred people, the most capable and honorable and respectful and useful and benevolent person was identified, and then celebrated, at least with admiration, and then perhaps with stories. And so then you might imagine that there were ten groups of a hundred people, and each of them had their story about the most admirable person, and then those stories came together as those tribes amalgamated, and then the story of the ten most admirable people was amalgamated into a figure that was the most admirable of those ten, and then the entire group of ten, one hundred tribes people could come together under that banner. And it really looks like, in some sense, that’s how monotheism emerged out of polytheism, is that the tribal groups had their local ideals, let’s say, and then when they came together, those local ideals were amalgamated into what you might describe as a meta-ideal, and people were able to unite under that meta-ideal. So for example, in Mesopotamia, there was a god known as Marduk, and Marduk had a very large number of names, some of which were quite fascinating, and the reason he had a very large number of names was because he was an amalgam of a very large number of previous gods. So, you know, there’s an idea, a Christian idea, for example, that Christ was the king of kings, let’s say, or the hero of heroes, and from a psychological perspective, I just read that as straightforward observation, is that as the stories of the great people of the past amalgamated, out of that emerged in the human imagination. A conceptualization of the ideal, it’s a very strange conceptualization, because it involves something like the voluntary acceptance of suffering and its simultaneous transcendence, and that’s akin, in some sense, to the old stories of the hero who fights the dragon, because of course, in some sense, the ultimate dragon is, well, death, and also the malevolence that might produce an unjust, death, and to be able to face that without shrinking is perhaps the essential hallmark of the most well-developed character, and that ideal is a product of the collective imagination of humanity, from a psychological perspective. What it means beyond that, if anything, I’m in no position to determine. Okay. My question was, do you have any thoughts or recommendations for how one can speak the truth in a hierarchical environment such as a workplace, where you might perceive matured people want to speak to the population, and how does this very well manage that? Okay, so the question is, how do you speak truth in a highly hierarchical environment, like a workplace, where perhaps you have disagreeable and even tyrannical managers, and a resistance to the truth. Well, that’s an excellent question. The first thing I would say is, you prepare yourself, and so, if you want to negotiate, for example, you can’t negotiate from a position of weakness, because you lose. You lose in every way. You can’t withstand the conflict. You’ve got nothing to fall back on. So if you’re in a workplace that’s not amenable to informative messages, let’s say, the first thing you do is look for another job. I don’t mean that you take another job. That isn’t what I mean. I mean that you need to provide yourself with credible options, because otherwise, you’ll be weak when you stand forth, and especially someone who’s a bully will just bull you right over, because you’ve got no power. And so you have to prepare yourself, and you do that by reducing the risk to yourself in an intelligent manner. And one of the things I counsel my clients, many of whom are executives or people who are otherwise very successful, is that you should always be prepared to make a lateral upward movement move, because otherwise you have no negotiated power. And so, of course, that means that if you have no options, you’re in a weak position. But it is the case that if you have no options, that you’re in a weak position. So you keep your CV updated. You develop the skills necessary to make you movable in the marketplace. You reduce your fear of interviews and alternative, you know, the processes that you have to go through to seek alternative employment, which is a very good thing to do anyways. And then, if you can put yourself in a position of relative strength, then you can decide what it is that you have to say first. You don’t fight unnecessary battles, and you don’t make unnecessary enemies. And perhaps you put forth a tentative suggestion with great argumentation behind it, after perhaps also finding out if there are other people who feel the same way you do, and formulating a potential solution. And then, generally speaking, under those conditions, the probability that you will be successful will be maximized. I would also say that if under those conditions, you still cannot succeed, that you should leave, because you’re purchasing security of a person at the price of security of soul, and that’s a bad choice. It will beat you down across time, and you don’t want that. So, yeah. Check, check. Are we live? Good. Well, thank you again, Young Americans for Liberty. Just want to thank you guys, and thank you, obviously. I’m also here from Portland. I completely agree with your assessment, with some colleagues from the newsroom, a newsroom and newsgroup called Torchcast. If you guys want to add us, that would be fantastic. I do have a societal question for you. What in your view is the macro agenda, or the goal, the end goal, the end game, for the current SJW left, who fight free speech, obfuscate the basic concepts of identity, and who peddle outright falsity in regards to the oppression of things, for instance, in the media and on college campuses? And is a solution, not the solution, but a solution, to that moving the over-to-the-window, so to speak, through mischief, trolling, and as you said earlier, black truths. Black truths. Speaking black truths. Well, the motivational issue is complex. I think some of it is the naive good-heartedness of youth. A fair bit of it is that. Some of it, I think, is the consequence of the introduction of women en masse into the political environment, and the manifestation of the political system. The manifestation of the personality trait agreeableness as a political force, perhaps for the first time in history. It’s a radical transformation to have women occupy positions of power, and we don’t know what that will mean for better or for worse. And to think that it will only be for better is naive beyond belief. And then there’s willful blindness, there’s ideological possession, and there’s a kind of ungrateful, there’s a deep ingratitude as well. Because, and a sense of historical, a lack of historical perspective is quite compelling. I mean, to my way of thinking, perhaps because I’m reasonably well versed in the nature of historical catastrophes, the fact that we can all assemble peacefully in this unbelievably beautiful place, in this crazily beautiful town, with the tension that does exist, which is rather minimal by historical standards, and engage in this sort of political discussion peacefully and productively, is almost incomprehensible, given the evidence that’s come forth to us throughout history. And I don’t believe that we do enough to teach our young people just exactly how improbable that is. And so I don’t think they know. And so what they see instead of the improbable functionality of our culture is all the errors that it still makes. And it’s reasonable for them to see that, but not without that broader context. What to do about it? Well, I don’t know. And it’s reasonable for them to see that, but not without that broader context. What to do about it? Well, I think the fundamental thing to do about it, as I said, is for, and this is, I believe, the Western way, fundamentally, is for people to accelerate, to magnify the degree to which they’re taking personal responsibility for their life. Because I think that as individuals, they’ll find the proper way to fight the micro-battles that will be necessary to fight in order to stem the tide of rising radical… radicalism, let’s leave it at that. What I think will happen with the humanities, and what I would also encourage people to do, is to stop enrolling in those classes. I mean, the humanities are believing people like man. Men are leaving them in droves. There won’t be a man in the humanities in ten years, and in most of the social sciences as well. I mean, I’ve watched the enrollment curves for, really for decades, and have seen this propagate itself across time. But more tellingly even, is that the overall proportion of enrollment among students in the humanities has declined every decade since the 1960s. And so as the humanities moves farther away from what it is that they truly have to offer, which is the transmission of the wisdom of the past to youth so that they can see their proper way forward, and to become articulate, well-armed, and responsible citizens as they abandon that. And if they abandon that responsibility, then all they have to offer is nihilism and resentment, and that doesn’t sell well, except to a tiny fraction of people who would like to have as much of that as they can possibly manage. But we see it happening, I just planted a flag there, we see it happening not just on the college campus, but as an overall cultural shift toward selling also to people en masse. And you look at what just happened at the Liberty Rally in Berkeley, you look at essentially every post-college protest that’s going on in the streets, Portland to Chicago. It seems that how we address this type of narrative is not just happening on the college campus, but it seems that the idea within your framework of getting to the Kingdom of God, what if the kingdoms looked completely different for the cultural shifts? Yeah, well, I mean, well, you know, in many times in my life I’ve tried to face, let’s say, the choice between a political route and this, I would say, philosophical route or psychological route that I’ve chosen to go. And what I gave you tonight is really the best answer that I have. I’m not trying to make the case, and wouldn’t, that that’s a comprehensive answer. But I think that if you want to move forward properly, the best thing to do is to organize yourself, I mean personally, to organize yourself as well as you possibly can. And to get those things around you that aren’t in order, in order, your family, how you conduct yourself, because then you’re going to be in the best position to make the proper decisions in the specific situations that obtain to you. And I think that that’s where people have their most power. And I think that power is not insignificant, not at all. So that’s the best I can do for that. Yeah, I mean, I think that was a really interesting question. And I’m not a social justice warrior myself, but as I understand it, I think a lot of people who I’ve talked to who think about that, I think they’re really trying to dismantle what they see to be unfair systems of advantages and patriarchal structures that they have. So my question is, because this truth idea really, really interests me, do you feel that because of the limits of your own human experience and your own identity, that there are things that you will never be able to change your mind about? Thank you. I think there are things that I’ll never… there are things that I, let’s say, would stake my life on, which I think is a better way of putting it. One of those is that it’s better to serve being than to denounce it. And that it’s better to not lie, let’s say, instead of telling the truth. Because someone asked earlier, how can you go about telling the truth? And in some sense, you can’t. But you can stop saying things you know to be false, which is a good start. And that’s within anyone’s grasp. And I can say, I’m not likely to change my mind about the utility of doing that either, because I’ve decided that I’m going to accept the consequences of doing that gratefully, regardless of what the consequences are. And so, at some point in your life, perhaps not precisely when you’re young, you have to decide what it is that you’re going to act out. This is something that Carl Jung specified, he said, you know, you’re going to act out of mythological structure of one type or another. You’re either going to be aware of it or not. If you become aware of it, then perhaps you can choose it. And that doesn’t give you any guarantee precisely, you know, because even if you act out, let’s say, the heroic path, you know, and you face the dragon in combat, there’s no necessary, it’s not a necessity that you win. The dragon can eat you. But the idea is that that’s your best bet. All things considered, it’s your best bet to face it forthrightly. And I believe that, I partly believe that because I’m a clinical psychologist. And one of the things that clinical psychologists know is that if you help people confront the things that they avoid voluntarily, they get better. And that’s a fundamental truth. And I think it’s the fundamental truth of human advancement and learning. And it’s possible that we are Irish elk, and our fundamental approach to the world is deeply flawed. And if we pursue it wholeheartedly, we’ll end up extinct. It is possible that that’s the case. But if that’s the case, then there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m part of the human race and I’m going to act out its destiny the best that I can manage. And I’m not. Willing to reconsider things at that level. I think that that’s because I’ve thought them through sufficiently for me. And because I’ve also determined in the course of my own life that, and from watching the effects of what I have been talking about on other people, that what I’m doing is serving the good, at least as well as I can do it. And what I’ve learned is being very helpful to me personally. It’s been very helpful to my family. I know it’s been helpful for my students because they always tell me that. And people write me all the time and say that they’ve found great utility in what I’m communicating. And so that’s enough evidence for me right now that I’m on a path that sufficiently justifies me. So. Just like to say we have about 20 minutes until 9 o’clock. It’s probably going to take five to 10 minutes more questions and then about 10 minutes for people to feel about, talk about themselves, and make their way out. So about 10 minutes more. I’d just like to thank everybody who helped organize this event. I’ve been watching yourself on YouTube for a while now and I really felt that you’ve helped me and I’m sure a lot of other people in this room. I really appreciate it. Hey, it’s a pleasure. So, I was just wondering, based on history and whatnot that you go into, you discussed like the Hula, Archipelago and whatnot, what kind of role do you think government should play in society? I think that it depends on the circumstances. And so I don’t think that that’s the right question. I think the right question is how should a government constitute itself so that it can respond flexibly to the demands of the situation? I believe that there’s utility in a conservative viewpoint and I believe that there’s utility in a liberal viewpoint, but that it depends on the specifics of the situation and that there is also error and even catastrophic error on both sides. So the government needs to be constituted, I would say, much like it is in the West, where sovereignty is instantiated in the people, for better or worse, so that the people can learn from their errors and that we progress by engaging in dialogue across people of different temperamental types. Because sometimes the borders are too open and they need to be tightened and sometimes the borders are too closed and they need to be loosened. If the borders between everything become completely closed, then everything dies. It’s deprived of air and water and everything dies. There’s endless mythological representations of that. I mean, part of the reason that Egypt, for example, in the Mosaic story is a kingdom of sand and stone is because sand and stone lack water. And Moses, who’s someone who leads his people out of tyranny, is a master of water. And the message in that story is that sometimes the kingdom turns to stone and it’s a tyranny and new revivification needs to be integrated. The doors have to open and new information has to flow in. But then there are times when, like the story, for example, there are times when there’s too much influx of information. That’s a flood. That’s one way of reading the flood stories is that there’s just too much pouring in and everyone drowns. What we have to always ask ourselves is, are we tending the garden properly? It’s not drying out from lack of water. It’s not drowning because there’s too much moisture coming in. And the only way we can determine that is by paying attention and communicating. And that’s why free speech is such a fundamental necessity. So it’s not precisely what the government can do because it has to do many things. Because it’s the society, the people, and people have to do many things. But how the government goes about making its decisions. And then at least what the government has to do is protect those, what would you call them, rare and precious processes that enable it to continue to be a responsive and alive entity. And I think that we have done a remarkably good job of that in the US. And I think that the US is a great example of that for all its flaws. Everything is flawed. But the proper analysis is flawed compared to what? And the answer isn’t to the hypothetical utopia of your imagination. The answer is to other similar systems that have actually existed in time and space. And by that measure, I would say the West is doing spectacularly well. And I don’t think that we should sink it because we’re ignorant about its value. Among the postmodern philosophers that you’ve mentioned as having particularly threatening or destructive ideas, these things that cause people to question a loose side of the value of culture. I think you mentioned Foucault, who has mentioned Nietzsche as an inspiration. So I wonder how might somebody like Foucault or somebody like me, who I think a lot of people like Foucault, get Nietzsche upon? Well, I’ve read a reasonable amount of Foucault. And I would say that among the postmodernists, he’s rather remarkable in the fact that you can actually understand what he’s saying. I don’t find what he wrote particularly surprising. Like the idea that mental illness is in part a social construct. If you’re a reasonably educated clinician, that’s more than self-evident. In that virtually every complex activity that human beings engage in is culturally determined to a large degree. It’s Derrida that I have the most problem with. And I also know that he put his finger on a very complex problem, which is that the central postmodernist claim is that every situation allows for a potentially infinite number of interpretations, which is true. And therefore, it’s difficult to determine which interpretation should be held up as paramount. Now, that’s true. In fact, the artificial intelligence researchers ran into that when they were trying to design systems that could perceive the world. Because the original idea was that perceiving the world was easy, because it’s just made out of things. And learning how to manipulate those things and act upon them would be the complicated problem. But it actually turned out that perception was the complicated problem, because there’s an indefinite number of ways to perceive things. Now, the reason that postmodernists were wrong is because there aren’t an indefinite number of interpretations of the world that don’t kill you or make others kill you. There’s a very constrained number of interpretations that allow you to continue to exist and, equally importantly, allow you to continue to exist in the presence of other people. So although there are many interpretations that you can ferret out of the Shakespeare text, your job is to ferret out one that actually helps you live properly. And that’s hypothetically the goal of the guides to great literature. And so I think the postmodernists radically overplayed their hand, and that’s particularly true of Derrida. And I think that the people who follow Derrida are, in many cases, doing so because it’s a hell of a lot easier than actually doing the difficult job of extracting out useful tools from the literature of the world, which is what you do when you read. You extract out useful tools. With regards to Nietzsche, I mean, Nietzsche said something about everything. And so every philosopher of the modern age, one way or another, is deeply influenced by Nietzsche. And the problem with Nietzsche is that he was a thinker prolific beyond comprehension, virtually. I mean, I did recently, I did a, I think it was a 45-minute video on one paragraph of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and I barely started to scrape the surface of it. And of course, he has multiple books. So Nietzsche is a very strange character, and he said that he philosophized with a hammer, and he meant it. And his critique of Christianity was devastating, I would say. But I would also say, and this is a rather shocking comparison, that Nietzsche played, the role Nietzsche played with regard to Christianity was the same role that a maggot can play in a wound, which is that it can devour nothing but diseased flesh and leave what’s healthy behind. And I think there is a reading of Nietzsche that allows for precisely that. When he said that God was dead, he also said that that would be a catastrophe, the likes of which we could not even imagine, and that society itself would oscillate back and forth murderously for centuries as a consequence. So it wasn’t triumphant. And he strove to find out what an alternative to that might be, and he formulated the idea of the over-man, essentially, right, the super-man who was capable of creating his own values. I think that Nietzsche made a mistake there, and I think it was a mistake that was rectified by Carl Jung, because Jung noted, I think Jung was really the first person, although Nietzsche has intimations of this, because Nietzsche does say that our drives philosophize, right, which is a very biologically oriented observation. But what Jung noted was that, well, we don’t create our own values because the values are implicit within us, but we can rediscover them, and that’s part of why he was so interested in analysis of mythology and the unconscious. And so I think the postmodernists took the part of Nietzsche that’s only destructive to its final conclusion, and that’s actually what’s being played out now. Derrida’s critique of modern civilization is fel-logo-centric, right, male-dominated, centered around the idea of the logos. He regarded that as nothing but a tool of oppression and marginalization, and there’s some truth in that, because whenever you produce a value system, you also exclude things from the value system as not valuable, obviously, but the problem I think that the postmodernists won’t address is that the alternative to creating value systems and dealing with the exclusion that comes along with that is to drown in nihilistic chaos. And worse, while you’re drowning in nihilistic chaos, you’re going to call out forces of totalitarian order, and so it’s no solution. It’s no solution. And what I see postmodernism doing to students, generally speaking, is demoralizing them completely. You know, they come to university looking to catalyze their identity, often clinging to the last remaining shreds of their culture. That’s just what’s keeping them afloat. All the postmodernist professors do is take those remaining fragments that are allowing them to stay above the water and tell them that they’re illusory and take them away. It’s like, well, now you’re free. It’s like, I’ve dropped you in the middle of the ocean. You can swim in any direction you want. You’re free. And I think that that’s rooted in large part even in hatred of youth. I really believe that. Because why would you cripple people if you didn’t hate them? And so there’s hatred of humanity lurking at the bottom of the worst excesses of ideologues in general. You know, you hear this from environmentalists sometimes. I’ve heard this many times. The planet would be better off if there were no people on it. It’s like, well, let’s keep you away from the thermonuclear weapons, shall we? Yeah. So it’s not easy to come up with a canonical interpretation of Nietzsche. There’s no doubt about that. But again, I would say, I thought for a long time, and from a psychological perspective, I tried to understand whether it was Nietzsche’s philosophy that drove him insane. But I think the evidence for that is nonexistent. I think he did suffer from a degenerative brain disease of great severity. And I actually think that his fundamental philosophy, which I’ve read, I haven’t read everything he wrote because there’s been new books published, but I read his great works in chronological order. I think his fundamental philosophy is affirmative, not negative. But he’s a critic, you know. And he wanted to find something that he could stand on. And that’s what critics do. If they’re real critics, you’re not looking to destroy. You’re looking for something that you can stand on. And Nietzsche was certainly very useful to me. And I know he was also extraordinarily useful to Carl Jung. He was a real student of Nietzsche. And was really devoting himself to solving the problem that Nietzsche posed, which is, well, what do we do in the aftermath of the death of God? And Jung’s answer was, we rescue our father from the deaths. And that’s the right answer. That’s what the university should be doing with young people. It’s like your dead father’s in the library. You go out there and fight at the Farid amount, right, and unite with him and become the thing that keeps chaos at bay. Right? Thank you. On that note, this concludes our talk with Jordan Peterson. Please join me in thanking him again for joining us. Thank you.