https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=s4c-jOdPTN8
Hi everyone. My name is Baruch Harari and I am the financial director at Students Support a Free Speech at York University. I’ll keep all the intros for tonight short because we really don’t have any time. If you’re ever traveling downtown on a Tuesday night around 7 o’clock and you pass by the Isabel Bader Theater, you’ll see hundreds of people, about 500 people lined up outside. And you’ll ask yourself, why are there these older people, younger people, why is everyone just outside waiting in a line? And it’s confusing. You think maybe there’s a celebrity there, you know. It turns out it’s Professor Peterson psychological significance of the biblical stories. Hundreds and hundreds of people sold out crowds every single week. And I often ask myself, what is it about Professor Peterson that just attracts such a large audience? And for me personally, it’s how genuine he is when he speaks. Many times you’ll see him get on stage and be emotional and you don’t really get that from many speakers. Also, the professor’s command of the English language is, it’s so eloquent and yet so simple to understand, which is, it’s really unfound nowadays. It’s really amazing to have Professor Peterson here because he was the initial inspiration behind Students in Support of Free Speech. On that note, it is my pleasure to introduce Professor Jordan Peterson. So I’m going to talk to you a bit briefly about why postmodernism is wrong. And I actually mean technically wrong, apart from ethically wrong and morally wrong and intellectually wrong and emotionally wrong and practically wrong. But I’ll give The Devil Is Due to begin with because they are actually wrestling with quite a difficult problem. And the founders of postmodernism were by no means unintelligent individuals and they actually put their finger on quite an important problem. And the important problem that they put their finger on was the fact that any set of phenomena has a near infinite number of potential interpretations. And that actually happens to be the case. That fact, let’s say, was discovered simultaneously in a number of different disciplines. One of them, most surprisingly, was artificial intelligence. And the artificial intelligence people ran into that conundrum when they learned that it was much more difficult to make a machine that could perceive the world than had originally been supposed. You know, we’re supposed to have autonomous robots and functional artificial intelligence back by the late 60s. And of course that didn’t happen. And part of the reason for that was that the artificial intelligence researchers, when they were starting to instantiate perception into their machines, learned that charting your course in the world might be a trivial problem in comparison to determining how to perceive the world. And the reason for that is that there’s a very large number of ways to perceive the world. And the postmodernists actually caught on to this. And one of the claims they made was that, well, there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret any given text. And that actually also happens to be the case. And then they said, well, since there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret any text, how do you know that any given interpretation should take precedence over any other interpretation, which is also a perfectly reasonable issue. They went off the rails very rapidly after putting forward that set of propositions. And that’s partly why they also kept their alliance with Marxism, because the problem with postmodernism fundamentally is that if you agree to the proposition that all interpretations of all phenomena are of equal value or lack of value, then you can’t act in the world. And the problem with that is that if you’re a human being, you have to act in the world, because otherwise you suffer miserably and then you die. And that seems to be an unacceptable outcome for most people. So the issue with postmodernism isn’t so much the erroneous claim that there are a very large number of interpretations for any given phenomena, including the meaning of a text. The error in postmodernism is the failure to recognize that there are finite number of credible interpretations of phenomena. And also a refusal to engage with the intellectual problem that determining what that finite set might actually consist of. And I’ll just give you a very brief overview of how it is that we happen to solve this problem as human beings. We do it partly biologically, because we inhabit a biological framework that’s been developed over the course of about 3.5 million years that severely constrains the manner in which we interpret the world. And it constrains it such that we tend to only manifest, spontaneously manifest interpretations of the world that don’t result in undue suffering and our demise. And there’s plenty of ways to be stupid enough to perish and there’s plenty of ways to be stupid enough to suffer without meaning. But there aren’t very many ways to live properly and carefully for a long period of time in a manner that doesn’t also simultaneously do harm to other people. And so that’s the second set of constraints, is that you have biological constraints on your perception and they’re built in as a consequence of a Darwinian process. And the second part is that you’re forced to interact with yourself now and this week, next week and the week after and the month after and the year after. So you have to conduct yourself in a way that doesn’t interfere with your future life as you’re living now. And simultaneously you have to conduct yourself in a way that makes all the other people around you want to cooperate with you and compete with you and maintain the relationship with you and do that today and next week and next month and next year and so on into the future. So there are, although there are a very large number of interpretations of the world, there are unbelievably severe constraints on the number of functional interpretations there are in the world. And one of the things that the humanities was supposed to be educating people with regards towards understanding was what the universe of those finite functional interpretations might be. And that’s been more or less abandoned by the universities under the guise of postmodernism. The fact that the postmodernists dare to be Marxist is also something that I find, I would say, not so much intellectually reprehensible as morally repugnant. And one of the things that the postmodernists, postmodern neo-Marxists, continually claim is that they have nothing but compassion for the downtrodden. And I would say that anybody with more than a cursory knowledge of 20th century history who dares to claim simultaneously that they have compassion for the downtrodden and that they’re Marxists are revealing either their ignorance of history that’s so astounding that it’s actually a form of miracle or a kind of malevolence that’s so reprehensible that it’s almost unspeakable. Because we already ran the equity experiment over the course of the 20th century and we already know what the Marxist doctrines have done for oppressed people all around the world. And the answer to that mostly was imprison, enslave, imprison them, enslave them, work them to death or execute them. And as far as I can tell, that’s not precisely compensated with any message of compassion. And so I don’t think that the postmodern neo-Marxists have a leg to stand on ethically or intellectually or emotionally. And I think that they should be gone after as hard as possible from an intellectual perspective, an informed intellectual perspective. And this is fundamentally a war of ideas and that’s the level of analysis that it should be fought upon. And not only is it a war of ideas, I think it’s one that can be won because I think that especially the French intellectual postmodernists are a pack of, what would you call them? Well, we could start with charlatans, that’s a good one. Pseudo-intellectual would be good, resentful would be another. And then I would also consider them highly, they’re highly deceptive in their intellectual strategies because almost all of them were Marxist student intellectuals and they knew by the time the Gulag Archipelago came out and even before that, that the nightmares of the Soviet Union and Maoist China were of such magnitude that they had completely invalidated any claim to ethical justification that the fundamental Marxist doctrines had ever managed to manifest. And so it’s a no-go zone as far as I’m concerned. Intellectually, the game’s over. We’ve already figured out that there are finite constraints on interpretation and we also understand why those exist and how they evolved and from the perspective of political argumentation, there’s absolutely no excuse whatsoever in the 21st century to put forth Marxist doctrines as if the bomb that’s administered by the compassionate to the downtrodden, sorry, tried that, didn’t work. We’ve got 100 million corpses to prove it and that’s plenty for me. And if it’s not enough for you, well then you should do some serious thinking either about your historical knowledge or about your moral character. So that’s the first thing. Okay so the next thing is what to do about it and I think, I thought about a lot of things about what might be done about it apart from just talking about it which seems to be reasonably effective but I thought for a while that it would be useful for the political systems, people who are running the political systems to consider doing something like cutting the funding of universities by 25% and letting them fight over the remains and hopefully what that would mean, hopefully that would mean that the pseudo-disciplines such as women studies which never had a methodology that was credible to begin with and I would put in the same classification all the ethnic and racial studies groups that are popping up on campuses like MADD under the guise of true disciplines which they’re not in any sense of the imagination but also, or any sense of the word, but also increasingly the social sciences and the general humanities that have been corrupted quite terribly by the postmodern doctrines. I thought well maybe it would be good to see if the funding could be cut for them because there’s no reason that the public at large should be funding a fifth column whose aim is to disrupt the fundamental structures of western civilization with tax money that’s devoted to supporting people while they’re doing that. You know, and I’d like to think about that, it’d be nice if that was a paranoid delusion and of course when I first started talking about this the first thing that people thought and quite rightly was who the hell is this crazy professor and how many things might there be wrong with him which is exactly what you should think when someone stands up and says, hey you know this system that you guys all think is going really well and that’s been going well for decades, there’s something seriously rotten about it that you should be paying attention to. The first thing you should think of is well what makes you think you’re not insane and because that is the right answer under those circumstances but it turned out at least as far as I can tell that I’m not actually insane and that the things that I were pointing out were actually factual and what happened in Canada at least and I would say to some degree around the world was that as journalists who actually happened to be concerned about free speech generally speaking started to look into the claims that I was making about such things as the legislative policies surrounding Bill C-16 they realized that I was actually just reading what was written on the page and understanding it instead of trying to blow something out of proportion which I had absolutely no motivation whatsoever to do. But then you know I thought, I thought no you can’t have political interference with the universities because what happens is that you know you think what happens is that if you arm the politicians so that they can start telling the universities what they can and cannot teach even with regards to funding is then that goes seriously sideways very rapidly and you don’t end up with the result that you wanted you end up with some other result because you know how it is when you allow one organization to interfere with the autonomous function of another is that it isn’t the people that you want to do the regulating that end up doing the regulating and the things that you end up getting regulated aren’t the things that you want to stop so that’s not a good idea. So I think I have a better idea and I think the better idea is that the post-modernists should be starved at their source and I don’t use that terminology lightly I think that what needs to happen is that freshmen and second year university students and students coming into university from high school need to be educated about the post-modern cult and they need to be encouraged to not take the courses to just drop the courses to just stay the hell away from them and the humanities enrollments have been declining precipitously since the 1960s and a big part of that is that you know why in the world would you go as a half confused high school student into university and get whatever shreds of culture that you’re still clinging to to keep your poor head above water in the sea of chaos that threatens to surround you taken away by your professors so you’re stripped bare of anything but some vague sense that maybe you’re a horrible racist unconsciously in some manner that you can’t detect and then be left with nothing that that for your hundred thousand dollar investment in your bloody student loan so people are smart enough maybe not to continue to enroll in that sort of thing over time and the humanities have been being decimated since the 1960s as a consequence but it’s time for that process to accelerate and so here’s something cool that happened this week I think. I decided a couple of weeks ago to make a post-modern lexicon and I started analyzing word use and I was gathering abstracts from this Twitter site called New Real Peer Review which is something that the post-modernists really hate and because of course what New Real Peer Review does is take actual published abstracts from post-modern humanities journals which by the way have a zero citation rate of 80% and merely and merely republish them and the abstracts are so reprehensible and so incoherent and so cult-like and ideologically addled that the people who wrote them get irritated when other people read them and you know which is a good because the original Real Peer Review which was the first one was shut down by people who were irritated that the people who ran the Twitter site had the unmitigated gall to actually publicize writing that was written to be publicized. It was like the only situation I’ve ever seen where authors were actually embarrassed that someone did what they could to publicize what they’d written. Anyways New Real Peer Review picked up where they stopped and has been publishing abstracts like mad from these crazy post-modern journals which are journals only in name and so I started to pull out key words. Well I’ll tell you a little bit about that game in a minute. I started to pull out key words that were emblematic of the let’s call it the post-modern cult and then I thought I’d generate a questionnaire that parents of university students and late stage high school students and freshmen in university and maybe second year students could use as a guideline so they could look at the course descriptions and check off word frequency from the post-modern list and decide that if the course was part of the post-modern cult that they should maybe just not take it. But then I got a real interesting email from a guy, I won’t tell you his name yet, but who’s a computer programmer and he put together an AI system to parse apart post-modern, the post-modern lexicon automatically and he set up a website now where students can feed in course descriptions of any sort and it will spit out whether or not they’re post-modern and he’s… And so we’re developing, so the point is to get the program up to the point where it can automatically distinguish between post-modern and non-post-modern content and then students will be able to cut and paste a course description and paste it into the analysis box on this website along with the professor’s name and the course’s name and the discipline and the university and so we should be able to produce a listing of every university and every course that people are willing to participate in analyzing across North America and set up a list of courses and professors and disciplines that should be avoided and so maybe we can starve them out at their source and that’s what should happen. So it has to be bottom-up as far as I can tell for this to come to an end and it should come to an end because the post-modern neo-Marxist doctrine is nothing but a cult except that it’s the sort of cult that doesn’t have enough economic sense to run itself out of profit. So not only is it a cult, it’s a failed cult and if it was… So it’s a cult that has to be subsidized by the public person in order to exist at all. So that’s a pretty damn pathetic cult because normally if you’re a decent cult leader you can at least figure out a way to pick the pockets of your victims in a manner that enriches you. So I can’t even manage to get that right which I think accounts for their pronounced anti-capitalist bias because they haven’t been able to transform their ideological doctrine into some way of making themselves spontaneously rich. Although it certainly seems to have done a great job of ladling students with absurd levels of student loans in the United States, it’s exactly the point in their life where they should be free to make entrepreneurial decisions and take some risks which is also something that I regard as absolutely reprehensible. So the universities have figured out how to conspire in some sense to pick the future pockets of the students that they’re purporting to educate and they’re not educating them, they’re indoctrinating them, they’re not teaching them how to speak, they’re not teaching them how to debate, they’re not teaching them how to write, they’re not introducing them to the classical wisdom of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition and that’s absolutely appalling because that’s what the bloody institution was there for to begin with and that’s what it’s supposed to be doing. Yeah, so what else do I have to tell you about that? Oh yes, I just have one more thing I guess that one of the things that I was quite curious about was, I’ll tell you about two things, one of the things I was quite curious about is the post-modern, say, neo-Marxist insistence that the only true human motivation is power. Now I’ve been thinking about that in a couple of ways. I think that was actually Marxist’s slight of hand at the end of the 1960s because the original Marxist revolutionary doctrine was that Western society, let’s say capitalist society, but you can think about it more broadly as society in general, is basically best conceptualized as a zero-sum game fought to the death between the oppressors and the oppressed and be the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, let’s say. And as we know, playing that game in places like the Soviet Union and Maoist China didn’t work out so well for everyone so there seemed to be a fundamental flaw in the conceptualization, although people could always excuse that by saying, well that’s not real communism, which is the sort of statement that should immediately get you punched in the nose hard enough to knock you out as far as I’m concerned. So because the statement like that reveals only one thing and what it reveals is that if you had been fortunate enough to be in the position of Joseph Stalin that you wouldn’t have been quite the murderous monster that he was because your moral character is such that you wouldn’t have been swayed by access to that kind of extreme power. So if you dare to make that claim then there’s some things about yourself and humanity that you should learn and you should learn them rapidly before you pose more of a danger to yourself and others than you already pose. So part of it is the postmodernists turned the Marxist emphasis on economics into an emphasis on power in the 1970s and I think they did that as a form of sleight of hand because by the late 1960s and early 1970s it was obvious even to people as intransigent as someone as say Jean Paul Sarcher, who refused to denounce the Communist Party until that late in the progression of the 20th century, it became obvious even to people like that that there was just no way that you could maintain your intellectual and moral credibility and remain a supporter of standard communist doctrine. And also it seemed to be the case that strangely enough contrary to Marxist prediction that the working class in the West was getting richer and richer than people had ever got in history rather than being increasingly downtrodden by the brute heel of the corporate and capitalist elite. And that was not a revolution that was particularly easy to sell. Part of the sleight of hand was oh it’s not about economic power, it’s about oppression and oppressed and oppressor on a broader sense and that’s where we got the transformation into identity politics, which is just the Marxist oppressor, oppressed doctrine under a new guise. And I think it’s really tremendously reprehensible for people to be conducting themselves intellectually in a manner that insists that the most important element of any student or any person for that matter is whatever racial, gender and sex identity happens to be flavour of the month. And I think the problem with that fundamentally is first of all that those category systems are extraordinarily loose and they’re indefinitely multipliable, you know, because if you take any given individual there’s probably well it’s the postmodern problem, haha, there we go. It’s the postmodern problem that there’s almost an infinite number of ways to categorize any given individual. So how the hell do you figure out which group they belong to? And that’s actually a major problem. Like if you’re one eighth black, what does that make you exactly? Are you black? Are you white? Are you oppressed? Are you oppressor? Are you, let’s see, one half is oppressed as someone who’s a quarter black. Does it work out arithmetically that way? Hey I’m dead serious about this man. If we’re going to play this sort of game that’s exactly the question that has to be asked, right? And then how do you multiply up your oppressed identities? And then again who decides, who gets to decide exactly which identity you should manifest? And then how do we rank order those identities? And then how do we equate between them? And what measurement techniques do we use to determine who’s oppressed and who isn’t? And how do we assess equality? And on what dimensions are we going to assess equality? And who’s going to enforce it? And who’s going to make the decisions? It’s like oh well we’ll figure that out as we go along. It’s like yeah we certainly will and the results won’t be pretty, I can tell you that. Because the problem is actually unsolvable, all it’ll mean is that those categories will be made at the whim of the people who are making the categories. And since as we know the only thing they believe in power is power, that the only thing they believe in is power is that you can be absolutely sure that they will have absolutely no hesitancy whatsoever to use power in the seeking of their aims. And I think the other reason that all of the postmodernists, neo-Marxists ever do is talk about power is because they want to justify their use of power to get exactly what they want when they want it. There’s nothing but power, it’s like alright if there’s nothing but power that means we’re at war over power. And if that’s the claim that you make then you can justify the use of power because there isn’t anything else to turn to. There’s no logic, there’s no dialogue, there’s no consensus, there’s no discussion between well-meaning people. There’s nothing but divisions between power groups and identity groups and a Hobbesian state of war between all of us. Well when I look at people aiming at that then my proclivity as a psychoanalyst is to think that that’s exactly what they want. And to divide us up all by race and ethnicity and sexual identity and sexual preference and sexual expression and gender identity and all these multiplying forces of group identities seems to be nothing but an invitation to chaos and that’s exactly what I see looming. And it needs to come to a stop and it needs to come to a stop as fast as possible and one way of doing that is to stop the universities from continuing to indoctrinate young people who really at least at the beginning don’t know any better into playing these absolutely insane. And I would say bordering on murderous intellectual games. And so… So then I’m going to set up this website and maybe some other ones like it. And I’m going to do a series of videos for young university students and for high school students and I’m going to tell them that perhaps they don’t need to go to university to be indoctrinated. Perhaps they could go to university to learn and if they want to know the difference between an educator and someone who’s merely interested in indoctrination and the production of the next generation of pathetic whining radicals then they can use the website to distinguish between people who are credible and people who aren’t. And maybe we can drop the damn enrollment in those horrible courses by 75% over the next three years and just stop it in its tracks. So anyways that’s part of the plan. And I think it’s something that’s actually implementable. These things can turn around fast. And one of the ways that they’ll turn around is that if people just stop taking the courses. And so what people need to do in order to know that they should stop taking the courses is to know that these… Is to know what it is that these courses are aiming at. So that needs to be explained. Then they need to know what language the people who teach these courses are using in order to fulfill those aims. Then they need to know how to identify the courses. Then they need to know that it’s in their best interest both I would say spiritually and economically to avoid those courses and those disciplines like the plague. And then maybe we can get the disciplines that have become entirely corrupt and the ones that started that way to put themselves back together before they run themselves out of existence completely. And I might as well name a few of the disciplines that I think are particularly reprehensible to begin with. Obviously I’m painting this with a very broad brush and I’m not making the claim that every single person who engages in activity within all of these disciplines has been corrupted beyond comprehension by the postmodernist neo-Marxist. But it’s close enough first pass approximation. So as I said already women’s studies and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups, man, those things have to go. And the faster they go the better. They should never be put… It would have been better had they never been part of the university to begin with as far as I can tell. Sociology, that’s corrupt. Anthropology, that’s corrupt. English literature, that’s corrupt. Maybe the worst offender are the faculties of education and I would say… I read the recent policy documents of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario and I can tell you, you can go read it, it’s right on their website, is that their plan, and they just say it, I’m not making this up, you don’t need any inferences, there’s nothing implicit about it, is to reorganize the curriculums from kindergarten to grade 8 so that children are taught to be social justice warriors from the moment they step foot in the public education system. That’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re making that… Look, I mean we have social justice tribunals in Ontario. Okay, that’s not subtle in case you didn’t notice. To name them social justice tribunals, that’s not subtle. And so you see the same sort of language in the ETFO documents is that social justice is the right way to go, the appropriate thing to do is to train children to follow precisely that pathway, and the best way to do it is to get them as young as possible. And that’s the faculties of education for you. And they’re not producing people who are interested in educating children at all. And they’re taking the easy route and what they’re doing is training people who can memorize and then spew forth a one dimensional view of humanity and then have the goal, the unmitigated goal to presume that what they should be doing with children is indoctrinating them into that particular line of thinking from as early an age as possible. And so faculties of education, they need to be fixed and they need to be fixed fast. And then, and this is where I’ll stop, one of the most shocking things I learned this year is I didn’t really know this but I didn’t learn this until I went to Queen’s University because I went to Queen’s University, I was invited there by a group of law students, you know, and I was there, I hope hypothetically, to debate Bill C-16 and the students went to all the law professors and asked them if they would debate me and none of them would. And I thought, well, I thought, yeah, well that figures, first of all, that’s what I thought because, well, but then I thought, geez, that’s pretty absurd because I’m a psychology professor and you know, lawyers, one thing lawyers are pretty good at is arguing if they’re good lawyers. I mean that in a complimentary manner, I mean that’s what you learn to do when you’re a lawyer, you learn to speak, you learn to formulate an argument and you learn to formulate an argument on virtually any set of principles because you know, you’re acting as defence or you’re acting as prosecution and you need to be flexible on your feet and put forward the best possible argument given the facts at hand. And they couldn’t find anybody to debate me so Bruce Pardee, who’s a professor there, had to act as devil’s advocate, which he did quite nicely, but I thought that was pretty, pretty appalling to say the least that they were either so ideologically rigid that they wouldn’t confront me on their bloody territory. It’s like if a law professor from Queens wanted to come and debate me about psychology, hey, there’d be no problem with that because that after all is my field of expertise and the fact that a law professor wouldn’t come forward and debate me on a legal matter, I thought was just, I didn’t even know what to think about that. But one of the things I did learn and I’ve really learned this more is that law has actually become corrupt as well as a discipline and it’s not so much, I know a lot of lawyers and I’ve worked with a lot but most of them have been more on the corporate and business end of things and so, but all the human rights law, all the law that doesn’t seem to be attached in some sense to business concerns has also become corrupt and social justice oriented beyond belief. And the students at Queens were complaining to me that they weren’t learning any law in their courses, all they were learning was social justice propaganda and so you bloody well better watch out for that, I can tell you, because the people who make your legislation are lawyers and they’re making plenty of legislation that is not in your best interest. And even worse than that, perhaps, it’s not even in the best interest of the people for whom the legislation purports to protect because the bloody legislation and the policies are so incoherent and so badly written like Bill C-16, here’s one of the things it did, no one knows this and I can’t believe they haven’t noticed. You know the strongest argument that gay people have had for the last 50 years for being included in broader society and let’s say tolerated, so to speak, or welcomed for that matter is that it was a biological phenomena. You know and I’d say the evidence for that isn’t overwhelming but it’s certainly suggestive, it’s like Bill C-16 has eradicated that because it’s predicated on the presupposition that there’s no relationship, that the relationship between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual proclivity is independent. They blew out the structure that enabled them to make the argument for pursuing the rights to begin with. And so if I was a good hateful right-wing radical and feeling rather anti-gay in my orientation, let’s say, I might say something like, oh I see, it’s just something you learned, is it? Well how about you unlearn it? And if it’s just your whim, well then why should I put up with it at all? And that’s actually written into the damn legislation now. So watch the lawyers because they’re being trained as social justice warriors and they’re producing incoherent bits of legislation that are going to produce a tremendous amount of problems as they roll through the legal system. So anyways, in closing, the closing is… Thank you. It’s a war of ideas and it’s an educational problem and what we’re going to try to do is to educate students well enough, while they’re making their course decisions, so that they can stop being indoctrinated by people who should have known better than to do that to begin with. And so that’s the plan for the next couple of years and hopefully it will be effective. So thank you very much. Thank you.