https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=U4NijLf3M-A
Music Well, Dr Jordan Peterson, welcome to Sydney on your Australian tour. You’re talking to packed out houses and the interest is extraordinary and we’ve had the opportunity to talk personally and I can understand why. I want to begin with something that Churchill wrote in the 1930s and he said this, One of the signs of a great society is the diligence with which it passes culture from one generation to the next. When one generation no longer passes on the things that are dear to it, its heroes and their stories and its religious faith, it’s in effect saying that past is null and void, it’s of no value. He goes on to say, that leaves young people feeling a lack of direction and a lack of purpose and opens them to the dictum of Karl Marx that a people derived of their history are easily persuaded. Have we stripped our young people of purpose and meaning and left them open to being bullied around? Well, there’s two things about that that I think are really worth laying out. The first is an analysis of the purpose of memory. Because people think that the purpose of memory is to remember the past. And that’s not the purpose of memory. The purpose of memory is to extract out from the past lessons to structure the future. And that’s the purpose of personal memory. And so you’re done with the memory when you’ve extracted out the information that you can use to guide yourself properly in the future. So if you have a traumatic memory for example that’s really obsessing you, if you analyze that memory to the point where you figured out how you put yourself at risk and you can determine how you might avoid that in the future, then the emotion associated with that goes away. So memory has a very pragmatic function. And cultural memory is the same thing. Is that we need to extract out stories from our past that structure our future. And we need that because, first of all, if you don’t have a purpose let’s say, it isn’t that your life becomes neutral in a meaningless sense. It’s that your life becomes characterized by unbearable suffering. Because the baseline condition of life is something like unbearable suffering. And what you have to set against that is a noble and worthwhile purpose. And hopefully your determination of that purpose is buttressed to some degree by the wisdom of the past. Because you can’t conjure something like that up on your own. And if you provide people with nobility of purpose then they can tolerate the suffering of existence without becoming entirely corrupted by it. And cultures that don’t do that, it isn’t even so much that they die, it’s that cultures that don’t do that are dead. They’re done. They don’t have a story anymore. They don’t have a call to adventure. And then, well then everyone suffers stupidly as a consequence. It’s a very bad thing. So Churchill made the same observation that many of the great psychologists and philosophers made in the early part of the 20th century. It’s like, bring the story forward and propagate it and make it the most noble possible story. And then you motivate people to transcend themselves, which they need to do. So yes, he’s exactly right in his diagnosis. Just to stay with him for a moment, he’s painted as the great defender of freedom. It’s possible that your country, Canada, and certainly my country, Australia, would have not continued as free societies had it not been for that man courageously standing at a time when so few did. He wasn’t the inventor of freedom. Freedom as we understand it, and I want to unpack that a bit, something very, very few people in very few cultures down through the ages and even today have ever really experienced? Well, yes. And partly because we’re afraid of it, I would say. I mean, people think of freedom as the ability to implement your whim. And freedom opens up that as a possibility. But sustainable freedom, that isn’t what it’s about at all. It’s about, it’s primarily about responsibility. It’s about determining which load you’re going to pick up and carry. That’s the proper definition of appropriate freedom. It’s not dim gratification of instantaneous impulse. It’s self-evident that that doesn’t work. Two-year-olds do that. And that’s why they can’t live in the world. They can’t organize themselves across time. They can’t sacrifice the moment for the future. And the more sophisticated you get, I suppose, in some sense, the more you’re able to do that. And then your freedom becomes the freedom to choose the proper responsibility. And that’s not, that’s also not something that we’ve been good at communicating to young people. If we talk to them about responsibility, we generally do it in a finger-wagging sort of way. It’s like, well, you’re breaking the rules. You’re a bad person. And, well, that may be true because people break the rules and there’s no shortage of badness in people. But the proper message for young people is to say, well, no, you don’t understand. You want to take on responsibility. You want to take on the heaviest load that you can conceive of that you might be able to move because it gives your life nobility and purpose. And that offsets the tragedy. And not only psychologically, not only does it offset it psychologically because you have a purpose and something to wake up for and to face the difficulties of the day. But also because if you face the difficulties of the day properly, you actually ameliorate suffering. Not only in the psychological sense, but because you make the world at least a less terrible place. And that’s something. To move things away from hell is something. Even if you’re not self-evidently moving forthrightly to heaven, to move things away from the worst they can be is, well, that’s a noble goal in and of itself. So young people are starving for that idea. It’s very interesting to watch. As I look at it, it seems to me that Acton had it right. Freedom properly understood needs to be seen as a negative and as a positive. The negative is a sort of concept of freedom from fear, addiction, persecution, tyranny, in a personal sense. And then freedom to be is to reach your potential. But it seems to me that what’s missing is an understanding that freedom exercised within a framework of responsibility, i.e. doing what you ought, will guarantee ongoing freedom for yourself and for your neighbours. Freedom exercised in a way that confuses it with licence tends to destroy freedom. In fact, you could even go so far as to say that misunderstood. Freedom turns out to be its own worst enemy. Well, that’s the difficult distinction between freedom of the moment and freedom with everything taken into account. I’m a real admirer of the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget is a developmental psychologist and few people know, the world’s most well-known developmental psychologist, and few people know that he was actually motivated in his intellectual pursuits by the desire to reconcile science with religion. That was his driving force from the time that he was a young man. You wouldn’t know that even necessarily by reading his writings because it’s implicit rather than explicit in them. But he has a different model of what constitutes morality than Freud. Freud’s model is combative. It’s sort of the superego as tyrants, so the superego would be the strictures of society, the id, the biological impulses, and the ego crushed between those, right? So the ego is this thing that’s crushed between nature and culture. And so it’s a really, it’s a tense and combative model of the human psyche. And there’s something about it that’s accurate because some of the restrictions that are put on your impulse gratification are imposed on you, in a sense, tyrannically. But Piaget’s perspective was much more optimistic and I think much more accurate. He noticed that as children organized themselves spontaneously as they developed, especially within the confines of their own spontaneous play, they didn’t so much subsume or inhibit their dark and aggressive impulses as make them sophisticated and transform them into universally acceptable games. So for Piaget, a game that a group of children were playing, that all of them were playing voluntarily, and that was going well, and that they all wanted to continue playing was a microcosm of society, and literally a microcosm of society. The reason the children were playing those games was to practice being productive members of society. And he felt that the appropriate game tended towards what he described as an equilibrated state. So an equilibrated state would be a game that you’ll play because you’ve decided it’s a good game, but that you can play with others because they’ve also decided that it’s a good game. And so that can work at the individual level and at the familial level and at the social level. And if you get all those things working simultaneously, then you have a sustainable enterprise. And it’s predicated not so much on the inhibition of impulse or on the regulation of it, but of the integration of impulses into a pattern of being that gratifies them on a relatively permanent basis. So you know, if you want to go to university and become a physician, I think there’s a lot of sacrifice of impulse of gratification that goes along with that. But if you become a physician, then it’s a noble enterprise, people support you socially, and all the needs that you need to have fulfilled will also be fulfilled by that enterprise. Well, that’s a way better model. And so it’s strange that the maximum freedom comes with the adoption of a discipline and then also the adoption of responsibility that frees you up and everyone else around you in the long run. And if you explain that to people, especially in this day and age, when they’ve been fed a never-ending diet of idiot rights and freedoms, they’re immediately on board with it because they know that most of the meaning that people experience in their lives is a consequence of adopting responsibility. So they’re starving for that idea to be articulated. It opens up a whole can of very, very interesting issues. Let’s try and pick a couple of them, but before I do, it’s evident to me, and I’m enormously encouraged by this because I’m a passionate Australian, I want this country to be the sort of place that offers opportunities of the sort that I had when I was young. I’ve had my opportunities, but I look at my kids’ generation. What’s going to be there for them if we keep feeding them the sort of thin gruel? In reality, the people turning out in vast numbers, every one of your talks in Australia has been oversubscribed massively. It tells you they kind of get that there’s more to this than they’re being told. Oh, yeah, they know. Well, it’s one of the things that’s so interesting about dealing with archetypal themes. Archetypal themes are archetypal because they actually speak of the structure of human experience. That’s why they last. And so human nature and human experience has a pattern. You don’t have the capacity to articulate that pattern as an individual, in part because your life is too short. You just can’t figure it out. But the ancient representations of those patterns are everywhere around you. And you know some of them in image. You cotton onto them automatically. You fall into them if you go to a movie, for example, because movies always express archetypal themes. If you hear them articulated, you think, I knew that. I knew that. I just didn’t know how to say it. That’s the platonic idea of learning as remembering. Your soul already knows, but it doesn’t have the words. And so when people talk to me about watching my lectures, let’s say, they basically say one of two things, if it’s not just a simple thank you. They say one of two things. A third of them say, quarter of them say, when I listen to you talk, it’s as if you’re telling me things that I already know. It’s like, yeah, well, that’s exactly right, because that’s what archetypal stories are. They’re the description of what you already know. But that can be articulated. And then who you are and how you see yourself and the way you describe yourself all become the same thing. So that’s wonderful. Then you’re not at odds with yourself. Then you’re a functioning unity, and that makes you much stronger and more indomitable than you would otherwise be. And then the other thing that people say, and this is more like three quarters of them, is that they say, I was in a very dark place. I was addicted. I was drinking too much. I had a fragmented relationship with my fiancee, and I wasn’t getting married. Things weren’t going very well with my family. My relationship with my father was damaged. I didn’t have any aim. I was wasting my time. Some variant of that, some combination of those. And they said, well, I’ve been watching your lectures. I’ve decided to establish a purpose. I’m trying to tell the truth, and things are way better. And so let’s say I’ve done maybe eight or nine large-scale public talks in the last two months, so that’s probably 20,000 people. And about half of them, a third to half of them, have stayed afterwards to talk to me. So that’s about 7,000 people who have said that to me. And then people stop me on the street all the time and tell me exactly that story, which is just wonderful. You can’t imagine how good it is to be able to go to places you’ve never been and to have people stop you on the street spontaneously and say, look, my life is way better than it was. It’s like, it’s so good. And I’ve got, I don’t know, 35,000 letters from people since last August. It’s more than that. I can’t keep track of them. And it’s exactly the same thing. Like three-quarter, a quarter of them say, well, you’ve given me the words to say what I already knew was true. And thank you for that. I can see that in the audience. It’s so interesting because I can lay out a story. People go like this and say they’re doing that all the time. It’s like the lights are going on. And that’s a really, well, there’s almost nothing better than that, to watch lights go on when you’re talking to people. It’s like, that’s just absolutely fantastic. But to get this response from people, my father, I have, my father’s about 80, he’s 83, I think, 81. He’s 81. And I put him in charge of going through my viewer email, which is an overwhelming job. But, no, we’ve had discussions about this constantly. He’s overwhelmed by the fact that so many people are writing and saying the same thing. It’s like, well, I have a purpose, man. My life actually matters. I finally realized that. And I’m putting it into practice. And I’m bearing up under the heaviest load I can imagine. And it’s really helping. It’s like, God. That’s tens of thousands of responses now. So it’s, you couldn’t hope for anything better than that. There’s zero harm in it, right? It’s just people putting their lives together. They’re not mucking about with other people. They’re not trying to make broad scale social transformations about which they have no idea. They’re trying to make their immediate environment better. And it’s working. It’s like, great. It’s great. You say there’s zero harm in it. I’d say as a former legislator that there’s an enormous amount of good in it. A country is only the sum total of the people that make it up. To the extent that they’re put together, resilient, able to contribute, don’t have to ask others to help them, the stronger the nation and the society will be. And rapidly. I was thinking the other day, a journalist asked me why the audience, why people are responding so positively to what I’m saying. The young men, for example. And I thought, why? Yeah, that’s a good question. Says, well, I’m actually on their side. I’m pretty happy that they’re not wasting their lives. I’m really sad to see that people are disenchanted and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and aimless and perverse and vengeful and all of those things. It’s terrible. And then to see people question whether that’s necessary and then to start to rise out of it. It’s like, it’s so fun. Like last night I was at, after my talk, it’s overwhelming. I don’t usually think about these things, but I was after my talk last night, and so all these people line up and they have their 15 seconds with me. And they’re kind of tentative. They’re excited and attentive when they come up to talk to me. And then they have 15 seconds of time to tell me something. I’m really listening to them. And they’re hesitant about whether or not to share the good news about their life. I think it’s often because when people share good news about their life, people don’t necessarily respond positively. They don’t get encouragement. And people need so little encouragement. It’s just unbelievable. And so they’ll tell me something good and I’ll be, God, that’s so good. Somebody says, I’m getting along way better with my father. I haven’t seen him for 10 years. And now we get along. It’s like, God, great. And then the power of that, you can’t overstate the power of that. For individuals to get their life together. The individual is an unbelievably powerful force. And every single person who gets their act together a little bit has the capacity to spread that around them. It’s a chain reaction. And so it’s a lovely thing to see. That’s fantastic. My observation of atheists would be they don’t live like atheists. They don’t live as though they really believe. They’re just a cosmic accident and there’s no purpose. Well, most of them, the best of them, I have a lot of respect for the atheists, generally. Because they’ve generally thought a lot more about the situation and struggled with it more than the complacent fundamentalists who wallpaper over their doubts with overstatements about their belief. The atheists, the word Israel means he who struggles with God. It’s like, well, it’s not obvious that it’s not the atheists. They’re struggling away. They’re obsessed with it even. And so they have God more on their mind than the typical person who’s a believer. And so it’s interesting too because there’s been this little community developed around my biblical lectures in particular of people who call themselves Christian atheists, which I think is quite remarkable. So if I lay out the rationale for the Christian ethic, which is something like pick up your damn cross and struggle uphill, which is a really good message, they think, oh yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense. It’s like, well, I don’t need the metaphysical baggage. It’s like, well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t. But even to pick up the practical utility of that idea, which is overwhelming, that’s an excellent start. And I was going to follow on that and so it strikes me with a lot of young people and I think this is enormously to their credit and goes to heart, I think, of what you’re saying. They’re told that all morality is relative. They don’t live that way. They’re actually looking for truth, aren’t they? Well, if you live that way, everyone hates you. But that’s the creed that we’re… Oh, yes, yes. But that’s a good example of who you are can be out of sync with how you represent yourself. It’s like I was walking through these ideas with the audience last night. It’s like, well, how do we treat each other when things work? And how do you treat yourself? Well, first of all, you have to treat yourself like you matter. Because if you don’t, then you don’t take care of yourself and you become vengeful and cruel and you take it out on people around you and you’re not a positive force. None of that’s good. So you suffer more and so does everyone around you. And there’s a malevolence that enters into it. None of that’s good. So that’s what happens if you don’t treat yourself like you matter. And then what happens if you don’t treat other people like they matter? Well, you lie to them, you cheat them, you steal, you enter into impulsive relationships with them. They can’t trust you. That doesn’t go anywhere. They don’t like you. You end up alone at best and maybe incarcerated at worst. That doesn’t work. And so you watch the people around you who thrive, regardless of what they say, they act out the proposition that everyone matters. And then you have a functional society. And I think, okay, well, if when you act out the proposition that everyone matters, you have a functional society, maybe that’s evidence that that proposition is true. It’s like, I think it’s true. I think the idea that the individual has a spark of divinity within him or her, I think there isn’t a more true way of saying that. And if you act that out, well, this goes back to the idea that you brought up about potential, which is also something I’ve discussed with my audiences a lot. It’s like we don’t act like we live in a material reality. We act like we face a landscape of potential, an external landscape of potential, with an internal reservoir of potential. That’s how we act. And then we call each other out on it. We say things like, well, you’re not living up to your potential. And persons go, so yeah, well, I know. It’s like, well, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? Well, you mean there’s more to you than meets the eye, even though it’s not measurable, right? It’s not tangible. It’s just possibility. But everyone acts as though that’s a reality. And we all act as if we make choices about what reality to bring into being. We punish ourselves for our moral errors and other people as well. We act out this ethic that puts us each at the center of being as active participants in the world that we want to bring forward. Everyone acts that way. And if we don’t, then things go to hell instantly. So it’s like, well, what do we believe? This is the argument I’ve had with people like Sam Harris, the atheist types. It’s like, yeah, you think you’re atheist, man. It’s like you’re Christian, Judeo-Christian, let’s say, to the core. You just don’t understand it. You just don’t realize it. And it’s understandable, but it’s not helpful. This idea that you put forward of a spark of divinity in every human being surely lies at the heart of the miracle of Western freedom, the idea that every individual has worth and dignity and standing. It’s the idea that killed slavery, right? Slavery is everywhere. The greatest human rights movement of all times, so successful that it obliterated the idea that it was all right to keep slaves, let alone change the law. It changed the way the world thought, even though there are evil people who still keep slaves. And here’s a rub. It was plainly led by people of profound Christian faith. There’s no other way of putting it. Anyone who honestly, honestly, and truthfully looks at the history of that period, can’t get away from it. But because it doesn’t suit the modern left’s narrative, it’s airbrushed out. Doesn’t that in itself say something profound about our willingness to try and distort truth to suit our objectives? It’s hard to say what it speaks of. It’s like the whitewashing of what happened in the Soviet states, in the communist states in the 20th century. I mean, anybody who goes through that literature with any degree of care comes away traumatized, shell-shocked. It’s just, it’s everything the Nazis did on a larger scale. It’s horrifying. And yet I see with my students, for example- 50 or 60 million people who dared to disagree died? Oh, at minimum. It was- In their own culture? Mm-hmm. It was something- In their own society? We don’t know. In the Soviet Union, the estimates range from 20 to 60 million. And in Maoist China, the estimates are as much as 100 million. And so- Are our kids taught this in school? Not at all. In universities? Why not? Very- I think it’s partly- You see, their societies, they just prefer something. The modern fight, it seems to me, in many ways is between what might be called freedom and fairness and equality. Equality sounds terrific. But we’ve actually seen what happens in societies where they set equality up as the ultimate goal. They became terrible places. How did that happen? Well, I think this is part of the problem. Yeah, well, I think that’s also part of the whitewashing is we can’t understand how one of our primary moral intuitions, which might be fairness, let’s say, can transform itself into something so utterly murderous when it’s played out on a large political stage. And I think because we don’t understand that, I mean, look, there’s reasons to be on the left. There are temperamental reasons first. So a lot of your political preference is influenced, let’s say, by your temperament. And a lot of your temperament is influenced by biological factors. So there are temperamental reasons to be on the left. People who are on the left tend to be higher in creativity and lower in conscientiousness, for example. Those are the two best predictors. But there’s also practical reasons to be on the left. And one of the practical reasons are that human societies, which tend to be hierarchical, like all animal societies or almost all animal societies, produce inequality as they go about their business. And inequality is actually quite painful. No one likes it. Nobody, no rich capitalist walks down a busy urban street and sees a starving, homeless person who’s clearly mentally ill, suffering madly, and thinks that inequality is okay. No one thinks that. No one’s for poverty, right? And so we have this moral intuition that would be better if the downtrod were lifted up. And it’s difficult to discriminate between that and an inequality narrative. And so I think part of the reason that we can’t face the lesson of the 20th century is because it’s the left that mostly has to face the lesson. And they don’t know how to reconcile their deep intuitions about the injustice of inequality with the fact that when you put that doctrine at work into operation as a political tool, you instantly stack up millions of corpses. We don’t know what to do with that. And so we just avoid it. And that’s, well, then of course we risk replicating it, which is not a good, that’s not a good tactical move, let’s say. Well, that’s the problem. If we don’t learn from history, we’re destined to repeat it. I entirely accept, and some Australians might be surprised by this. They say, no, I can’t understand the leftist perspective. I think I can. I can understand the nobility of wanting to ensure that everyone is respected as a full member of the human family, of our culture and our society. But this is where it gets so tricky. And it’s where I think many young people are starting to wake up. They’re being sold a pup. Do you have that expression in Canada? No, no. Sold a pup? No. Sold a dud. It’s not a sound idea. That many of the things that sound attractive don’t necessarily work. So perhaps we need to be arguing the case for freedom and fairness, which will produce at least a high degree of equality of opportunity rather than arguing for equality, which history tells us tends to severely erode freedom. Yeah. Well, it’s a harder sale, though, because it’s easy to appeal to compassion immediately, thoughtlessly, right? And since that’s such an instantaneously positive moral virtue, and you don’t need sophisticated argumentation to buttress it, it’s a lot more difficult to make a cold and a little case that the proposition freedom first, let’s say, freedom and responsibility first, lifts the bottom up better. It’s a cold argument, and it requires rationality to parse through. So it’s a harder sale. I would argue, though, it’s not just rationality. It’s history. If you bring rationality and honesty to the study of history, I think the case is actually quite compelling. I think it is, too. In fact, I think it’s open and sharp. I think it’s… Well, there’s a book that I’ve just been reading that I would recommend. By a man named Walter Scheidel, and he wrote a book called The Great Leveler, which I really like. It’s an empirical analysis of inequality. And his research questions were something like, well, what is the phenomena of inequality? To what can you attribute it? And what, if anything, can we do to ameliorate it? Okay, so the first answer is something akin to what I wrote in the first rule in my book, 12 Rules for Life, which is, well, you can’t lay hierarchy and inequality at the feet of Western civilization or capitalism. We’re done with that argument. That’s wrong. Animal societies are hierarchical, and they produce unequal distributions. And there’s evidence for that in the biological realm, going back a third of a billion years. And that’s happened for so long that your nervous system has primarily adapted to it. So it’s a deep reality. And blaming it on capitalism, it’s like, no. Inequality is a big problem. It’s way worse than Marx thought. Okay, fine. And people tend to stack up at zero. That’s a bad thing, because it destabilizes your society to have people who are so far down in the underclass that they have nothing to lose by flipping the game. That’s a bad idea. And it drives male-on-male homicide as well. And the social science evidence for that is clear. All right, so we want to ameliorate inequality to some degree, because we don’t want people to stack up at zero and destabilize the society. And we don’t want young men in particular to become violent. Fine. So then Scheidel takes another tack. It’s like, his observations, he looked at Neolithic grave sites for signs of inequality. And you see what people are buried with. And one of his cases, there’s 200 people in a grave, and one of them has 190 pounds of gold. And the next richest person has like four ounces of gold, and then everyone else has none. It’s like, so even in these Neolithic societies, inequality was the rule. Hunter-gatherer societies are the same way, except inequality isn’t material, because they don’t have a surplus. Inequality is everywhere. OK, so then Scheidel asks two other questions. One is, well, how has it generally been reduced? Pestilence and war. That’s it. So you can reduce inequality if you demolish everything, because that just brings everyone down to zero. But the inequality is less. And then he does an empirical analysis and asks a very interesting practical question, which is, imagine that you tauted up the inequality coefficients of the right-wing societies, and you did the same with the left-wing societies. Is there a difference between the inequality coefficients? And you’d hope yes, because you’d hope that what would happen as a consequence of activity on the left would be that something would actually occur to ameliorate inequality. He found no evidence for that whatsoever. So the left is sensitive to the catastrophe of inequality, let’s say. But their compassion-oriented doctrines designed to ameliorate that, on the positive side, there’s plenty of resentment on the left, too. And I don’t want to sweep that under the rug. Their compassion-oriented policies do not produce an improvement in the equal distribution of goods. So it’s a way bigger problem than we think. So and putting into place these thoughtless compassionate doctrines, let’s say, putting them in place again is just going to produce exactly the same outcomes that were produced all through the 20th century. We must learn again to bring the wisdom of the past back to the table of today if we’re to find our way out of the malaise that’s affecting the West, I think, to a better place. But before we do that, explore that line of thinking. Let’s go back to freedom. All of the great sages down through the age, I think you make that point in this fascinating book of yours, obliquely at least, and particularly, though, the founder of Christianity, I think, would say to a person that your personal freedom is the thing you need to get right and sorted first. It’s one by one. And I’m thinking of young Australians that I feel so passionately about that, as I say this, it’s very easy not to be free. Very easy. Addiction, fear, anxiety, depression, all the things that… Lack of discipline. Lack of discipline. Because then you’re a tool of your whims. Let’s go back to a society which set equality as its goal, Soviet Russia, and in the pursuit of that equality killed 60 or 70 million, that’s the estimate, of those who disagreed who had a different view, who lost their freedom. Of those who even announced their own suffering. Because in the Soviet Union, if you dared to say that things weren’t going so well for you, then you were instantly a political criminal for announcing your own suffering. Because the utopia had already arrived, you understand. And so if you were still suffering, well, obviously there was something wrong with you. So imagine a society like that where your own suffering becomes criminal. Exactly. But let’s come to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. We know a lot about what happened because of him. He became an incredible global figure when I was a young man. And I read his book, The Gulag Archipelago. Here is this man who describes the horrors of being a political prisoner because he disagrees. He converted. He was originally a supporter of communism. He came to see how evil it was and how oppressive it was. He was imprisoned for having a different view to the state-ordained insistence that everything was terrific. And he writes unbelievably that lying on his prison bunk one day, listening to the guards beat up a fellow prisoner, the screams and the yells, he found freedom when he realized the dividing line between good and evil, in fact, didn’t lie between captor and captive. In fact, the jailers were captive too to a system, to a blind ideology, to an inability to think freely. Well, most of them were trustees. So they were perpetrating the very system that imprisoned them. Not between Catholic and Baptist, he wrote, not between woman and man, not between black and white. But the dividing line between evil actually lies somewhere across every human heart. Plainly, you believe it’s incredibly important that we understand that. It comes back to what you said. I think when it’s framed, we understand it. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows it. If they think, because all they have to do is think about their own transgressions. I mean, if you ask someone to sit for five minutes and think, okay, well, what mistakes have you made in your life? It’s like, that’ll come up pretty quickly. And you can even ask people, what terrible, unforgivable mistakes have you made in your life? It’s like, yeah, yeah, well, you know about those too. It’s like, it’s no one’s no one’s so naive, you know, unless they’ve really wrestled intensely against themselves. There’s virtually no one so naive to not be able to answer those questions. So we know that we’ve done things we shouldn’t have done, and we know that we’re not living up to our potential. Are we doing our children a massive disservice by trying to imply that there’s nothing wrong with them? No need for guilt, no need for shame, no need to come to grips with evil. This is so- Because the problem’s the environment. What are the things that’s so funny about what’s happened? The problem is that we’ve just got to fix society, fix the institutions, and then all this will disappear. Psychologists have been, not all psychologists, obviously, but the psychological profession is neck deep in this pathology, has been beating the self-esteem drum for 50 years. Oh, no, you’re okay. You should feel good about yourself. Like, you’re fine the way you are. It’s like you think, well, that’s a calming message for people. It’s like, no, it’s not. It’s not at all. And I watch my audiences. It’s full of people in the audience who think, I’m suffering a lot more than I think is tenable. A whole bunch of it’s my fault. My life is not in the order it should be. I know I’m doing 50 things wrong. It’s like, what the hell’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with the people around me? This is really serious. And some well-meaning person comes up and says, you’re okay just the way you are. It’s like, no one wants that message. It’s like, no, I’m not okay the way I am. I’m not okay at all the way I am. I know that. And so, you know, when I’m speaking now, I say to people, well, you’re nowhere near what you could be. That’s the positive message. It’s like, yeah, you’re a mess, but you don’t have to stay that way. You’re a mess. You know it, obviously. You’re suffering away. Like, so much you can barely tolerate it. It’s like, that’s okay. You can do something about it. So that’s the thing that turns the lights on. It’s like, you can do something about it. It’s like, oh. So they’re in a freezing prison cell in the most appalling circumstances. Half starved to death. He finds freedom in himself. He finds something positive and something to live for by first coming to grips with evil and understanding what it is. There’s a conundrum in there. And he said, too, like, and he underwent the Christian process of metanoia, which is to go over your, it’s confession, essentially, and repentance. It wasn’t mediated by a religious structure in Solzhenitsyn’s case, but it was exactly the same process, and he knew that perfectly well. I’m not making this up. He said, when he was in the prisons, and decided that he was at least in part to blame for his own imprisonment and the imprisonment of everyone around him, that that was his fault, or at least his, both his fault and his responsibility, that he was going to take that on. He said the first thing he did was he went over his life with a fine-tooth comb in memory. And his goal was, okay, I’m going to remember everything I did in my life up to now where I did something that I knew to be wrong, and not because of some external authority defining it as wrong, but in relationship to his own conscience, right? And then he was going to determine if there was some way that could be rectified now, to atone for it, right, to become at one with it again. And so that was part of the process he undertook. And the concluding consequence of that was that he wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which is an absolutely overwhelming piece that blew the intellectual slats out of the foundation of communism permanently, right? Once Solzhenitsyn published it. And until now, we seem to be trying to gloss over it. Academia seems to be full of people who want to soft-pedal that and reinstitute this naive view that if we just create the right institutions, everybody will behave rationally, will all be equal, everything will be okay. They want to enforce it. They won’t say that, but that’s what they want to do. They want to enforce it. And it’s only a few short decades since all of that happened. Are we mad? Well, we’re characterized by inertia and ignorance. It’s not easy to understand history. It’s especially not if you read it properly. I had a client at one point who was an unbelievably naive person. You cannot overestimate her naivety, no matter how hard you try. Her parents taught her that adults were angels, literally. And she believed that in a strange sense when I met her. She was in her 20s. And she had this extraordinarily naive view of people and had been hurt. And if you’re very naive and you’ve been hurt by someone, you often disintegrate because it blows your world apart. And that’s what had happened to her. And I said, she had a university degree. And I said, well, look, like in the liberal arts, I said, didn’t you read any history? And she said, well, yeah. And I said, well, didn’t that disturb the whole adults are angels hypothesis? And she said, well, I read it, but I just compartmentalized it. And that gave me the key to what was wrong with her. And we successfully dealt with it. But I had her to begin her process of cure, oddly enough, because she had to understand malevolence because she had been touched by it. She had to understand it because her naive worldview had been shattered by the hand of malevolence. I had to read a book called Ordinary Men by Browning. And it’s a study of these Polish policemen, German policemen who were sent to Poland after the Nazis had marched through Poland. And they were sent to police Poland. And they were decent middle class guys, essentially, most of whom had been hit maturity before Hitler had come to power. So they weren’t indoctrinated Nazis, not like the Nazi youth types were. And they had to go to Poland and be policemen under wartime conditions. And they had a very humane commander. And he told all of them that they were going to have to do things that would be far more brutal in all likelihood than they were normally prepared to do in their role as non-military policemen. But that they could go back to their old job if they wanted to. So it wasn’t top down enforcement of an authoritarian ethos. And Browning documents their transformation from the guy next door, the policeman next door, into people who were taking naked pregnant women out into fields and shooting them in the back of the head. And it’s a brutal book because, well, these men, it just ruined them to do that to themselves. They were physically ill during the process of transformation. And he does a very good job of documenting how an ordinary person transforms into a Nazi murderer. And I had to read that. I said, but don’t you compartmentalize it. This is about you. This isn’t about someone else. When you read history, you think, well, that’s about someone else. It’s like, unless maybe you’re a victim and you identify with the victims. It’s a very rare person who reads history and identifies with the perpetrators. But unless you read history and identify with the perpetrators, then you don’t understand history at all. And so who wants to understand that? And I get my students, I said, look, I’ve told them this for 30 years. Here’s something you have to understand. If you were in Nazi Germany, the statistical probability is overwhelming that you would have been a perpetrator. You think you would have rescued Anne Frank. It’s like, think again. Those people are very, very, very, very rare. They put their lives on the line to do that. They put their family’s lives on the line to do that. You think you’re one of those people? Really? It’s like that all that means is that you know nothing. You know nothing about yourself. You know nothing about people. You know nothing about politics or economics or history. It’s a harsh lesson. The truth about Germany in the 1930s, it was probably the most educated society in the world and seen to that point in time. Education alone, cleverness in inverted commas alone, intelligence alone. Sophisticated civilization alone. No, right, right, right. Absolutely. There’s no substitute for character. Pascal talked of the glory and the scum. To reach our full humanity, it seems to me we need to understand both in tension. Now Carl Jung said it. The unbelievable scum that lies in terms of our potential at the bottom of every heart. The extraordinary nobility, you call it the spark of divinity, I would say made in the image of a mighty creator. You’ve got to hold those things in suspension if you’re to find your real humanity. And in fact, the way through to the good place is surely through the valley of darkness in the first place. Well, if it’s possible to be enlightened, why isn’t everyone enlightened? It’s like, well, you don’t get to paradise, you don’t get to heaven without harrowing hell first. Right, and who’s going to do that? That’s a terrible thing to do. It isn’t even clear that you can survive it. No, I mean, it’s brutally damaging to come to terms with your own proclivity for malevolence. And so people don’t do it. And it’s no wonder. But the funny thing is, and this is also something that I think that people who’ve been watching my lectures have been attracted by, especially the young men, it’s like, until you know you’re, until you understand that you’re a monster, until perhaps you even develop that as a capacity, you don’t have the moral force to do good. And so not only is that dissent to begin with necessary to scare you straight, right, to make you understand what exactly it is that you’re dealing with, but you don’t even have the strength of character to be good until you understand just exactly what sort of monster you can be. I have a rule in my book, rule five. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Yeah, I read it. It’s a meditation on the monstrousness of parents. It’s like, don’t underestimate yourself, your capability to ruin your children’s lives. You let them act in a manner that makes you disprove of them. You will take revenge on them in ways you cannot even imagine. And unless you understand that, you’re not going to be careful enough as a parent, and you’re not going to set proper boundaries. Don’t let your children annoy you. It’s a very bad idea. Now, you know, that means that you should try to regulate your proclivity to be annoyed, and you should try to be civilized, and you should talk to your partner, your wife, or your husband about your oversensitivities and foolishnesses. But having said that, you need to know who the monster is, and it’s you. So if we’re washing that wisdom out, I don’t want to sound condemnatory here. I’m more sympathetic and concerned for what’s happening in our family homes and the environment in which our kids are being raised. And you and I, I mean, you’re very passionate in your concern for these people. So we don’t want anyone to think here that we’re trying to condemn them. Far the opposite, just the opposite. But if we’re washing this out of the system, what then happens to our kids when they hit institutions, schools, colleges, universities? Well, we’re going to find out because increasingly the elementary and the school systems that our kids are going through from, say, the age of five to the age of 18, they’re increasingly occupied by the postmodern neo-Marxist ideologies. I think we have to learn to identify what those are. That’s a start. I mean, there’s buzzwords, diversity, inclusivity, equity. Equity, that’s a no-go zone. Equity, that’s equality of outcome. That’s a preposterous, murderous doctrine, masquerading in sheep’s clothing. White privilege, systemic racism, gender, all of those. None of those as individual topics are necessarily off the table. You can have an intelligent discussion about any of them except equity because that’s just a no-go zone. But to see those concepts emerge as a network of meaning, you know that you’re in the presence of this pernicious postmodern neo-Marxist doctrine that’s fundamentally ideological at its core. And people need to see that and they need to understand what that means and they need to stop it. Now, how they’re going to stop it, they’re going to make a million individual decisions about that. But at least they could start by identifying it. I’ve suggested to parents in Canada, in the US, that as soon as teachers talk to their children about diversity, inclusivity, and equity, that they suggest to their children that they leave the class. Because they’re no longer in the educational realm, they’re in the indoctrination realm. And people aren’t taking that, I wouldn’t say they’re not taking that seriously. It’s not an easy thing to figure out and it sounds very, very radical to suggest encouraging your children to leave the class. But I think we’re at that point. I wonder why universities are not offering high quality courses in how freedom was secured by Western societies for its individual member people. And how it might be secured and how you secured fairness from unfairness. Those sorts of things are not there. Well, I think some of it has to do with what we’ve been speaking about. To address the problem squarely is actually quite daunting. The difficulties are manifold. Inequality is real. Individual malevolence is real. To constrain it inside yourself is extraordinarily daunting. To read history as a perpetrator is traumatizing. These are hard things. And then to think through the problems of addressing something like inequality instead of reacting to it in a knee-jerk, compassionate manner. And implement policies on that basis that are going to be counterproductive. That’s also extraordinarily difficult. So there’s difficulty as part of it. And then I would also say, well we haven’t talked about the resentment that drives the discussion of inequality. It’s not all. It’s not like everyone on the left is overwhelmed by compassion. And that’s why all these brutal things tend to happen. It’s that they’re also overwhelmed by the same sort of jealousy that Cain had for Abel. And the same sort of murderous impulses that emerge very rapidly as a consequence of that jealousy. He has more than me. He must be a perpetrator. It’s morally obligatory for me to take him out. That’s an easy message to sell. I read about how the communists de-kulakized the Russian countryside. So imagine, imagine. It’s Russia. You’re in a village. It’s 30 years, something like that, after the serfs have been emancipated. There’s a few agriculturalists who’ve managed to produce successful agricultural enterprises. You know, maybe they have a couple of cows, they have some land. They’re able to hire a few people. And they’re raising almost all the food, right? And so, and they’re a minority in any village because the hyperproductive successful are always a minority. So they’re a minority in every village. All right, and so, and there’s people who are doing worse, and then there’s a lot of people who aren’t doing so well at all. And then the communist intellectuals show up and they tell the people who aren’t doing so well, some of whom are just suffering because of life, but some of whom aren’t doing well because they’ve never done anything productive with even a second of their life. And the communist intellectuals come in and say, you know those guys that are doing so much better than you? Yeah, they actually stole all of that from you. And you’re morally obligated to go take it back. It’s like, oh man, you know, after six cups of mead, let’s say, or let’s say 10 or let’s say 20, and I’m drunk out of my mind, and I’ve got my cruel buddies with me. And we’re all resentful right to the core because we’ve wasted our miserable lives. And now we have an opportunity to go like down the street to our wealthy neighbour’s house and to rape his daughters. And we can do it in the name of good. It’s like, well, there’s a story you can market. And that happened everywhere in the Soviet Union. And so they wiped out the kulaks. It’s like, great. And then six million Ukrainians starve today. That’s right. Brilliant. I’m a farmer. Brilliant. The Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe. That’s what it was. Then it became a region pathetically unable to feed itself. And yet the same sort of worldview that gave rise to that, we’re now being told, you use the word neo-Marxist. Many people in Australia use the word cultural Marxist. I’ve got an old friend who said to me, what are you talking about, John? You know, free capitalist Australia is not going to let that happen here. Well, Qantas Airlines took a nice step towards that the other day. And they adopted their language policing policies. These corporate, these corporations who should know far better let these far left fifth columns into their organisations. I think they’re not going to pay for that. I think they’re going to stop with some demands for the reconstruction of language. Not like the demands for reconstruction of language, by the way, are trivial. They’re maybe the most important thing you could possibly demand. I want to reshape the way you speak. I want to reshape the way you think. It’s like, well, that’s OK, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the bottom line. It’s like, it’ll interfere with the bottom line. You let that fifth column in. It’s a warning to corporate people. You let that fifth column in, man. You’re going to regret it. You’re going to regret it. So and things can turn on a dime. You know, a very well-organised minority, even if the majority opposes them, and they do, a very well-organised minority can have an unbelievably pernicious effect on an organisation. Margaret Mead’s made that point. Society’s changed direction when a small group of people decide to change its direction. That’s the way history works. Well, that’s what happened in the universities. Let’s come back. This issue of the redefining of language. It seems to me that there are two things that people who want to reshape society in brutal ways do. The first is they start to silence good debate, either silence it or shut it down or whatever. Second thing they do is they redefine language so it’s very hard to have a debate. So diversity, actually, I mean, there’s no other way to put it. In this country, it’s rapidly coming to mean a stifling conformity. You dare not deviate from the line. And you see it with a whole lot of other words that are bandied around, equality being one of them, because it’s confused. The quality of opportunity is confused with the quality of outcome. Well, the initial wedge was equality of opportunity, and then that flew. And so, well, no, no, it’s equality of outcome. That’s equity. And that’s, I cannot believe how rapidly that idea, which is the ultimate and terrible idea, is I can’t believe how rapidly that spread and how little people criticise it. Well, that’s because to uninformed analysis, it sounds good if you’re feeling carelessly compassionate. Because you go back to the Ukrainian example, in destroying the leading edge farmers, you actually guaranteed misery for everyone. Oh, unbelievable. People were selling human body parts in the Ukraine for food. You know, it was, if you were a mother and your children were starving and you went out into the fields after they were harvested, and you picked up individual pieces of grain that the harvesters had left, and you didn’t turn them over to the state, that was a capital offence. Right? That was, and the funny thing is, that was in the glory days of the Russian Revolution, right? That wasn’t in the like 1950s. That wasn’t in the 1930s even. That was in the 1920s. That was right when this started. And I think it was, I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge who was reporting on that for a UK newspaper whose name escapes me at the moment. He was pointing all of this out, you know, and no one paid attention to it. No one paid attention. Towards the end of his life, he warned that the West is in danger of eating itself out from within, and I wonder whether in fact he wasn’t being very prescient. And you and I want to stop that happening for the sake of our young people. For the sake of everyone. For the sake of everyone. We went down that pathway already. We’ve seen it. We don’t need to do it again. We’ve tried it. History should be like science in the sense that it ought to be objective. It ought to be told truthfully. It ought not to be used to secure some dominant group’s preferred version of society. Well this is also why, see what I’ve been trying to do about this, because I thought this through a long time ago. I thought, well, I don’t want to, I think the group identity game ends in blood. Doesn’t matter who plays it. Left wingers play it, blood. Right wingers play it, blood. And lots of it. Not just a little bit. It can’t play the identity politics game. Well so what do you do instead? You live the mythologically heroic life as an individual. That’s the right place to work. And that’s the message of the West as far as I’m concerned. Is that we figured that out. We figured out that the collective identity was not the pinnacle statement. That the individual, not that collective identities have no value. Obviously family has value and your organizations have value. All of that. That’s not the issue. The issue is what’s the paramount value? What’s the metric by which people should be measured? And the answer is they should be measured as individuals. As if they have a divine soul. They should be measured in that manner. But it can’t be a selfish thing. That is to say, if I recognize I have worth and dignity, I’m obliged to recognize it. So do you. I think you can’t recognize that you have intrinsic worth and dignity without also doing, without also recognizing it in others. And vice versa. I don’t think that I can recognize the worth of another person without stumbling onto the idea that I also have to recognize that for myself. When did you think, well, everyone would want that? But people don’t. Because you’re also charged with the responsibility of your own care as if you matter. Well, that’s a big responsibility. It’s a lot easier to assume that everything is pointless. I mean, that’s painful and all of that. But you don’t bear any responsibility. And no one lives that way. No. Well, not for long. Not for long. Well, not for long. Exactly. But you know, Voltaire’s biographer, it wasn’t actually Voltaire himself. It was a lady who wrote one of the many biographies of him in the 1930s. Came up with that adage summarizing his views. That I may disagree with you, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it. There’s a couple of things implicit in that that seem to be incredibly important. So I may disagree with you, but you have dignity and standing and worth and a right to put your view. That’s the first thing. I’m respecting the other person. Oh, you should crave it. Yeah. And the second thing it implies is that it’s the idea on the table that’s important for two reasons. One is we need to have a debate about that, not attack the person who put it there. Show some respect for them. The second thing is it’s only by honest debate that you find the best way forward. Well, that’s the thing. That ties back to the discussion we had about the purpose of memory and the purpose of historical education. It’s like, look, there’s another rule in my book, which is rule nine. Assume that the person that you’re listening to knows something you don’t. Well, they do. The person you’re listening to knows some things you don’t. You can be sure of that. Now, whether or not you can get to them is a different matter. But if you do get to them, it’s a real deal for you. That’s why you want to listen to the other person’s arguments is because you’re not everything you could be. You don’t know the pathway forward with as much clarity as you could. And it’s possible. This is one of the wonderful things that I’ve had the privilege of experiencing as a clinician. It’s like I live inside a Dostoevsky novel as a clinician. People come in and they tell me about their lives and I listen to them and they tell me things that are just absolutely beyond belief. I learn from my clients constantly. They’re telling me honestly about their experience. They tell me things they wouldn’t tell anyone else because I actually listen to them. But part of the reason I listen is because I’m desperate to listen. It’s like there’s a possibility I’m going to do something stupid in the next five years that’s going to be fatal. And there’s some small possibility that if we have a decent discussion that you’ll tell me something that will eliminate some of my blindness so that I don’t have to fall into that particular pit. And if you have a good sensitivity for the depth of the pit, then you’re pretty bloody motivated to avoid it. And that dialogue is dialogic. It’s dialogue logos. It’s shared logos. It’s the way that we redeem ourselves mutually moving forward. All depends on having the facts on the table as best you’re able to establish them. Not distortions of fact. Not what you wish would be the case. At least your best approximation of what you think to be true and not what you wish for. Because the new version of this seems to be if I disagree with what you say, I’ll paint it as hate speech or challenging to my notions of diversity and inclusiveness and I’ll fight to the death your right to even have your say. That’s why hate speech laws are so pernicious. And that needs to be taken apart. First question, is there such a thing as hate speech? Yes, obviously. People say terrible things, reprehensible things, quasi-criminal things even, all the time. Brutal and some of them cause a lot of trouble. So the idea that there’s hateful speech, it’s like yeah, okay, that’s self-evident, no problem. Well, let’s regulate it. Okay, fair enough because it’s hateful. You know, maybe we’d rather that there wasn’t any of it. Okay, no problem. Who defines hate? Well, we’ll worry about that later. It’s like no, he won’t. That’s actually the problem. Here’s the answer to who defines hate. Those people that you would least want to have define it. That would be the inevitable consequence of the legislation because sensible people won’t have anything to do with that. Like people who are power mad will gravitate to that domain to make an ethical case to exercise their controlling power over the language of other people. Now, and I’ve had journalists say, well, what makes you think that your right to free speech trumps the right of someone to not be offended? And I think that’s really the level of our political discourse. Okay, so we’ll run a little thought experiment. So I’m talking to one person, I’m talking to you, and the rule is I don’t get to offend you. Okay, maybe we can still have a discussion about something difficult. But let’s say I’m talking to 10 people about an important thing. Now I have to make sure that I don’t say anything despite the fact that this is an important and contentious issue. That I don’t say anything that offends even one of those 10 people. Okay, maybe I can even manage that. What if I’m talking to a thousand people? There’s going to be someone in that thousand people, there’s going to be someone who’s offended at the mere fact that I exist. So it’s an impossible standard. It’s like, well, you can’t say anything offensive. Okay, fine. Then you can’t say anything. Okay, so what? You don’t get to say anything because no one should be offended. Well, then you don’t get to think. Well, what happens if you don’t think? Well, then you can’t negotiate your way through the future and you fall into a pit. And so does everyone else. So that’s where that all ends up. You can’t say offensive things. Equals, you cannot negotiate your way properly through the future. Equals, everyone suffers. Well, that’s a bad strategy. So, and it’s all covered up with, well, you know, it would be better if no one was ever offended. It’s like, well, who thinks that? You know how naive you have to be to think that? You have to be pathologically naive, which is the kind of naive that you could have grown out of, but you willfully refused to because you weren’t willing to see what was in front of your face. And then you impose that blind naivety on everyone else because you don’t want to allow them to upset your like rosy view, your rosy view of yourself and the world. There’s it’s just there’s no end to how terrible that is. One of our very astute writers recently made the comment that freedom of speech is the most important freedom because it’s the freedom by which we defend all of our other freedoms. It strikes me that freedom of speech, though, is most important not for the powerful or for the elites. It’s actually for the minority groups. A free society surely is one that allows those who swim against the tide and have a different perspective the right to do so without fear of mob or state sanction. You’ve had some personal experience. Well, I gave a talk at the University of British Columbia about a year ago. It was called a left-wing case for freedom of speech. It’s like it’s really easy to make a left-wing case for freedom of speech. It’s like, well, that’s how the dispossessed have the opportunity to make their suffering known. Right? Yeah, clearly. I mean, it’s the fact that that argument even has to be made shows you how pathological the radical left has become because it’s clearly the case that freedom of speech is not generally in the interests of the power elite. Right? Because they already have access to what they need to maintain their grip on the world, let’s say, if you look at things in that manner. It’s the people at the bottom of the hierarchy whose right to expression needs to be protected. If you’re in control of the debate, you don’t need freedom of speech. Right, right. Obviously. So it’s always useful for the dispossessed, the freedom of speech issue. And then the other issue that you wrote that the writer that you described wrote brought to the forefront is the idea of the hierarchy of rights. Now, in our in our conception of rights in Canada, we are not willing to assume that any right has priority over any other right. Now, that doesn’t work out because when the two rights come into conflict with one another, which they do, you have to adjudicate their relative status. And what’s happened in Canada is that equality rights keep trumping everything else. And that’s not good. It’s actually a good reason why you shouldn’t have a bill of rights. And we never should have had one in my estimation. But whatever. The freedom of speech, you say, well, speech is the right to freedom of speech is central because it’s the right by which you defend all the other rights. Well, that’s why the idea of logos in the West is the most sacred concept. Right. So Christ, think about this psychologically, is Christ is the is the ideal of perfection. Now, this is independent of any religious discussion or any historical accuracy. It doesn’t matter. Looking at this from the perspective of the analysis of a myth or a story, what Christ represents is the perfect individual, whatever that is. Now you discuss endlessly what that is. But one of the things the West is settled on is the idea. Well, that is that the perfect individual utters the truthful speech that makes potential into habitable order does that through truth. Now it’s embedded in the first few sentences in Genesis, for example, when when God brings the world into being. So and the idea that that truthful speech that brings the world into being from formless potential also characterizes each person. That’s our form, our fabrication in the image of God. That’s the idea of the West. It’s an unbelievably remarkable idea that perfection, individual perfection is to be found in a relationship with spoken truth. God, that’s the great idea. Well, it’s out of that arises the observation that there’s no there’s nothing more central to the hierarchy of rights and obligations as well, let’s say, than freedom of speech. Yes, it’s absolutely central. That’s why Christ is the word made flesh. The idea is that the perfect individual is the person who’s well who speaks truth, but also acts out the truth of those words. It’s very it’s a it’s a proposition whose merit is virtually self evident when you understand it in that manner. So yeah, to see assaults on freedom of speech, especially compelled speech. Well, that’s where I drew the line in my life. It’s like perhaps that’s why speech legislation in Canada. Perhaps that’s why the left is so determined in this country to get Christianity out of the classroom. But tell us something of the chilling. There’s no doubt that’s why they’re determined. I mean, people like Derrida, I mean, he called the West phallogocentric, right? male dominated, logos centric. It’s like that is the West. It’s a logo centric. If you want to take the West down, you remove the idea of the divine word from the substructure of the society. So you have to do that. It’s like, and this is the level at which this war is being fought. It’s fundamentally a theological war. Interesting. I don’t like to think that. But it is famous Waterloo lectures, the inaugural Blaise Pascal lecture in 1978. Malcolm Mugridge said the West was in danger of eating itself out from within. And he spoke at great length about this attempt to, about how the West was abandoned in Christianity, and it had become a very empty and soulless and financially bankrupt place as a result. But it wouldn’t be the end. He said, despite the attempts to kill it in places like communist China and Russia, there will always be people who will fight through to the truth. And of course, we can see now three decades on whatever that he was absolutely right, closer to four decades on, he was right. Well, you know that Christianity is spreading faster in communist China than it did in Rome during its most rapid period of expansion in terms of proportion of people transforming. So Christianity is spreading incredibly quickly in China. Who would have guessed that? Right? I mean, that just makes you shake your head. Tell us a little more about your chilling experience. I mean, Canada and Australia are culturally in many ways very alike. If it can happen in Canada, presumably it’s coming here. Oh, it’s going to happen here. I think it’s absolutely inevitable. It’s not that big a move from where you’re already at. And the fact that, well, the Qantas airline thing is a really good example. The fact that these things are happening and that corporations aren’t standing up in outrage against the introduction of ideas like equity. It’s like, you guys are all primed for this. Why not compelled speech, especially if it’s done for the best of all possible reasons? I was accused of denying the identities of the oppressed. It’s like, well, to me, that wasn’t the issue at all. The issue was, no, look, I’m not an advocate of hate speech laws for the reasons I already described. It’s like, who’s going to define hate? Not the people you want to define it. For sure, that’s what’s going to happen. That’s bad enough. But then to say, well, I have to use the language of my detestable, radical leftist foes, let’s say. That’s not happening. So, and that’s what I said in these videos. Some of the most wonderful Australians I know are corporate leaders and they’re generous, philanthropic, they’re thoughtful, they’re contributors to the public debate. But I’d have to say far too many of them seem, I’ll use the expression, pig ignorant of the reality. They’re playing with fire. They’re playing with cultural forces that will destroy the very activities that they would hold up as being central to our wealth and prosperity. Those cultural forces are playing with them. Well, it’s even worse. Oh, yes. So these astute people can’t realize, don’t see, they’re being toyed with. They’re being toyed with demonic forces in a sense. And again, I mean that in a psychological sense. Carl Jung said, people don’t have ideas. Ideas have people. It’s like, you think about that for about five years. You know, like if you take the typical student radical out of their demonstration and you have a chat with them one on one, you find out that, you know, they’re the daughter of the guy down the street that you wave to, you know, while she was growing up. And that 80% of her is sensible person, you know, and 10% is resentful and 10% is ideologically possessed, partly because of the machinations of her idiot professors. And so she’s okay. But if you get 10 of her together, and each of them are 10% possessed, then you have the whole devil in the room. Right? And that thing has a will. It has a historical will. And you better not be thinking you’re running the show, especially if you’re ignorant of the process. And the corporate types who are letting the radical left fifth column into their midst, and mostly through their human resources, their human resources departments, which should probably just be shut down. They have no idea what they’re messing with. They should watch what happens to Google. I have to say I’ve been pretty stunned by two or three of the senior chairman in this country who have said to me or said to friends of mine, in the context of recent politically correct debates here, that they’ve been startled themselves by what their companies underneath of them have said, which raises some interesting questions about their need to get up the speed. They’re not startled enough. So I’ve seen many people have sent me this sort of training programs that the diversity consultants are foisting on the corporate world. I mean, it’s as if a woman’s studies program has been placed in the midst of the corporate environment. It’s not only the academic left, let’s say, made manifest in a PowerPoint presentation. It’s the worst elements of the activist academic left. The most appalling parts of the university are making themselves manifest in the corporate world at an amazing rate. And the corporations are guilty partly because of inequality, I would say. They’re guilty and they want to wallpaper over their bad conscience with some hand waving to the equality pushers. It’s like, well, play with that at your peril. So it’s a very bad idea. Diversity, inclusivity, equity, that’s a bad game. You’re going to be burned if you play it and in ways you can’t imagine. So freedom, fairness, respectful debate will take us a lot further. That’s right. Responsibility. That’s a good one. Let’s circle back to young people because the future is going to belong to them before we know it. Remarkable and very insightful and engaging human being, Jonathan Haidt, is perhaps a leading example of somebody who’s seen from a left perspective himself how dangerous all of this is and how we’re endangering young people by not being honest with them, not encouraging them to explore what they instinctively feel needs to be explored, going back to our earlier topic. And when leaving them without the resilience that they’re going to need to confirm, if you like, a free and prosperous society. And I had a question here relating to this, which I’d just like to read. In his piece, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt outlines why millennials today are so fragile and lacking resilience in life and in relationships, in university courses and the workplace, and what has led to this overwhelming push to be protected from anything difficult or uncomfortable or offensive. And he calls it the flight to safety. And I think you’ve used that expression. He outlines the core reason for this fragility of mind and emotion. He says it stems firstly from over-functioning and over-protective parents. Then schools now reaches into our universities. And of course, more people than ever go to universities in the West. So they form a much bigger bulk in our community afterwards. And it leaves them tragically unprepared and unarmed for life and relationships. Would you comment on that? Well, I think it’s good to take a step back from that and think about it in the broadest possible terms. There is definitely an epidemic of over-protective parenting. But it’s useful to ask why. And my suspicions are that this is driven by very fundamental biological and cultural phenomena that aren’t generally considered in relationship to this issue. We don’t have very many children. We don’t have 12, you know, six of whom die. We have one or two. And that makes them very precious. We’re unwilling to take risks with them. And no wonder. And then we also have them much later in life. And so, like, if you have a kid when you’re 18, you’re still a kid. You’re going to go out and have your life, right? Because you’re so, well, you’re in the height of your exploratory, you’re in the height of the exploratory part of your life. You’re not going to over-protect your kid because you’re still a kid. But if you’re 40 and you have one child, it’s like all your eggs are in one basket. And the probability that you’re going to take undue risks with that precious person is very, very low. Now, obviously, there’s some advantages to that because, great, you devote resources to your child, you know, and foster their development. But the downside is that you have every motivation to hover. And maybe you’re also extraordinarily desperate as a mother to maintain that bond with your child because you’ve struggled so long to achieve it. It’s highly, highly valuable. You can’t take a risk. Well, so these, so we might say, well, perhaps overprotective parenting is a secondary and unintended consequence of the birth control pill and the fact that people now have children later in life. Could easily be. No, if you have six kids, it’s like, what are you going to do? Helicopter parent them? It’s like, no, you’re so tired you can’t even get off the couch if you have six kids. And they outnumber you, right? They’re raising each other. They’re competing and they’re taking each other down a peg. They’re not, there’s no overprotection there. But with a single child landscape or dual child landscape, mostly a single child landscape, then you’re going to overprotect. And then that ethos starts to permeate the schools and it starts to permeate the higher education institutions as those children mature. And then that all reinforces it. Not good. It’s not obvious what to do about it either because if it is driven by demographics in that sense, it’s a much more intractable problem than we think. So I did some of that in 12 Rules for Life. You know, I said, look, what you have to understand is that you’re a danger to your children no matter what, right? You can let them go out in the world and be hurt or you can overprotect them and hurt them that way. So here’s your choice. You can make your children competent and courageous or you can make them safe. But you can’t make them safe because life isn’t safe. So if you sacrifice their courage and competence on the altar of safety, then you disarm them completely and all they can do is pray to be protected. So in the very act of trying to do the right thing by them, although often with a selfish motive, right, often with a selfish motive, we strip away the tools and the equipment, the understanding they really need to make life work. Well, that’s the edible mother, right? That was Freud’s great discovery of the dark mother. And the dark mother is the person, she’s the witch in Hensel and Gretel. Gingerbread house. Lost children. Too good to be true. It’s like a house of candy. Wow, who could want anything better? What lives inside the house of candy? The witch that wants to fatten you up and eat you. Right, a cautionary tale about overprotective parents, overprotective mothers, about the overprotective feminine. It’s like the psychoanalysts, they were so smart, said the good mother necessarily fails. That’s such a brilliant phrase. It’s like you can’t, as your child matures, you have to fail more and more as a mother, right, until by the time you’re 30, your child’s 30, let’s say 25 for that matter, you’re not their mother anymore. I mean, obviously you are, but the relationship has hit something like quasi-peer status. Not entirely, obviously, but the child’s independent, able to stand up on their own two feet and take on the world. So now we see this thing, a university student runs into some difficulties with study or whatever and brings their parents in to talk to the faculty. Yeah, or they go off in colour. I mean, when I went to Queen’s University a week ago, and there was a lot of noise and horror around that, you know, the people who were decrying my visit set up colouring bookstations so that people could be comforted because, you know, the evil professor was coming to talk. It’s like, and you know, as a clinician, and Height knows this as well, and all the clinicians worth their salt know this, the worst thing you can do for someone who’s anxious is overprotect them. It makes them worse. The clinical literature on that is crystal clear. What you do for people who are hyperanxious is gradually expose them with their voluntary consent to increasingly threatening situations. That cures them. It’s exactly the opposite of what all the mental health professionals so and I use that term extraordinarily lightly are trying to do to produce safe spaces on the university campus. Like if a safe is if a space needs to be defined as safe, you can be sure that’s the one thing it is not. Jordan, this has been fascinating. Let me pay you a compliment. In some ways, I think the most valuable thing you can do for us is to model the courage to speak your mind. You do it forcefully. You do it courageously. You do it compassionately because the reality is you only have to spend a bit of time with you to realise that you actually care, especially about our young people and what they’re experiencing and especially for our young men, because we know boys model themselves on men who they respect. You’re doing a great job of modeling courage in the face of fire. Well, there’s something I’d like to say maybe in closing about courage. People say that to me and you know, I don’t think it’s exactly right. There’s a line in the Old Testament, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and I think it’s more like that. It’s not that I’m courageous. It’s that I’m afraid of the right things. So when I made my videos, it wasn’t like that didn’t make me nervous, but I was less nervous about going back to bed and not saying what I had to say than I was about making the videos because I know where this is going. I don’t want to go there. And so it’s not so much courage. It’s that it’s a matter of, it’s less risky to say something than to remain silent when you know there’s something to be said. I know that to be the case. And so lots of times in life, it’s like there’s no pathway forward that’s going to shield you from risk. You get to pick this risk or you get to pick this risk. And I think I picked the lesser risk and that might be wise, but I’m not so sure it’s courageous. Well, I think it’s admirable. Let’s leave it on that basis. Thank you. Thank you very much for the conversation.