https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eVvS3L_aBV4
Jordan Peterson, psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, but no University of Toronto. Been there some years. SAFs got involved because we were sent the letters that Dr. Peterson’s dean and then vice provo, I believe, had sent him and they worried us tremendously as people concerned about academic freedom. And the integrity of teaching. The letters warned Dr. Peterson to stop saying publicly that he would refuse requests to use non-gendered or additional pronouns. And this is, for us, was a very serious matter, a very serious incursion on the freedom of teachers to teach as they will. Teaching has a lot to do with the rapport between the professor and the student, classroom dynamics and the honesty and sincerity that teaching requires, we thought, were infringed by these orders, especially orders coming from deans and department heads. And so we wrote letters to the University of Toronto about this. So we’re very privileged to have Dr. Peterson with us today to talk to us about these things. Maybe also some more theoretical and abstract things than his own particular case. He’s going to talk to us about why freedom of speech is not just another value. Dr. Peterson. Thanks. So I thought I’d start. I’m going to approach this from three directions, but I, or in three sections, I thought I’d start by just letting you know why I was objecting specifically to Bill C-16. I made three videos in late September, and one of them criticized Bill C-16. One of them criticized the University of Toronto administration’s, the Human Resources People’s, decision to make so-called anti-unconscious, anti-biased training mandatory for their HR staff, which I thought was and still think was reprehensible. And I don’t even remember what the other one was about, but it doesn’t really matter. Those were, that was the first one, the one on Bill C-16 that caused most of the furor, surprisingly enough. And I said I wouldn’t use the made up, what I consider neologisms that purport to describe the status, the status of people whose sexual identity is ambiguous. Because that isn’t how it looked to me. It looked to me like these words like zee and zur and so forth were the linguistic vanguard of an intellectual movement that I would say detest is probably the right description. And that’s this strange blend of postmodernism and Marxism that has emerged to occupy the bulk of the humanities and a good chunk of the social sciences. So that was the first thing, is that I’m not using those words. That was the first thing. That was personal, right? Is that that’s not a form of linguistic game that I’m willing to play. And I have my reasons for that. The second was I regard any legislation that compels people to use a certain kind of language as a very dangerous, first of all, a dangerous piece of legislation directly, but also a very dangerous precedent. I mean, there are limits on free speech that are already reasonably well instantiated in the law. You can’t incite a crime. You can’t threaten someone bodily in a believable manner. You can’t libel someone. We already have reasonable restrictions on what you can’t say, but we’ve never had legislation that required you to use a certain language except in certain commercial applications. So, for example, if you sell tobacco, you have to put a warning on it. But the United States Supreme Court decided, I believe it was in the 1940s, that similar attempts to compel speech on the part of individuals in non-commercial settings was unconstitutional. And I know that that doesn’t have any direct bearing on Canadian law, but certainly the principle does. And then I was also very… See, one of the problems with a piece of legislation, and this is, I suppose, the problem with interpreting a text, as the postmodernists would say, is that it’s not easy to get the level of interpretation right. Right? Because if you’re interpreting a text, you can look at the letters. That happens with biblical interpretation very often. You can look at the individual words. You can look at the phrases. You can look at the sentences. You can look at the paragraphs. You could look at the work as a whole, and then you also have to look at the context within which the work is being interpreted in order to come up with an interpretation of anything that’s complex. And so when you see a piece of legislation, it isn’t obvious what the legislation is actually intended to do, despite what it’s purported to do. And it isn’t obvious what level of analysis to pick when you’re going to criticize it. And in some ways, Bill C-16, you could regard it as innocuous, just as an extension of rights that have already been granted to certain, let’s say, protected groups, although I’m not so thrilled about the whole notion of ascribing rights to groups to begin with. We’re already far down that path. And, you know, I’ve been accused of making a mountain out of a molehill. But happily enough, the University of Toronto, after I made the videos, immediately produced two letters that were informed by their legal department’s wisdom, stating that what I had done with the video was perhaps in conflict with the university ethical guidelines, if you forget the ones that had to do with freedom of expression, and that they might, that my actions and even in making the video might have violated the tenets of the understanding of the law. And that I was actually scaremongering because as soon as I made the videos, the legal department at the U of T immediately validated my fears. And so that was a perverse effect of the letters they sent to me. So the other thing that I, there was other elements of the legislation that I object to and objected to and still do, and if you read the policies within which the legislation will be interpreted as the federal justice website indicated that it would be interpreted as a legal Of course, there’s close crosstalk between Ontario and the federal government because the liberals are in power in both, and the radical end of the liberal parties in power in both situations. And, you know, it turns out that it’s illegal for, like, you’re liable as an employer, for example, if any of your employees say anything that can be construed as a legal obligation, you’re liable as an employer. For example, if any of your employees say anything that can be construed as harassment, say on the grounds of sexual or gender identity, even if what they say has unintended consequences, and even if you don’t know that they said it. And so that kind of legislation, I just think, is just absolutely reprehensible. And then, because it’s designed to cast the broadest possible net to catch the most fish, and it’s clearly being implemented by people who are not precisely pro-employer, let’s put it that way. And then there’s another little ugly secret hidden underneath the policies, and that’s manifest most clearly in the form of what’s come to be known as the gender unicorn, which I would recommend that you look up, which is an animated character designed to indoctrinate small children into the social constructionist worldview, which claims that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently. Which they most certainly do not. Now, and that’s what I said in the video, that’s partly why I’ve been accused of, say, being a transphobe, and I also complained that the university was taking policy advice from the people who started Black Lives Matter, and I don’t have anything against Black Lives Matter particularly, but the two people who started it are not the sorts of individuals, let’s say, that the university should be basing its policy decisions, the advice, they shouldn’t be taking advice from those people with regards to their policies. And apparently that makes me a racist, so the first part of the argument about what happened with my videos was actually whether or not I was racist and transphobic and all of that. But the point that I was making, the technical, specific technical point, was that the claim that those four phenomena vary independently was just patently false, and it is, by any reasonable definition of false. And I know that it’s part of a much broader propaganda exercise, as evidenced by the gender unicorn, for example, which gets children to indicate on four sliders their sex assigned at birth, their gender identity, their gender expression, and their sexual proclivity. And you can look at the animation or at the cartoon and decide for yourself by its graphic style what age people it’s aimed at. So is this a bill to protect transsexual rights or is it a bill to further a postmodern neo-Marxist agenda? Well, God only knows, but as far as I’m concerned, having analyzed the context within which this bill arose and within which it will be interpreted, I’m going to go for the furthering the postmodern neo-Marxist agenda until that’s thoroughly disproved. I would also like to inform you that I’ve had plenty of letters from transgender people, at least 30, and only one of them was critical of what I’m doing, because they claim, as have many of the people I’ve talked to, that the idea that a group of activists can self-nominate as the representatives of a given group and then speak for them as if they have a homogenous voice is absolutely, I think, a very good example. It’s absurd, and it is completely ridiculous. And most of the transsexual people that have been contacting me have said the same thing, which is, these people don’t speak for me. I wish they’d shut up because they’re doing a lot more harm than good, and I don’t buy what they’re doing anyways. So, you know, I think that the claim of the activist types to speak on behalf of the groups that they purport to represent is weak at best, and I don’t know why we ever assume that their representation is valid, except that we’re afraid to criticize that particular presupposition. You know, I mean, there’s nothing more ridiculous than assuming that someone is, because someone is black, that they speak for black people. I mean, I can’t think of anything that’s more particularly indicative of a fundamentally racist attitude than that, you know? Well, those people, they’re all the same. It’s like, yeah, well, sorry, it doesn’t work out that way. So, I wanted to clarify all that so that you know, you have a little bit clearer idea about why I was doing what I was doing. I mean, people have asked, so to speak, why I chose to die on that particular hill, and the answer is every massive conflict of ideas, let’s say, manifests itself in the minute. And that’s why it’s often difficult to gain any headway, because no matter where you draw the line, it’s arbitrary and subject to criticism. And you know, the fact that this happens to be about gender neutral pronouns regarding transgender people, to me, is just more or less an accident. It could have been about almost any number of other things. But I would also like to suggest that what should have happened with what I did was nothing, right? I made some videos that were relatively obscure academic, and I made some videos in my private time that were, you know, pretty badly produced, because they’re just amateur. And I was trying to straighten out my thinking about a couple of issues, the anti-unconscious bias training, for example, and also this legislative mess. And obviously it struck a major chord, and that to me is indication that my original supposition was correct, and that there was far more going on under the surface than there was at the surface. I mean, you know, like I said, it’s very difficult to pick the proper level of analysis, but one of the ways you justify your choice is by observing the impact of your choice of level of analysis and seeing if the consequences are commensurate with your original hypothesis. And I thought, well, just because people say they’re doing one thing with a piece of legislation doesn’t mean that that’s what they’re doing. And of course, a piece of legislation is a hydra. In any case, it does all sorts of things that people don’t intend it to do. So that’s a little background, and I’ll leave the background at that. And then I’ll talk to you now from a practical perspective why I believe that the idea of freedom of speech is not just another value among other values. And I would say that the simplest reason for that is that speech isn’t precisely a mechanism, it’s a process. It’s a generative process. Free speech is the process by which all ideas are generated. And I want to make it clear why I believe that to be the case with speech specifically, because you might say, well, no, that’s thought. But I don’t think that’s right, because the thing is that thought is a far more collective enterprise than people generally understand. First of all, most of the thoughts you have aren’t your thoughts. I don’t remember who it was that said that everyone is the unconscious exponent of a dead philosopher, but that’s definitely the case. The very linguistic mechanisms by which we formulate our grip on the world are collective constructs, and in some cases almost entirely, because creative thought is far rarer than people generally presume. And what that means is that when we’re speaking and when we’re thinking, we’re usually using, if not cliches, which is very frequently the case, as you know perfectly well if you’ve ever graded a particularly bad undergraduate essay, but even among more sophisticated people it’s generally the case that they’re acting as avatars of ideas that they did not produce. And so that doesn’t mean they can’t further the ideas, but the point is that we’re born into a linguistically mediated culture, and it’s mediated at all of the multiple levels of analysis that I already described, and we’re shaped in the way that we view the world with regards to the input that we receive that’s collective. We learn language from other people. We use the words that other people use. We use the phrases that other people use. It’s an intensely collective exercise, but even more specifically, so that’s from a general perspective let’s say, but even more specifically, the problem with thinking is that you’re a very narrow channel, right? I mean there’s a lot of world and there isn’t very much of you, and that means that there’s a lot more that you filter out than there is that you take in, and your filtering is very, very intensive. It’s dependent to some degree on your embodiment. It’s dependent to some degree far more than people generally realize on your motivations and your temperament, which is a topic we’ll return to. And then it’s further narrowed by your position in society and by the people that you have around you, and by your particular domain of expertise or lack thereof, and then there are sets of darker motivations as well that blind you to certain things that you should be able to see, but either don’t or won’t. And so the problem with thinking is that A, you’re a narrow channel, B, you’re not very good at it, and C, you’re incredibly biased, and there isn’t much you can do about that except listen and talk to other people, because they’re, I mean, they’re not the only source of correction, but they’re a pretty intense source of correction, and I mean we’re blasting corrective information at each other all the time, right? I mean, even in a situation like this, which you could think of as a monologue, but isn’t, it’s a dialogue, the reason I’m watching all of you is to see, you know, are you paying attention, and if not, I better adjust what I’m saying. Do your facial expressions indicate that you’re understanding what I’m saying and following it? Maybe you’re nodding, your eyes are open, you know, in some specific way, you’re actually facing me, your eyes are on me. I can read your facial expressions, which is always why I’m looking at individuals in the audience, and I’m constantly calibrating what I’m saying if it’s a dynamic conversation to ensure that the information flow is maximized, and the reason I look at your eyes is because I can tell where they’re pointing, and the reason I look at your face is because you’re broadcasting motivational and emotional information nonstop at me while I’m speaking, and so even in a situation like this, which like I said is more monologue than otherwise, there’s a tremendous amount of corrective information continually flowing between speaker and listener, and if that stops, you know, if you hear a speaker who’s detached from the audience, often someone who’s reading, for example, it’s much more difficult to listen to them, as everyone knows, and that’s because there’s a deadness about reading something in front of an audience, and I think the reason for that is that that living, let’s call it spirit, isn’t manifesting itself in the same manner as it is when the audience is listening, and the speech is both spontaneous and self-correcting, and so the thing about free speech is that, like I’m not a free speech advocate, let’s say, I’m a true speech advocate, which is to say that I believe that people should say what they believe to be true. I think that’s your obligation. It’s also your right, but it comes with an obligation, but I don’t believe that true speech is possible without free speech, because you’re just not very good at thinking, and so you have to stumble around when you’re first formulating ideas and wander into territory that’s not necessarily productive and manifest your biases, and in short, you have to be a fool, and the only way that you improve upon that performance is by, well, first of all, stumbling through it to begin with, and then second, by observing carefully what sort of reactions you’re getting and having a dialogue around it so that you can start to sharpen up your ideas and improve their focus and find out where you’ve made a mistake and all of those things, so a lot of what’s necessary with regards to thinking is the freedom to make mistakes, because what, are you going to do it right the first time? I don’t think so, and that’s why, for Carl Jung, for example, the fool was a mythological precursor to the hero, the trickster is a mythological precursor to the hero, because unless you’re willing to stumble around badly to begin with, and to be a fool when you first start doing something, which is always the case when you’re learning something new, then you’re not going to make any progress, and so practically speaking, free speech has to be as untrammeled as possible so that people can be wrong and they can be biased and they can still express their opinions, including their darker ones, and then allow themselves to be subject partly to improvement by the world, because if you say things that are too stupid and then act them out, the world smacks you a good one, there’s also the social intermediaries, the other people that you’re communicating with, who will also do the same thing, and we’re always broadcasting information at each other constantly trying to shape each other’s behaviour, and what we’re trying to do is to bring forth from other people that which we would like to see them manifest, and so there’s an implicit ideal as well that people are broadcasting at each other all the time, and there’s tremendous social pressure, generally speaking, to manifest that implicit ideal as closely as possible, because otherwise people disapprove of you or lack interest in what you’re saying or criticize you and so on, and you have to be allowed to be exposed to that kind of corrective feedback, because otherwise you drift and you become subject to your own idiosyncratic insanity, and I mean I’ve seen that very many times in my clinical practice, because well first of all I have some isolated people that come to see me and all they do is talk, I just listen, I mean because they don’t have anyone else around, and they need someone to run their narrative by to keep their minds organised, they can’t do it themselves, and they can’t do it without listening to themselves talk even, because for most people talking is how they think, and talking socially is even more how they think, and I mean that literally, I don’t mean that metaphorically, and I think that’s true for almost everyone, I mean there are people who are trained academically who can actually think, but to think you have to divide yourself into sub-personalities, I suppose, each of which has a differing opinion, a well-elucidated differing opinion, and then you have to let those different elements of your personality have an internal dialogue, and you have to draw conclusions from that, it’s very, very difficult for people to do that, and we radically overestimate the degree to which they do, Jung said at one point that people don’t think so much as thoughts appear in their head, and they believe them, which I think is a much more accurate way of describing the general, because true thought is not only that the thoughts arise in your mind, it’s that you look at the thought and then you critique it, you have to separate yourself from the thought and decide whether or not it’s valuable, that’s more like an editing function, and it takes a long time to be a good editor, a tremendous amount of time, and it just doesn’t happen generally speaking, so I would say, well without free speech there’s no true thought, and then you might say, well who the hell cares whether or not we think, and I think the answer to that is fairly straightforward, I mean you might think it’s so obvious that it doesn’t need explanation, but there are very few things that are so obvious they don’t need explanation, so the reason you think is so that the world doesn’t smack you as hard as it might, fundamentally, and I really mean this technically, because the way that people evolved the capacity for thought was that the prefrontal cortex, which mediates a lot of voluntary linguistic ability, actually emerged over the course of evolutionary history out of the motor cortex, and so that’s a very interesting thing to understand, because it means that animals basically think by moving, and the problem with that is if you think by moving and you make the wrong move, then you’re dead, whereas what human beings can do is they can generate fictional avatars of themselves in fictional worlds, and they can run the avatars as simulations, and the ones that get killed they don’t express in behaviour, and I mean you can do that with words too, although people originally would have done it mostly with images, they do the same thing with drama, and so the reason that you think, and I think it was George, it was Alfred North Whitehead that said this I think, but I’m not absolutely sure, what you think is so that your thoughts can die instead of you, and that’s a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant phrase, and absolutely the case, so if you think properly, then you kill off the ideas that if you acted out would kill you, or at least cause you suffering, or perhaps cause suffering to the people around you, and since it’s more or less obvious a priori that suffering is worse than not suffering, under most circumstances, it seems reasonable to act in a manner that will minimize it to the degree that that’s possible, and so you need clarity of thought, because that helps guide you through a world that’s enshrouded in fog and full of sharp objects, and if you don’t want to stumble into them and impale yourself, then you should have sharp vision and sharp capacity to communicate, you know that’s one of the things I tell students when I’m trying to teach them to write, because no one ever tells them why they should learn to write, it’s like you learn to write so you can think, and you learn to think so that the world doesn’t treat you any more harshly than it absolutely has to, and that’s no joke, and if you’re a person who’s been around a bit, you see very rapidly that people who sharpen their arguments properly, and can articulate their position and defend it, are always, always the people who are most successful and most compelling, and that change the way structures function, and that also help things continue in the proper path when they’re running down the proper path, it’s no joke to be articulate and to be able to think, there isn’t anything that’s more powerful than that, and that’s a good segue into the second or the third part of what I wanted to talk to you about, see, since I made those videos, I’ve become, I guess the word is popular, oh, yeah, well in many ways, by about November, by the end of November last year, there were more than 200 newspaper articles about the consequences of the videos that I’d produced, and those were like in press printed articles, I’m not talking about anything that happened on YouTube, and YouTube is a very strange phenomenon, let me tell you, it’s far more powerful than you think, so just as an aside, I was on a program last week, hosted by a guy named Joe Rogan, I don’t know how many of you know who Joe Rogan is, Joe Rogan gets 1.2 billion downloads of his podcasts a year, just think about that, like that’s absolutely unparalleled, and everybody under 30 is getting their news from either Facebook or from YouTube, the whole conventional media sources, they’re dead, they’re so dead you can hardly believe it, so YouTube, and one of the reasons I’m bringing it up is because YouTube is the first platform that’s produced for people, the capacity to make the spoken word as far reaching and permanent as the written word, that’s a complete cultural revolution, it’s the first time it’s ever happened, it wouldn’t have to be YouTube, it just turns out that that’s the platform that got there first, but it’s a big deal, and anyways, the reason that I became popular I think was partly because of the political philosophical videos that I made, but then when people came to my website to watch them, they stayed generally speaking to watch the lectures that I’d been posting on there since 2013, and those were derived from work I did on my website, and those were derived from work I did on a book called Maps of Meaning, which I published in 1999, and see what I was trying to do with that book was to sort something out that was very complex, and that was when I was growing up and the Cold War was raging, I couldn’t understand precisely why we had divided into two armed camps around our respective ideological positions, either why those ideological positions were so important that people would risk the destruction of the world to protect them, or why it was those two particular ideologies, or whether or not this was just a difference of opinion, which would be a more postmodern view, there’s multiple ways that you can organize societies, in the West we happen to organize our society one way, but that’s one of a plethora of potential ways of organizing society, and let’s say the communists had decided to organize their society another way, and human beings are infinitely malleable, and so the social structures that we occupy are arbitrary in some sense, matter of opinion, and maybe collective opinion, but nonetheless still a matter of opinion, and I thought, well is it the case that the values that we hold to be true in the West are merely based upon opinion, and so I started to investigate that, and the conclusion that I came to as a consequence of hitting the question from multiple different perspectives, was that that was not a reasonable way of formulating, of interpreting the evidence, and so I looked at evidence from neuropsychology and neuroscience, mostly based at least in part on the work of someone named Jeffrey Gray, he was a very good psychologist, very interested in anxiety, I looked at general behavioral psychology, looked at literature, and I looked at mythology, and I could see a pattern emerging across all of those, which I think is a nice way of determining whether or not something exists, like it’s one thing to see a pattern in one set of data, but if you can see the same pattern in another set that’s quite historically distinct from the first, and then see the same pattern in another set, and then another set, then the probability that that’s a spurious pattern starts to decrease quite radically, and so I don’t think the pattern was spurious, so I’m going to tell you what I think I, what would you say, extracted, this is very complicated and makes a difficult transition in the talk, so I’m going to read something first, this is from the Gospel of John, it’s one of the most famous lines in the Bible, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, it’s a very strange idea from a cosmological perspective, because it pauses that there’s something conscious or cognitive about the origin, that there’s a necessary cognitive element to the origin, I think about that essentially as something associated with consciousness, and of course we don’t really understand the relationship between consciousness and being, we don’t understand consciousness at all, but it seems integrally associated at least with our individual beings, because one of the things that we seem to not doubt is that we are in fact conscious, and that so are other people, and if I treat someone as if they’re not conscious, well they tend not to be very happy about that, and so I think that’s a very interesting idea, if I treat someone as if they’re not conscious, well they tend not to be very happy about that, so they’ll certainly object to it, so despite what we might say we believe, we certainly act as if we regard all other human beings as conscious, and the consciousness is a prerequisite for the existence of their experience, so anyways, so that there’s this emphasis in this book that is at the root of our culture, that there’s something about verbal communication in particular that has to be regarded as foundational, and I think that’s actually to some degree in keeping with the postmodernist claims that everything is a language game, let’s say that everything is constructed by language, now I don’t believe that everything is constructed by language, but I’m just pointing that out because you can take this particular perspective, and you can look at it from a variety of different intellectual sources, and still derive an analogue of the claim from it, so I want you to keep that in the back of your mind for a moment, now that idea that the word was there at the beginning of creation, that’s a very very old idea, it’s older than the Judeo-Christian context from which I extracted it, so for example in Egypt there was a god named Ptah, who was a major god, but as far as the Egyptians were concerned, he was the original creator, and he created as a consequence of thinking, but more specifically as a consequence of speaking, so again there was this idea that there was this primacy of speaking as a force that brings being into existence, and then you see the same thing in the Mesopotamian context, their creation myth was called the Enuma Elish, and there’s a god in that story, and that story apparently is one of the places from which the creation story in the Bible was extracted, the god is named Marduk, and Marduk is a god that fights chaos and creates the world out of the consequences, and he has a variety of different attributes, one of which is his head is ringed with eyes so he can see in all directions, so there’s very much emphasis among the Mesopotamians on the primacy of attention, but he can also speak magic words, and it’s the fact that he’s equipped with this massive capacity for attention and the ability to speak magic words that enables him to go and fight the dragon of chaos, roughly speaking, and to cut her into pieces and make up the world, one of Marduk’s names for example is he who makes ingenious things out of the combat with the dragon of chaos, and Tiamat is this primordial goddess of chaos that represents the formless proto matter of things from which consciousness extracts structure, that’s one way of thinking about it, so that idea is quite widespread, in fact it’s an idea that informs mythological structures everywhere as far as I can tell, there’s this idea that there’s a dynamic between what you know and what you don’t know, you can think about those as different domains of reality, what you know and what you don’t know, and the thing that mediates between what you know and what you don’t know is this thing that has the attribute of spoken wisdom, it’s something like that, that’s a very complicated idea, it’s very difficult to understand, it’s extraordinarily difficult to understand, but I can give you some sense of it, it’s a phenomenological idea I suppose, imagine that you, that, I don’t know maybe you have it, yeah, maybe you’re a medical student, a pre-med student, you want to go to medical school, so you’re easily beadling away on your courses, you’re doing alright, then you go take the MCAT and you score it to say 20th percentile, which of course 20% of people do, and that will come as quite a shock to you, no doubt, because you go in there, in the world that you understand, and in that world you’re competent, let’s say, to become a medical doctor, and when you open the envelope and you look at the number, well then your world crumbles and collapses, and what it collapses into, I would say, is equivalent to this formless chaos, that the ancients believed was the ground of being, and it’s this place where confusion reigns, in fact the word for the chaos that God orders with the word at the beginning of Genesis, often translated as chaos or confusion, now when you think, well, you’ve formulated a world that you inhabit with a particular linguistic, rational, logical structure, it’s predicated on certain axioms of belief, like that you’re competent to be a medical doctor, and then you receive a piece of information that makes not only your present understanding of yourself, no longer relevant or correct, but also your past understanding of yourself, and also your future, poof, gone, right, well, gone where? Gone into what? Well, gone into chaos, roughly speaking, and then you’re in very rough shape as a consequence of that, and if you do manage to lever yourself out of that chaotic condition that you now find yourself in, you’re going to essentially do it with thought and dialogue, right, because you’re going to talk to people, what did I do wrong? What’s wrong with the way I thought? How could I have been so misled by what I believe? What should I do now? All of that is a way of reconstructing yourself from the ashes, so to speak, and you do that with speech, and you do that with true speech, and so true speech is what redeems you from the chaos of unstructured being, and so then that’s another thing to think about for a moment, and then I’m going to bring up this final piece, and we can think about it too. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how these ideas came to be, because they came to be over a very long period of time, so the god Marduk, for example, he was assembled, you could say, as the empires of the ancient Middle East, as the tribal people of the ancient Middle East came together, and they each had their own deities that represented their highest values, and when they came together, those deities had to be amalgamated, and so tribe A has its highest value, and tribe B has its highest value, and they’re embodied, that’s the deity element, and they come together, and then the deities in some sense have to have a war to figure out who’s the top god, and so if you assemble a few hundred tribes, out of that comes a conceptualization of the top god, that was Marduk, for example, in Mesopotamia, and he usually absorbs the names of all the previous gods, and he sort of emerged as the king of a hierarchy, and so you think about this, if you think about the expression of the deity as the projection of the highest ideal of the tribe, and that’s something that’s been worked out over perhaps millennia, especially with people who have an oral tradition, and then you bring those different tribes together, what happens is the highest ideals in their embodied form have what you could think of metaphorically as a war, and the war of gods in heaven, by the way, is a very ancient and widespread mythological motif, and out of that war arises what you might describe as a meta value, and so the meta value would be the highest value among a set of values, and the question would be, well, what would that value be? What would that highest value be? Is there something about it that’s recognizable and say somewhat constant so that if you took a hundred tribes here and amalgamated their ideals, and you took a hundred tribes here and amalgamated their ideals, if the two sets of amalgamations would have a structural similarity to one another? And as far as I can tell, the answer to that is yes, and it’s a logical answer because you’d expect structural similarity if you extract out a common element from a very large number of constituent representatives. So for example, if you take a large number of female faces and average them, so I’m not talking about the average face, I’m talking about the averaged face, it’s not the same thing, the averaged female face is attractive, and so is the averaged male face, and so because it kind of constitutes the central human form, and if you take 64 women and you extract out an averaged face and you take another 64, you get the same face. Well, maybe it takes more than 64, but you get the point. And so, well, so I was thinking about how that process came to be. I decided to look at it even like to go back farther in time to try to understand how it is that we formulated our values per se, especially given that at some point we weren’t linguistic creatures at all, right? We separated from the common ancestors between us and chimpanzees about six million years ago, and sometime during that six million year process we started to be able to imitate ourselves first and then represent ourselves in image and action, and then only after that to start to articulate ourselves. And so a lot of the knowledge that we have is grounded in our embodiment, but also in the shaping of that embodiment across extraordinarily long periods of time. So like there’s an implicit way of being in your form, in your embodied form, but more importantly there’s an implicit way of being that’s a consequence of that. It’s a consequence of the fact that we’ve existed within hierarchical social structures for far longer than we were even sharing a common ancestor say with great apes. So that’s for maybe hundreds of millions of years with regards to being embedded in a hierarchy. So then the question is something like, if we’re embedded in a hierarchy and we have been forever, that’s about 350 million years by the way, is there a set of attributes that tends reliably to move you up the hierarchy? Because if there is, you see, going up the hierarchy increases the probability of reproductive success. So there’s actually nothing more important to determine over the course of 350 million years inside a hierarchy than how it is that you ratchet yourself up the hierarchy reliably. And you could think about that in some sense as the source of ideals. Here’s a kind of a concrete way of thinking about that. You know, if you get a hundred men together, they’re going to organize themselves into a hierarchical structure. They have to or they’re going to stay chaotic and fight. That’s the other alternative. But the way that the people who are going to rise to the top, they might rise to the top because of their sheer physical prowess and power, but they also might rise to the top because they’re very competent at certain things. And it’s as if all the men are going to get together and vote, and maybe that would actually happen, to determine who best embodies the spirit of the group and who should be granted leadership. And in an evolutionary context, by the way, that would also help ensure that that person would propagate their genes into the next generation. And it’s not a trivial effect, especially among men. It’s a big effect because roughly speaking, half of all men are not reproductively successful. So there’s a wicked culling, let’s say, among men. Well, you can see this among chimpanzees as well. They have dominance hierarchies. Some sort of chimps rise to the top. And you might think, well, that’s the caveman chimp who’s best at pounding out all the rivals, but it turns out that that’s not exactly the case. And Franz de Waal has done a very good job of detailing this with his work on chimpanzees. In particular, he’s found that the power-hungry tyrant sort of chimp can rule for a while, but he tends to have a very unstable kingdom. And the reason for that is he’s not very good at mutually grooming. He’s not good at socially connecting with other males, and he isn’t popular among the females and doesn’t attend to the young, essentially. And so what happens is even if he’s like the meanest, toughest guy on the block, two subordinate chimps team up. They make friends, they groom each other, and they have each other’s backs, and then one day he’s having an off day because he ate too many fermented bananas the night before, and they just tear him into pieces. And chimps are unbelievably strong and unbelievably brutal. They seem to have absolutely no internal regulation whatsoever of their aggression. That all seems to be manifested outside in terms of dominance hierarchy control. And we know that because they go on raiding parties into other chimp towns. They go on raiding parties into other chimp territories, and when they find chimps that aren’t part of their hierarchy, they just rip them into pieces. And so that’s a scary thing if you think about our similarity with chimpanzees, because we like to think we have internal controls over our aggression, but it’s not so bloody obvious, I can tell you that. Anyways, what DeWall found was that it’s actually chimps that are more, you might say humane, although chim-pane, I don’t know what the equivalent is. Let’s say humane, that manage to produce hierarchies that are more stable and actually manage to stay alive on top of them for much longer periods of time. And he thinks about that as the emergence of an implicit morality. It’s a morality that’s acted out. So then you think, well there are different ways of climbing up a hierarchy. There are worse and better ways. The better ways allow you to live longer in a more stable hierarchy, and the evolutionary payoff for that is that you leave more descendants. And so the hierarchy itself becomes a very powerful shaping mechanism that determines how it is that people are going to adapt because it’s the primary method of selection. So there’s an ethic in there. There’s an ethic that emerges from the social interactions, but that’s rapidly transformed into a biological selection device. And so we’re selected. And that’s especially true among human beings because with chimps, the females are indiscriminate maters, which is to say that a female chimp in heat will mate with any male chimp. Now, the dominant males chase the subordinate males away, so they’re still more likely to leave offspring than the subordinates, but it’s not because of the females. But human females are different. Human females exert choice and quite brutal choice, you might put it that way. They’re very choosy, and it’s one of the things that seems to have distinguished us from chimpanzees. And what roughly seems to happen is that the male dominance hierarchy elects men to the higher rungs of the hierarchy, and then the females peel from the top. And so that means that what you can say is that human beings are the consequence of intense male dominance competition. It’s not necessarily dominance, but it’s competition for the upper rungs of the hierarchy mediated by female selection. And so that’s produced, as far as I can tell, a powerful pattern of behavior. Now, the question is, what’s that pattern of behavior? I would say, well, it’s encapsulated in mythology in two forms. And the question is, well, who should lead? Let’s say that’s the question. Who should lead? That is the question. Who should be sovereign? Or maybe when it becomes abstracted, what should be sovereign? Because the first question from an evolutionary perspective is, who should be sovereign? But once you can abstract, then the principle of sovereignty can be detached from the leader and become a principle all on its own. And that might be first expressed in mythological or imagistic form, dramatic form, like the good guys versus the bad guys, or good versus evil. We could say it like that. But obviously it’s embodied and acted out far before it’s extracted and turned into an abstracted representation. Well, what seems to have happened is, so one of the common themes, for example, in mythology is what’s roughly being described as a hero myth. And a hero myth involves someone who’s part of a demolished community, community under threat. The threat’s usually signified by something vaguely like a dragon. And the dragon comes out, it’s eternal, it comes out to attack the village. The hero comes out and confronts the dragon and then frees the virgin, for example, or gets the gold. And to me, that’s a very, very, well, that is a very old story. It’s in the Anum Elish, for example. It’s the story at the basis of very many, what would you call it, widely dispersed myths around the world. The dragon, for example, is a very common symbol. And I think the reason for that is, it’s so complicated, but I think the reason for that is something like this, is that human beings learned to understand over time that the most reliable leader was the person who could step outside the structure when it was damaged to confront something that was chaotic and dangerous in whatever form that might be and then to bring something valuable back as a consequence. And you see that principle being elevated continually in mythological stories like the Anum Elish, for example, where the main hero Marduk is elevated among the other gods and is characterized by this intense capacity for vision which the Egyptians also worshiped in the form of Horus and this capacity to speak, which has this ability to formulate and reshape the world. Well, that’s the thing, is that it’s as if what we’ve discovered as a species in some sense is that the person that should lead, the thing that should be sovereign, is the thing that can step outside the structured order, incorporate something new and dangerous, and then produce something valuable out of it. That’s one phase. Another phase, another hero myth, is the person who criticizes the power elite when it becomes corrupt and points out the corruption and then restructures the society. That happens in the prophetic books, for example, continually in the Old Testament, because you could think that the historical enemies of humanity are twofold in some sense. One is the chaos that comes from outside and that disrupts the standard order that needs to be dealt with and the other is the chaos that comes in the inside when our institutions and hierarchies become corrupt. And then the thing that transforms that is the thing that has enough courage either to stand up against the chaos or to say something about the corrupt institutions. And what’s happened, as far as I can tell, is that over time those principles have been extracted out from this much more embodied domain and raised to the principle of highest sovereignty. Now, one of the things that happened in Egypt was called the democratization of Osiris and Horus. What seems to happen, and this is what happened in Egypt, is that the power to manifest that sovereignty, let’s say, is first only regarded as an attribute of the sovereign, the king, and the king is not the king. He is actually only king insofar as he can manifest that. So in Mesopotamia you’re only emperor if you were a good Marduk. You’d go out on New Year’s Day and reenact the entire cosmogony and you had to be a good representative of Marduk otherwise you didn’t deserve your sovereignty. In Egypt, unless you were a good avatar, let’s say, of Horus and Osiris, the combination, then you didn’t get to be Pharaoh. So you were embodying this principle, this principle of sovereignty. And what happened in Egypt was that, first of all, the principle of sovereignty, the images of sovereignty, could only be used by the Pharaoh and then it became the aristocracy. And then what seemed to happen after that, they were using the symbols, what seemed to happen after that, this was maybe a transmutation in part via the Greeks and in part via the Jews, is that the idea that that sovereignty that was inherent in the Pharaoh and then in the aristocracy was actually something that could be attributed to everyone that was human. And that was, I think, that manifested itself most completely in some sense at the beginning of the Christian era because there was an emphasis then on the idea that every single individual carried within them a spark of the divine, let’s say, and that was the proper source of sovereignty. And so then the question is, well, what is that source of the divine? And that’s why I read you that section from John to begin with because the source of the divinity is the capacity to speak and transmute the world as a consequence of speaking and that’s the proper principle of sovereignty. And as far as I can tell, it’s also the reason why in the West people have an inviolable right. The reason they have an inviolable right is because our society figured out and based on these unbelievably deep antecedents, precedents, that each individual had the capacity to contribute something to the group without which the group would be less. It’s something like that. And so you’re regarded at the base of our law as the, as the avatar, that’s exactly right, as the avatar of a divine principle and that divine principle is the capacity to use your speech to give order to the chaos of the world and to criticize structures of order that have become corrupt and reformulate them. And so you have this territory that surrounds you that’s inviolate, that it’s something about you that transcends even the reach of the law, which is a very strange thing, you know, because in our societies, even if you’re a murderer, even if everyone knows it, you still have inviolable rights. You think of all the things that are unlikely to have emerged as a concept, that’s got to be like number one. It’s been a very long, long struggle for human beings to understand that we embody this principle let’s say, that continually generates the world out of chaos and revitalizes it when it becomes corrupt and dead. And that’s the, as far as I can tell, that’s what’s expressed in John, is that there isn’t any difference between that and the capacity to carefully articulate the nature of your experience to other people and then to respond to the corrective feedback. That’s the way that human beings progress through the world and that’s the ultimate principle that should be at the top of what I think of as the set of all human dominance hierarchies, right? Something will move you up a hierarchy. Something slightly different will move you up a different hierarchy. You take a huge set of hierarchies and say, well, what’s the principle that’s going to work best across all those hierarchies? It’s something like the capacity to speak the truth. And so that’s how it looks to me. And that’s why I think apart from the practical reasons that are already described, there’s a lot of other things that we can do to expand this amount of information to process and I hope that made some sense. It’s a very difficult thing to boil down in a short period of time. I mean, I’ve been trying to do that for like 30 years to get it coherent enough to represent it in a short period of time. But there’s the practical issue, which is, that’s how we encounter what we don’t understand and turn it into habitable space and how we communicate about it and reach consensus. We know that and we know it really, really deeply. The whole human race has been aiming at that for God only knows how long, but it’s hundreds of thousands of years certainly and it might be far longer than that. And so it’s not a principle that we can dispense with and assume that we’ll construct something okay in its absence because it’s actually an expression of the fundamental nature of human beings and we mess with that at our extreme peril and as far as I can tell, that’s exactly what we’re doing now. And so, so that’s part of the reason why I objected to Bill C-16 because I don’t think that it’s reasonable for government authorities to put their goddamn words into their citizens’ mouths. As simple as that, I think there isn’t, there’s almost nothing you could embark on that would be more dangerous than that. And the fact that this had to do with, purportedly, had to do with the rights of a small minority of people I think is a complete sideshow. It’s almost irrelevant in relationship to the broader context and I think that if that wasn’t the case, then there wouldn’t have been any fear whatsoever about what I said because who the hell cares what I have to say. So, anyways, that’s my take on it. So, that’s all I’ve got to say. Thank you. So, you mentioned the form of dialogue. So, when you were giving the lecture, you mentioned that you’re not, in fact, engaging in a monologue because by looking and seeing our reactions, you’re constantly modifying your speech. I was wondering if you could speak up because I’m probably the only millennial in this room. No, no, no, one more. One more. But as someone who’s kind of grown up in the internet and who, in fact, has social media, do you think sites like Facebook and not so much Twitter, but basically Facebook, do they stop this dialogue or what are the ramifications of such things if people are communicating with each other without really being in the same room? What, for you, is lost? I think it’s sort of analogous to the danger of derivatives in the financial market. You know, because, like, a derivative is something that can amplify the degree to which the market moves, right, because it’s an abstraction from the underlying reality. So, it’s more powerful for good and it’s more powerful for evil and I would say, so to speak, you know, if you’re thinking about it metaphorically, well, it’s an amplifier and that can be a good thing but it can also be a bad thing and I think it does often amplify the proclivity of people to disappear into a self-reflective bubble and that’s aided by the algorithms that feed to you what you want to see. So, and we don’t know exactly what that’s going to do. It’s a very dangerous thing because we’re building an unconscious into the internet and no one’s going to understand how it works because it gets more and more complex, especially when AI kicks in in a big way because you can’t understand how those systems work even though they work and the problem with that unconscious in the internet is it filters information and you don’t know what the filtering is. I mean, you don’t know what your own filtering is, you know, because you’re not conscious of your underlying processes but this adds a whole new dimension to it and the fact that it’s self-fulfilling in some sense increases the probability of positive feedback loops that will go out of control. Do you think that it kind of locks you into your own maybe the story of your own life because I’m not a person, I’m not a frequent social media user but I see it as people posting about themselves, their relationships do you think it creates a constant feedback loop that it’s kind of like, I’m thinking of a, it’s not what it is, it’s the guy that looks… Narcissus, narcissist You’re looking at your own reflection in the mirror and that you are infected Well, I think what happens is that You’re not allowing other I think that is a danger I also think though is that you also fall prone to the implicit narcissism of all the other Facebook users and well, because people generally post glowing reviews of their own life and you know, to some degree that’s understandable because who wants to be subject to a constant barrage of misery I mean, there’s reasons that people do it they post themselves when they’re having fun when they’re doing something spectacular but that also means that you’re being blasted all the time by these endless images of other people having a far better time of life than you are and so I think that that, we do know that there is some evidence that more exposure to Facebook means more depression Now, it’s hard to pull out correlation and causality there but then in the political sphere you have the same problem because you’re not being fed an unbiased sample of information and your own initial biases are multiplied by the algorithms that select for you what you’re going to look at and we have no idea what the consequence of that is So, yeah Thank you very much Incidentally, I have a question that concerns something similar but I’m talking about the real face-to-face conversation You said how important it is for you as a speaker to get the feedback of your audience Now, having grown up in East Germany we have learned to look with no expression whatsoever at the most outrageous, stupid things because the consequences of rolling your eyes when they were talking about us being well ahead economically of the West would be just very negative so we didn’t do that and I see something very similar happening here especially in certain political lectures So, if somebody tells you that what you are doing or tells an audience what you are doing is horrible and I’m in that audience I wouldn’t roll my eyes because I know what the consequences are Now, of course, in… Those are microaggressions Yeah Really? I’m not kidding I mean, that’s exactly what it is Eye-rolling in particular is a sign of contempt Exactly But of course, if I never do that to you you now get the impression that what you say is just wonderful so you don’t get the critical feedback that is, as you pointed out, very important for you Yes Of course, that goes both ways It’s actually one of the fundamental defences of free speech is that if you constrain it, you are depriving people of corrective feedback and that’s a very bad thing because people cannot maintain sanity in isolation You outsource your sanity to other people If you are vaguely socially acceptable what that means is people can tolerate having you around and then they will provide you with corrective feedback and as long as you react to that, you don’t have to worry about being sane because they will keep you that way and you might think, well no, you can manage your sanity by yourself but no, it’s too complex You can’t, it’s not possible So the problem is not just inhibiting free speech but also inhibiting natural reaction to speech Absolutely, and the spontaneous reactions, right because a lot of those facial gestures, those aren’t precisely conscious and that’s actually good because they’re untrammeled expressions of your initial instincts It’s like having dogs around If you’re agitated and upset, the dog will get all nervous It’s like, well you can trust that, the dog doesn’t have an agenda and people are like that in their initial responses too because that doesn’t mean they’re correct but at least it means that it’s not mediated by an ideological bias or not so straightforwardly Just before we hear from Eva, I wanted to mention that we let our hypothesis die in our stead It’s Karl Popper, one of my favourite philosophers Yes I was just talking to it First of all, I want to thank you for a most interesting presentation and on a line which a lot of us here haven’t heard before So I thank you for that And I’ve, there are two things that I wanted to ask you about One, the concept that you’ve enunciated of the emergence over an extremely long period of time of the idea that we all have somewhat of the divine in us which I suppose also implies that we have somewhat of the opposite as well Yeah, it does imply that Leads directly to the idea of individual rights versus group rights Yes And a lot of the troubles that all of us here faced Is that we have become the target of these group demands for group rights rather than individual rights us all attaining or not that that march towards the hierarchies of society based on our own efforts and our own performances and so on So that’s one, but that’s also the other side of another thing that you’ve raised which one rarely hears in any of these kinds of meetings The biological basis of our behavior And I was really interested to hear you bring this into the discussion because it has seemed to me over the years and I’ve been around this business since the 60s I think when all the trouble seemed to have started Is that a lot of the feminism nonsense is involved with the denial of differences between males and females A lot of the problems with the performance and affirmative action and so on is the denial that there may be biological basis to some of the performance differences that we see in various fields of activity around the world And also this idea that we can decide what gender we are tomorrow morning I must say I’ve never heard of this What did you call it? The gender unicorn? Hey, look it up man It’s very instructive The idea that 5 year olds and 6 year olds will be subjected to this is positively alarming So I just ask you to comment on that Yeah, well they call that biological essentialism, right? And so that’s a curse word essentially, right? So, and again that’s partly why I objected to the legislation and surrounding policy because it doesn’t allow for a biological influence which is preposterous in my estimation I mean the biology actually is much more useful than people even realize So one of the things we were talking about earlier today was say the distinction between conservatives and liberals I can tell you one of the things that produces right wing authoritarianism authoritarianism, it’s very interesting and you wouldn’t guess this in a million years Prevalence of infectious disease So there was a great paper published 3 years ago, it was brilliant Prevalence of infectious disease So it was published in a journal called Plaws 1 And these researchers were interested in this hypothesis called the behavioral immune system And so you know very frequently when heretofore isolated human groups come into contact that either one group or the other dies like maybe all of them or virtually all of them that’s essentially what happened to the Native Americans when the Spaniards hit Central America because they didn’t have any built-in immunity to smallpox or chickenpox or mumps or measles and like successive epidemics just wiped them out the estimates vary but it could be as high as 95% 95% and so it appears as though the border idea, the idea of thick borders let’s say, which is a fundamentally conservative idea liberals want open borders and a lot of information flow and the conservatives want closed borders and more restriction and protection at every level of the conceptual hierarchy it’s not just political borders, it’s borders around everything but that seems to be tightly associated at least in part with the prevalence of infectious disease both at the country level and at the local level within countries and the correlations like point seven, it’s not trivial and it’s not with governmental authoritarian attitudes it’s with individual authoritarian attitudes in the locales where the infectious diseases are prevalent and it seems to be associated with the emotion of disgust so Hitler wasn’t afraid of the Jews, conservatives aren’t afraid of others that isn’t how it works, they’re disgusted that’s not the same thing, it’s associated with a personality trait called orderliness and so once this has been sorted out by psychologists over about the last 10 years let’s say and when I was plowing through the literature and working on the relationship between disgust sensitivity and personality I happened to reread Hitler’s table talk, which was a collection of his spontaneous speeches collected at dinner time, lunch times by secretaries from 1939 to 1942 and once I knew this other information it just leapt out at me so Hitler was an admirer of willpower that makes him a conscientious type of person very obsessed with order, washed his hands continually, was hyper clean and disgust sensitive and his primary metaphor for the German people was a body, Aryan body, pure body under assault by parasites pure disgust and contamination language and it’s mediated by disgust sensitivity and that’s one of the things that predicts that kind of right wing close the border attitude and that’s also heightened in places where infectious diseases are a real problem so if you want to eliminate right wing authoritarianism it actually looks like one of the things you could do is promote public health programs everywhere to rid the world of it to the degree that that’s possible of infectious diseases you know, you want to impede the flow between people if there’s infectious diseases everywhere, obviously and that manifests itself in political attitudes so the biology reaches way deeper than people are willing to, like to assume but some of the things that it tells us are unbelievably useful to know it’s something terrible to know in some sense but useful to know and so like DeWall’s work on the stability of primate hierarchy is incredibly important I mean he’s been looking at the emergence of proto-morality among chimpanzees and that seems to be driven in large part by the dominance hierarchy structure it’s not exactly a dominance hierarchy either, that’s probably not exactly the right way to think about it because you know, dominance implies pure power but lots of human hierarchies aren’t dominance hierarchies at all they’re competence hierarchies or something like that, so it’s very different I’m a libertarian so I’m in favour of freedom but unlike a lot of libertarians I don’t think that there’s kind of a natural affinity to freedom among human beings that evolution has actually trained us to be conformists much more than freedom loving individualists absolutely and as a result of that, I mean because in our evolutionary history it was often much more important to row all in the same direction the clan, the roughly related, genetically related clans that were roaming it was much more important to row in the same direction than to row in the right direction as long as you didn’t row off the cliff or run off the cliff that would be bad, but as long as you were muddling through it was better for everyone to be in the same and so therefore we evolved to be very much conformists and people like you, and to a lesser extent the rest of us in this room, are the disruptors we’re the ones who are non-conformists, we’re the ones who say, hey wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right to me and we’re the ones who want to lead society back to chaos the state of chaos where everyone’s got their own little view of how things should go instead of following the leader and just doing what everyone else does and that’s why people like you attract, to my way of thinking, that’s why people like you attract such a visceral angry reaction is that you’re leading us back into chaos and if we don’t all ignore you and shut you down and we’re all going to be in this state where the clan is fighting amongst each other instead of rowing in the same direction I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that certainly one of the things I’ve learned, see I already knew before all this happened that people were primarily conforming I actually don’t have much of a problem with that because most of the time the tradition is correct but sometimes it’s not correct at all that’s the problem so one of the things I always tell my clients and my students for that matter is you should do what everyone else does unless you have a really good reason to vary and one of the things I learned from Carl Jung was that and if you do vary you should try to only do it in a couple of directions because you probably can’t handle doing it more than that it’s just too much, too much psychologically but the problem is that sometimes the group is rowing off a cliff and then it’s, then, you know, that’s partly why the individual in some sense is the eternal saviour of the group because the group is, it has the aspect of sheep, let’s say and the sheep are doing fine they’ve got the whole herd thing going for them decreases the risk of individual predation they’ve got all their nervous systems in tune so there’s real utility in the herd but they’re also subject to all the problems that herds have like herd panic and so that’s not good enough that’s what human beings figured out was that being part of the herd, although necessary, isn’t good enough there has to be a balance between the tradition the old dead tradition and the revivifying force of the living essentially those are actually how the gods split up in Egypt because Horus was roughly a representation of the living and Osiris was roughly a representation of the dead and it was the combined combination of those two that made up the sovereign very intelligent, dramatic political philosophy but one of the things I have seen since September is I knew that people were conformist but I really had no idea to what degree that was true I’ve got very, very few letters of support from people who are academics, for example and I get secret reports really people will come and say which is fine, but you can always try it out and see how it goes so when I gave talks in the 80s and 90s on employment equity one of the most common comments I would get after the thing is over and people are kind of moving around and shaking their hands I agree with everything you said, but I would never say yeah, I agree I agree I agree I agree I agree I agree with everything you said, but I would never say yeah, well it’s no wonder it’s not surprising there are real reasons not to stick out from the herd if you mark a zebra so that you can identify it against the herd the lions will kill it right, and that’s, Dan, I tell you, knowing that because they can’t organize their hunt unless they can identify the individual the lions dazzle the lions that’s right, well they’re camouflaged against the herd zebras so that’s, man, that’s worth knowing, it explains a lot that oh, sorry thanks very much for elaborating very compellingly the fundamental significance of thought and speech which are almost impossible to, at our point in development, to separate and the trance issue, which is the particularity, that isn’t very important I would agree with you, but I’m a sex researcher, so people are going to ask me the trance issue, I think, is an appropriate lightning rod for social constructionism and, you know, as a researcher in this field, I can tell you that John Money was wrong kids are in tabula rasa and, you know, Mickey Diamond was right, and, you know, etc now you’re in trouble the presence of police officers here was actually a very interesting underscoring of the power of thought and speech and the millennial issue of the internet reminds us that we don’t choose our audience in the internet, you’re basically exposed to the world and your tendency to self-center, to avert being trolled, is probably great at any rate, that’s just background my colleagues are going to, my colleague Ken Zucker, who one of your colleagues at the University of Toronto was recently fired for his departure from common wisdom and it wasn’t much of a departure, and in fact he represents common wisdom on the trance phenomena having said all that, my colleagues are going to ask you two questions ask me two questions if he met Joan, who was, you know, transfeminine, male to female transsexual would you refer to her as Joan? yes, it’s simpler and the other issue is, midst all the garbage and the hype and the let’s reassign a three year old and stuff that I think all of us would regard as nonsense many of us, some of us in this room deal with trans individuals every day you know, like some gay individuals, that’s just the way they emerged in life they’re genuine, they’re not particularly begging special privilege my colleagues are going to say, would you, you know, you’d call her Joan would you call her Joan, and would you accord her authenticity or reality or is she socially constructing herself, or was she born that way? well, the devil’s always in the details you know, I mean, one of the things that’s emerging right now, although this is a fringe viewpoint is, like, imagine that you’re dating while you’re prejudiced because people’s prejudices shine forth most clearly in their choice of partners right? they choose people who are, sorry oh, people’s prejudices shine forth most brightly in their choice of sexual partners right? we prefer young people, generally speaking we prefer healthy people we prefer people of our own race we prefer people of our own religion we prefer the highest performing individuals we can get our hands on, generally speaking and so all that’s deeply prejudicial and one of the things that’s emerging, I wouldn’t say in the trans community because there isn’t such a thing, as far as I can tell, but among certain individuals is they’re dubious of your right to choose your sexual partner based on their genitalia, let’s say because that’s a form of discrimination so, yeah, well, you know, look, I can tell you in Huxley’s Brave New World, and this is worth thinking about you didn’t get to, it was a social faux pas to turn down a sexual request because it’s discriminatory well, it is discriminatory really, I’m not kidding, man, it’s the deepest form of discrimination you know, you’re basically saying yes, exactly, exactly it and that’s what you had to do in Huxley’s Brave New World and you also weren’t allowed to have a long-term monogamous relationship because the exclusionary element of that was regarded as prejudicial which it is that’s the thing that’s the thing and so the question is, well, I could say, well, I wouldn’t discriminate it’s like, well, it depends on exactly what you mean by discriminate and then of course the argument is about exactly what right I have to discriminate and increasingly the answer is none like, we’ve already sacrificed freedom of assembly we’re pretty much on the way to sacrificing freedom of speech it’s a logical conclusion to all of this that on those issues, I think we’re very much on the same page I’m going to be asked by colleagues and graduates what is your view of the authenticity that is, someone says, look, I’ve always identified as the opposite gender now I feel much better that I’ve transitioned yes, well, that’s a part that I’m more skeptical about because the evidence isn’t all that clear that people do feel better when they transition so, but it’s, look, it’s conc… yes it is first of all, the fact that there are categories doesn’t mean there aren’t any there aren’t exceptions okay, there’s exceptions now, what those exceptions signify, well, that’s generally to be dealt with on an individual to individual basis and that’s fine with me you know, I’m a clinician, I’ve dealt with all sorts of people who don’t and who fits in the categories nobody, like, to become socialized what you do is you mangle your square peg into a round hole and I mean, for some people that’s obviously far more of a sacrifice than for others you know, social being demands, what would you call, restriction of your at least of your individuality in all sorts of different aspects and for some people that’s much more of a sacrifice than others the question is, what does the existence of the exception imply for the general case and I believe that if you’re a postmodernist and a Marxist underneath that it supplies the excuse to take down the category of gender and why would you do that? I think that’s the category used by the oppressive patriarchy to continue its pathological power seeking there’s a distinction between, you know, leave me alone, I want to get on with my life versus, I’m going to dismiss the category so that there’s room for me yes, precisely or I’m going to dismiss the category on behalf of someone else who I claim to speak for which is even more commonly the case just in a general environment where oppression and identity are the currency of status and advantage right, right, well, and I just don’t see that it’s going to be all that useful kids are confused enough when they’re growing up I think to add gender confusion to that, which we’re doing very very rapidly is going to destroy 15 people for every one it saves it might be more than that because there’s plenty of confused people out there I would say like, what, 2 out of 30, something like that are just barely clinging on to the edges of reality and they’re looking for acceptance and transmutation wherever they can find it and confusing them further isn’t going to help and these people that were transitioning young there’s going to be one hell of a kickback from that, I can tell you when they hit adulthood let me just follow up on Grant Brown’s question Jordan is among the top 5 or top 10 professors in North America during the past year who’s been a lightning rod a target of collective efforts at humiliation and being disgraced and my question is essentially if you could give as parsimonious an answer as you can which generally isn’t very parsimonious I’ve noticed, yes of why you and it’s a remarkable phenomenon when somebody is demonized to the extent that you have been in mainstream media I was reading just lately I picked up in a car mechanics office a copy of Toronto Life oh yeah, they did a nice hatchet job by a kind of wide eyed reporter he doesn’t seem like a demon he seems like a kind of nice guy he even seems a little bit on the left but he must be a demon so the question is just as briefly as you can, why you? because I said there was something I wouldn’t do right? because all these massive ideas, as I said, they manifest themselves in micro examples many micro examples, but they’re micro examples and so there’s always a certain amount of arbitrariness when you decide to not go along with it and the arbitrariness is like, well I said that I wouldn’t use these words for example and I had a rationale for it and then people test you out when you put up your hand, they test you out they think, well are you just a monster well let’s throw a bunch of monster words at you and see if they stick see if you can defend yourself because that’s a really good way of finding out whether you’re actually a monster and so that was the first, let’s say, two months of all of this was me just sort of fending off these different accusations now I was fortunate in many ways I was fortunate in that, in the first demonstrations that followed the videos that the people who were supporting me behaved reasonably well compared to the people who weren’t and that was, you could think about that as somewhat dependent on chance not entirely, but things could have gone badly the other way and also I was protected by the fact that I already had about 400 hours of videos online and so virtually everything I had said to students in the last, well, over the span of 30 years really but particularly in the last five years was all recorded and so if anybody wanted to find out if I was a monster, all they had to do was go through the painful process of listening to what I had to say and there were no smoking guns buried in there which is significant given that there were 200 hours of it you’d think there’d be something in there that I said that could have been taken out of context that would have really walloped me a good one but so far nobody seems to have extracted one so, and I also think that, I guess the next reason would be I didn’t just, apart from saying there was something specific I wouldn’t do which like brings the abstraction down to a point of reality, right it’s a line that makes it real rather than just an abstract critique I think the other thing that happened was that people came to my website because of the political material, but that isn’t where they stopped they started listening to what I had to say and I think that what I have to say is actually revolutionary so, and I think people have a sense of that I mean, it looks like it, as far as I can tell the response seems to indicate that and you know, I’ve shared some of that with you today that the idea that some of our values are grounded in phenomena that are far more primordial, let’s say, than our mere opinion like that’s a big deal if there’s anything about it that’s true and I mean, I don’t know, but I’ve been trying to puzzle this out for a long time and it seems to cohere and when people try to apply the principles that I’ve been discussing in their lives it makes their lives better and it’s so interesting too, because I’ve been going around speaking publicly and most of my audience is men, interestingly enough even in the live talks and all I’ve been doing with the men basically is talking to them about saying what’s true and adopting responsibility and they’re so bloody hungry for that that it’s just mind boggling which is something really curious and interesting to me because that’s not a saleable message because I’m basically saying, well, find the heaviest load you can conceive of and try to pick it up and while you’re doing that, try to engage in the least amount of deceit as possible and that that’s also a pathway out of suffering and that’s also for people in general well, it’s so interesting to see how unbelievably, positively the people who are following this are responding to that I’ve been talking to a lot of the potential leaders of the conservative party and one of the things I’ve told them repeatedly is you guys have something to sell young people for the first time that I can remember and that’s responsibility the left is selling freedom and rights it’s like, well yeah, where’s the other half of the story freedom, you know, that’s freedom to drown I mean, I’ve got nothing against freedom obviously but there’s no rights without responsibilities and there’s no freedom without tradition so somebody’s got to tell the other half of the story so, Dr. Peterson, three more questions, is that okay? We don’t want to wear you down sure, okay you’re too late for that thanks a lot, Jordan I’m remembering a conversation we had about a month ago in a little cafe in Ottawa some of the issues we discussed then brought up again today it leads to certain, we didn’t resolve anything, I think, ultimately and I doubt if we ever will and it seems to me the real problem is something you mentioned today and we could go a little further with it it’s a question, Pontius Pilate’s question the first postmodernist, what is truth and it was taken up many times by Nietzsche and the genealogy of morals where all truth is interpretation and of course this is not the case with Nietzsche and anybody who follows him as you pointed out because that’s somebody else’s truth that there is no truth and therefore what do you do with that and you’re into the problem of the Cretan liar but here is the problem for me even with your talk, which is as usual brilliant and I think grounded in tremendous amount of factual information I was asked once after a book of mine came out which was contested hotly by many people what gave me the right to think I had the truth this was an interviewer in Toronto for a random house thing and why did I think what I was saying was true who was I to say that I had the truth and I said I don’t have the truth and I had to come up with some explanation quickly in some kind of phrase and it just occurred to me I said all I have is this, credible verisimilitude what is credible verisimilitude he wanted to know I said A, it depends on gathering as much evidence as you possibly can even if you have to counter your own biases you just said with as least amount of deceit or self-indulgence as possible and the second factor is common sense which seems to be not so common these days so if you can put evidence and common sense together and at the same time try and marshal and monitor your own proclivities I went right but that was hard with my book because I was left before I could go right and I had to make that decision do I want to go right and lose all my friends or do I want to stay left and have kept men and join my friends and so on I had to go right because that’s what the evidence told me against my own desires so honesty if you can manage it evidence and common sense but here’s the problem it’s still there how do you get from credible verisimilitude to truth where is the bridge how do you get there nobody can say that ultimately yes the problem I think you can say certain things are true certain dates etc. certain things have happened certain men have suffered as a result of feminists all this is true but where truth seems to founder is when you enter the realm of cause who has the truth to explain feminism developed in the way it did or why climate warming or global warming developed in the way it did we can point out the fact this is wrong this is wrong this is happening but when you get out of the element the region of events and into the region of the causes that’s the bridge the gap from credible verisimilitude to truth and I frankly don’t know how to manage that so the conclusion I’m coming to is a little bit different from your conclusion it’s not the one that I want to come to and I would like to resist it but the conclusion I’m coming to is quite simply we’re fucked yes but that’s always been true the apocalypse is always that’s why the apocalypse is eternal because the world is always coming to an end and it’s actually true in small ways and in great ways I mean with regards to to your ideas about truth I would say that like language truth is more like a process and I would say it’s a process that you actually embody rather than conceptualize abstractly to one of the ways I’ve thought about it is that if you’re seeking the truth then what you don’t know is more important to you than what you know and that’s a fundamental orientation I mean what I’ve been doing since September and I’ve had friends who’ve been helping me with this but I think I’ve been doing this for a long time as I’m trying to figure out where I’m wrong I’m watching the audience to see if I’m making a mistake I’m listening to my friends who are watching my YouTube videos telling me when I’m a little too angry maybe or maybe too pompous or too noisy all the different ways that you can fail in front of an audience I’m listening to them I’m listening to the comments and I’m trying to modify myself accordingly and so you live in error and strive towards the truth and it’s in that striving that the truth is most accurately embodied but then I would also say one other thing about the existentialists is that there’s a kind of emphasis on pragmatic truth among the existentialists because they claim that your truth is something that you should act out not merely hold because to act out is to believe it it’s a definition, right? it’s not precisely a proposition it’s a definition and so I found some things that I was confident enough into risk acting out and so that’s what I’m doing to the best of my ability and I’m watching what happens and I’m watching what happens if other people act out the propositions and as far as I can tell so far so good I mean, I wouldn’t say that my position right now is to be envied it’s very stressful I mean, since September I’ve basically been in the position of any mistake is fatal for all intents and purposes and that’s very stressful to be that hyper vigilant but by the same token the public response to what I’ve been doing has been overwhelmingly positive I’ve only got three pieces of hate mail which just staggers me and the comments on YouTube, for example, are like 50 to 1 positive and yeah, maybe it’s a biased sample I can’t tell but and the other thing, you know, I’ve been trying to rip holes in the ideas that I presented to you today really, like with all my intellectual capability every time I lecture I’m trying to do the same thing is like, is there something in this that I haven’t got right because I was trying to look for a rock at the bottom of things, you know and partly why I decided that I wasn’t going to use those damn words is because I think the rock at the bottom of things is honest speech and I really believe that it seems to me to be right and that’s good enough, so I’ll act that out and see what happens as best I can I’m not claiming to be any more honest than anyone else seriously, I’m not that’s a big claim to make you better watch your bloody step if you’re going to say that but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe that honest speech is the pathway to redemption because I do believe that I know that’s strange language but you know, that’s still it’s the most accurate language for that kind of conceptualization Dan, and then David, and then we’ll thank our speaker during your presentation your emphasis has always been on on the truth, I mean the the man who strays from the group to find the truth and comes back to it et cetera oh, his emphasis has been throughout on truth and my question is this I take it that truth is a necessary condition for an idea being important at some level it’s not at all obvious that it’s a sufficient condition I mean some truths are surely uninteresting, boring and others are really important and in particular ideas about value now I’m not sure whether you wanted to classify claims about value as being susceptible of truth or falsity that’s sort of been a long-standing question in the philosophical world about which is the right thing to say about those if we suppose that we include those it would be a way of obscuring the contrast I’m going to make surely we need an additional variable which is the value of these ideas and it’s not I was wondering whether you were in were supposing that you had at least implicitly some kind of general criterion of value of that kind that applies in your theory or whether that’s open-ended no, I have a criteria because I mean that’s a fundamental question I’m talking about values rather than empirical facts of which there are an infinity right, and so it’s the application of the facts to the problems of life that’s the problem because there’s a lot of facts but I would say and I got this partly from Piaget because one of the things that Jean Piaget was trying to do was to understand he was actually trying to mediate between religion and science that’s what drove his entire intellectual career and he came up with this idea of the equilibrated state which is an idea I really like so imagine two teams of five people pursuing a goal it’s the same goal for both teams but team A has been forcibly compelled to attain the goal and team B is doing it voluntarily his proposition was is that in a race that was even all other things considered that the team that was composed of voluntary participants would outperform the team that was compelled and I believe that and he basically said it’s enforcement costs that make the difference and that’s a compelling argument for me and so I’ve been expanding on that partly it’s like Piaget via Jung I would say is the intellectual pathway it’s like the proper aim for value is something like what’s good for me in a way that’s good for me tomorrow and next week and next month and next year because time frame matters a lot so that’s a serious constraint and then what’s good for me now and the future me in a way that’s also good for the other people around me if that’s possible and then also broader society if that’s possible across multiple time frames and that’s sort of like the ultimate equilibrated state and so that’s a hypothetical ideal obviously but I’m not sure that answers the question in the following way why can’t there be an indefinite number which are good by that same criterion but different lots of them we don’t it seems to me arrive at a single criterion of anything by using that well I know but I think it’s a criterion that filters out to be sure but it seems to me that leaves a whole lot of them in and that’s interesting and I think that’s a good thing myself but certainly it’s not obvious that that wouldn’t be true there are commonalities among the set of solutions that’s basically that’s the proposition that I’m putting forward is that there are and I think those would be akin to Jung’s archetypes there are commonalities across the sets of solutions and so and they’re reflective of people’s I would say basic nature roughly speaking I mean it’s partly why human beings that are isolated and have been forever can learn to trade with one another for example because they can and so there’s there are constraints built into that requirement that I just described that weed out most solutions which is also I think the answer to the postmodern dilemma which is well because you’re kind of posing it which is well how do you know there isn’t an indefinite number of solutions and I would say because the constraints on the solution space are so intense that very few variance manage because if you make a big mistake you’re dead or people gang up on you or like you know you either run into the world headlong and perish or you transgress against your fellow people and they’re not very happy about that and so the set of solutions that allows you to simultaneously exist in the world and in the social world for a reasonable length of time I think there’s a very limited number of solutions to that problem it just seems to me that you’re literally constraining the set of the set of things in your universe in a way that seems to me to be much too restrictive because there’s lots of things that are not problems quick response what’s that? well the only thing I can say is that I think there’s a set of solutions that’s bounded in some manner even though it may be quite large but there’s a pattern to be detected among it’s like the pattern that you can detect that unites everything that’s musical there’s something although there’s very diverse forms of music there’s something that emerges from all those forms that allows you to generate the category and I think the same is the case with ethical behaviour although even though it’s subject to the constraints of time and place as well well thanks very much Jordan this was really a great presentation that you’ve done with some encouragement first of all I’ve looked at the extent of your coverage on YouTube and one of my areas is digital media and journalism and it’s incredibly impressive as you probably already know so the level of influence that you have is really incredible and that’s a good thing because that brings me to my second point I’ve watched a lot of your stuff and you’re not embarrassing for those of us who hold similar views great, great, that’s good I mean that in an excellent way I am definitely hearing you in fact, there are a lot of people who espouse similar views and they give me shivers they make me sick to my stomach a bit but you haven’t embarrassed us me and that’s good and secondly I’ve seen that you have moderated even your approach saying the same things but you’ve become even more erudite in the way that you present your arguments and I really appreciate the effort that you’re putting into this because the number of places that you’ve been and the number of shows that you’ve appeared on I know must be very taxing and so I want to just acknowledge that you’re doing this not for your own good and I really appreciate the effort that you’re putting into this because this is a lot of personal effort that you’ve expended and I really appreciate it thank you yes and this is the question the question is sorry everyone but the question is this I keep hearing people say and these are my colleagues who are cowards incidentally who say if only he were nicer and you’ve mentioned that already do you really think that and honestly this is the question then do we need to be nicer do you need to be nicer just a response to that if you would I need to be nicer when it’s necessary I need to be nicer when it isn’t and I need to learn to distinguish those more carefully continually more carefully and hypothetically I’m getting better at it the fact that my job isn’t at stake at the moment actually does take some of the agitation pressure off you know I mean at the beginning of this I was quite embattled let’s say and also less accustomed to this crazy sequence of events I didn’t know exactly what I was doing not that I do now and I’m more resigned to it in some sense as well and I’m not trying to present myself as I don’t regard what’s happened to me as any sort of calamity even though it’s very complicated but it has its own momentum and that’s okay I guess but I’m trying to weave my way through this with the least amount of enmity possible but that’s something you have to continually feel out and hopefully that’s working better that’s the plan thank you very much